Slocum and the Town Killers
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
No Mercy
Slocum held his pistol at his side and began walking toward the pair. The men didn’t see him until he was twenty feet away.
One turned and said, “That you, Al? You’re back mighty quick.”
Slocum raised his six-shooter and fired. The bullet caught the man in the head. As he fell, the other outlaw realized his mistake. He went for his six-gun, only to discover he had taken off his gun belt when he had started raping the woman. He spun and dived for it.
Slocum didn’t cotton much to shooting a man in the back. This time he made an exception. The man died as he pried his six-shooter from its holster. He twitched, and Slocum shot him again . . .
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
SLOCUM AND THE TOWN KILLERS
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / December 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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1
“Kill them. Kill them all!”
A cheer went up from the thirty gathered men, who waved pistols in the air, anxious to get on with the slaughter.
Clayton Magee sat a little straighter on his nervous black stallion. The horse was as eager to get into the fray as the men arrayed in front of him. Magee straightened his Union uniform with its faded gold braid and numerous rips, and bent forward so that the morning sun glinted off his major’s insignia to give more authority to his words.
“You know the standing orders,” Major Magee said. “There will be no killing.”
“Until we’ve made sure they’re not among the combatants,” Albert Kimbrell said, some of the crazy fire dying in his dark eyes.
“Find them. If they are there, find them and take them into custody. They must not be harmed in any way.” His fingers tapped on the butt of the pistol slung at his right hip.
“Then kill everyone else?” The insane fury returned to the smaller man’s eyes. He watched closely until Magee nodded the slightest amount. “Can I give the word, Major?” Kimbrell asked, keyed up and breathing more harshly than before.
Magee looked at his second in command. If Kimbrell was eager to get on with the attack, Magee felt only a hollowness inside. He sought. How he sought. And always he failed to find those he sought so tenaciously. One day, though, he would find. Until then . . .
“Attack,” Magee said.
“Get ’em, boys, get ’em all!” Kimbrell fired his six-shooter into the air as a signal, as if the small army needed such an order. More than half had already jumped the gun. The thunder of hooves pounding against the dry Oklahoma road leading into Cherokee Springs brought the early stirring residents out, eager to see if storm clouds building on the horizon had finally delivered much-needed relief from a monthlong drought.
This thunder brought only leaden death.
Major Magee sat astride his stallion, eyes closed as he listened to the sharp reports of dozens of Colts firing until their hammers landed on spent chambers. He had trained his men well. During the war, a handful of guerrillas, riding with multiple six-shooters slung around hips and in shoulder rigs, had sported more firepower than an entire company of soldiers carrying only muskets. His small army carried not only half a dozen six-guns each, but also two rifles. A single pass through Cherokee Springs would send over a thousand rounds through buildings—and people.
Screams reached his ears, but Magee did not open his eyes. He had seen the carnage many times before. What he longed to hear was Kimbrell or another of his men sing out with the joyful cry that his search was at an end.
“Major!”
Magee’s eyes shot open. Albert Kimbrell rode back. His face was streaked with half-burnt gunpowder from firing all his pistols. A rifle rested in the crook of his arm. From the way he lifted it off his sleeve, the barrel was hot from half a dozen rounds being fired as fast as he could cock and pull the trigger.
“You’ve found them?” Even as he asked, he knew the answer. Major Magee slumped in resignation. Cherokee Springs had been a long shot. Information had reached him from unreliable sources, but he was too desperate not to ride here and see for himself.
“Sorry, Major. Not a trace,” Kimbrell said. He was almost gasping for breath. Through the soot on his face showed a flush that faded slowly. “What’re your orders?”
“I’ll reconnoiter personally.” Magee put his heels to his black stallion’s flanks and rode forward slowly. Earlier in his quest, he had ridden at the head of his men with every incursion. Over the past few weeks, the killing had come to wear down his spirit and cast him into a great, dark depression.
By the time Major Magee trotted into town, most of the killing had been done. It wasn’t the smell of blood or the sight of so many dead that caused his melancholy, but the growing awareness that he might never find those he sought so diligently.
His horse tried to rear when it smelled fresh blood. Magee held it down until its fright passed. Men and women lay sprawled in the street where they had been gunned down without quarter. A few had been shot in the back as they tried to flee to safety. There was no way for them to realize that nothing in Cherokee Springs would have afforded them safety. Magee’s men were too efficient and bloodthirsty.
The wanton killings didn’t matter to Magee. The townspeople were guilty of hiding what he wanted most in the world. If not the citizens of Cherokee Springs, then the next town along this road. Oklahoma was a big territory, but he would not stop until he succeeded. He rode about for a while, and finally circled back to where Kimbrell knelt beside a man who had been shot down trying to take refuge behind a water barrel. The barrel staves had been riddled with bullets, causing water to pour out onto dry ground where it mixed with the man’s blood and begot a gory mud.
Kimbrell had the man’s hand in his, holding it up to examine the ring on the man’s right hand. He drew a knife from a sheath in his boot top and applied it to the bone just under the ring. Kimbrell sawed back and forth a couple times before the finger, with the ring still on it, popped free. He worked the ring around and around, but it would not come off the severed digit. He held up ring and finger to the morning sun and smiled.
“None of them, Albert?” Magee’s question startled Kimbrell. The man hastily shoved the finger with the ring still in place into his vest pocket and stood to face his commander.
“No, sir, none even look like ’em.” The flush had gone from Kimbrell’s face and a tic under his left eye caused it to almost close with every spasm. “I checked ’em all myself.”
“Yes, of course,” Magee said. At one time he had done this himself, but they had found towns, much like Cherokee Springs, where there had been too many residents for one man to roll over every likely body and look it square in the face. He gave strict orders about the killing, but always it seemed that his men got out of hand. With his increasing pessimism went a rage that often filled the void within his soul and gave some purpose to his life.
“You checked before the killing began?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Kimbrell said. He bobbed his head up and down. “’Fore we fired a single shot, we looked the place over. Uh, is it all right for the men to get on with it?”
“Loot the town. Be sure to take enough supplies to get us to the next possible sighting.”
Magee did not wait to see the fierce grin on his lieutenant’s face. He dismounted and began walking about, looking at the bodies. A booted toe poked into the side of a man lying facedown in the street. The man moaned and stirred.
“Help me. Murderin’ savages. Yer a soldier. Help me—”
Magee drew his pistol, cocked, and fired in a smooth motion. The slug blew off the side of the man’s head, killing him outright. Magee’s right arm turned to lead and fell to his side, the six-shooter dangling from almost nerveless fingers as he began walking about, looking at the dead and shooting the few his men had carelessly left alive. When his pistol came up empty, he returned it to his holster and walked a little faster.
They got what they deserved, harboring the two he sought. If they had not hidden them, he would have found them by now. It was all a vast cabal to keep the two from being found, and he would have none of it.
He went into the dry-goods store. This was always the first building he searched. Bolts of cloth had been knocked from shelves. A few had unrolled in a red and green carpet under his boots. Magee walked over the cloth without so much as an instant’s hesitation. None of this was useful. And none of the several dead in the store, draped over counters and sprawled on the floor, were those he sought.
The major stopped and pictured the ones who had slipped through his fingers. His hands clenched into fists. Then he spun about and stormed from the store.
Kimbrell had finished robbing the bank. The money from the vault would be divided equally among the men. Magee was more interested in what was taken from the general store and a gunsmith nearby. Their supply wagon had rattled along the rocky Oklahoma roads, increasingly empty over the past week. They needed supplies desperately. More than one of his men’s weapons had become damaged through overuse and lack of cleaning and oiling. No matter how he issued the orders—sometimes forcefully, at other times as a father might chide a son—they refused to maintain their six-shooters properly. They needed replacements.
“Got two crates of brand-spankin’-new rifles, Major!” One of the newer men in his company, one with knife scars crisscrossing his face and attesting to a violent trail through the West, waved to him. “I got half a dozen six-guns, too.”
“Distribute them judiciously,” Magee ordered.
“How’s that?”
“Make sure the damned men who need the damned guns get ’em, shit-for-brains,” snapped Kimbrell.
“Enough,” Magee said, seeing how the scar-faced man bristled at the insult. “See to it. I want a word with you, Mr. Kimbrell.”
Kimbrell looked around like a fox standing outside the henhouse.
“I’ll be brief,” Magee promised.
“What is it, Major?”
“They weren’t here?”
“Told you that already. We got to move on.”
“Yes,” Magee said tiredly. “We must move on. Never slow, never stay our hunt. We may find the spoor in the next town.”
“We ’bout got this town gutted.” Kimbrell shifted nervously.
“What is it?” Magee saw that Kimbrell wanted something more.
“The saloon. Saloons, actually, since there are several of ’em. Can I throw a few cases of booze into the wagons for the men? For the celebration?”
“They got knee-walking drunk the last time,” Magee said. Then old lessons returned. Morale. The men remained with him because they chose to do so of their own free will. This was not the army where deserters could be executed. “Yes, do it. What else?”
Kimbrell licked his lips. “Well, sir, there might be a woman or two left in town.”
“You mean left alive?”
“Don’t much matter since they’d still be warm.”
Magee let the momentary dizziness pass over him. He had long ago realized it was not useful to inquire too deeply about Kimbrell’s and the others’ personal tastes.
“Burn the town when you’re done,” Magee said.
“Yes, sir!”
Clayton Magee mounted and rode through Cherokee Springs looking at the dead until the crac
kling of burning buildings forced him to ride to the far side of town. He never looked back at the fire devouring the stores. His thoughts were fixed on the next town and, for a while, hope flared. Maybe in the next town he would find those he hunted.
He trotted off, letting Kimbrell muster the men behind him and follow. It was only fitting for a leader to be at the head of the column.
2
John Slocum wiped sweat from his forehead, trying to keep ahead of the muggy Oklahoma day but failing. He pushed his floppy-brimmed hat back on his forehead and looked around. The sun beat down out of a clear blue sky, and the distance vanished in a gray haze promising more stifling heat without any relief from a rainstorm. He patted his horse on the neck and got an aggrieved whinny in response.
“We should find some shelter, I know,” Slocum told the sturdy paint. “These sweet gum trees aren’t going to give us enough shade. Let’s get on into the next town and rest a day or two there.”
The horse showed approval with a toss and shake of its head. Slocum settled down again for the rest of the ride. From his recollection, there was a town not too far away. He couldn’t remember the name, but what did it matter? He was on his way out of St. Louis heading down into Texas. What he expected to find in Texas he could not say, only that it wasn’t St. Louis or Missouri or any of the unlucky poker games and unwilling women he had found there.
Unwilling except for one with a jealous husband Slocum had not known existed. Shotguns, too much liquor, and lying women made a mix Slocum chose to avoid.
The road came on him suddenly. Slocum turned left and right before deciding on the route westward. He urged his horse to a trot, then slowed and finally halted entirely. He dismounted and studied the road. A frown crept onto his face as he tried to count the number of horsemen that had preceded him this way. The horses were shod, so he doubted they were Indians. The disorganized way the horses had milled about, cutting up sere grass on either side of the road before finding the double-rutted dirt path, made him wonder if a cavalry troop was ahead of him. The number was about right.