by Jake Logan
He did not want to tell her that he thought her father was dying, even as he held him tight against his chest, blood seeping onto Slocum’s black shirt.
“Can you tell me how your father wound up in this condition?” Slocum asked.
“I don’t know all of it. Some men came into our house. They had guns and their faces were covered. They dragged my father out of bed and took him away. I didn’t find out where my pa was until yesterday.”
“Is that where we’re going now?” Slocum asked. “To your house?”
“Yes. That’s where I keep my medicines. I know Pa is in serious condition. I’m going to try and save his life.”
“Shouldn’t you take him to a doctor?”
Penny made a sound in her throat that came out through her nostrils. It sounded like an airy snort.
“A doctor would just tell me what to do. I already know what to do.”
“You do?”
“I think so. Please, no more questions. I don’t want to think about Pa just now.”
“Well, he’s bleeding,” Slocum said. “I think he might have a back wound.”
“Bleeding a little is probably the best thing for him right now, Mr. Slocum.”
The ground rose beneath them, rising above the level where they had been. They rode through flowered yucca, prickly pear, ocotillo, sage, and scrub juniper, the stately forms of saguaro standing like sentinels over a barren land, hoarding water in their trunks, protecting their treasure with sharp spines.
Something off to the left caught Slocum’s eyes, and he turned his head. Sunlight splashed on whitewashed adobe walls and a rusted cistern on wooden stilts.
“That’s Socorro,” Penny said.
There were scattered adobes, small earthen dwellings that seemed to have been placed there at random. There was a three-story building that looked like an old fort, surrounded by smaller ones that were one and two stories high, with log ends jutting from the inner ceilings.
“That big building is the main hotel,” she said. “Next to it is the Socorro Saloon, where Pa was held prisoner. It has a basement, one of the few in Socorro.” She seemed to shiver as she spoke, with either fear or revulsion, Slocum couldn’t tell which.
“Not much of a town.”
“It was built long ago as a haven for those who managed to survive the Jornada del Muerto,” she said.
“The Journey of Death.”
“Yes. That’s why it’s named Socorro.”
That’s when Slocum saw the sloping plain north of the town. It was littered with little white slabs of wood, crosses, headstones, and a profusion of flowers tied together in bundles or fashioned into wreaths. It was the cemetery, Slocum knew, a place where men, women, and children were buried, and likely where the man in the saddle with him would end up. The name of the town, then, was more than a little ironic, considering the number of graves on Boot Hill.
“It wasn’t any help to your father.”
“No. The saloon is an evil place. Please, Mr. Slocum, we must ride on, get out of sight of the village. I don’t trust those people.”
“All the people?” he asked.
“Those who might be watching,” she said, and he heard the faint tremor in her voice. They rode on, out of sight of Socorro.
“Do we have far to go?” he asked. The blind horse was stumbling and kept pulling against the lead rope as if it wanted to return to the fort and lie down. Its white eyes were a constant reminder of its blindness and its gray-streaked hide a reminder of its age.
“Three or four miles,” she said.
Beyond the town of Socorro, Slocum saw the rippling waters of a mirage, streaks of vaporous silver that glistened in the sun, vanishing and reappearing like the ghost of a lake, the ghosts of shining streams. He shifted his glance to the land around them, and soon the town and the cemetery had vanished like the watery mirage. The sun scorched the already burnt land, and he wiped sweat from his brow with the bandanna around his neck. Penny rode straight-backed, like a princess on a fine steed, and he marveled at the way she held herself in such heat and under such circumstances.
It seemed more like five miles to Slocum before Penny pointed to a low adobe building nestled between two small hillocks. But the dwelling was on high ground, compared to its surroundings, and as they rode closer, Slocum saw that the two hillocks were braced by deep channels cut into the earth, both leading to a wide, rocky plain.
“That’s where we live,” Penny said.
“Pretty smart of your pa to cut those ditches on either side of those little hills,” Slocum said.
“We get a lot of flash floods out here,” she said. “Pa dug those canals so that the water, when we get a big rain, just drains off down onto that flat.”
“Like I said, pretty smart,” Slocum said.
“Pa is a smart man,” she said, “in most things.”
Slocum resisted the urge to ask her about those things he wasn’t so smart about, but they rode up to the hitch rail, and a black-and-white dog rushed out to greet them, its tail flicking back and forth in a wild semaphoric pleasure.
“That’s Daisy,” Penny said. “She’s a border collie. She won’t bite you.”
Penny tied the halter rope to the hitch rail in front of the adobe house and walked around to the side of Slocum’s horse. He stepped out of the saddle with care. He let the wounded man tilt toward him, then pulled him down. Penny took her father in her arms.
“I can take it from here,” she said. “There’s a lean-to and a corral out back where you can put the horses up. You can grain and water them there.”
“You don’t need any help getting your pa inside the house?”
“John, I’m used to caring for the sick and the lame,” she said, and he thought he detected a slight note of sarcasm in her voice. She put one of her father’s arms over her shoulder and walked him to the front door. She went inside and Slocum walked the horses around the adobe.
Out back, there was, as she had said, a pole corral, a large lean-to where a horse and a mule stood under the canopy in the shade. He turned Ferro and Moses into the corral, stripped his saddle and bridle off Ferro. There was a water trough under the lean-to, and a bin full of hay sticking through the slats. Room enough for a horse’s or a mule’s head between the boards. Well built, he thought, all of it. The corral, the lean-to, the adobe house, which blended into the landscape so well, he knew it would be invisible at a distance.
He walked around to the front of the house and stared at a mirage that bristled on the horizon less than a mile away. He saw movement inside the tilting mirror of silvery waters and shaded his eyes with his hands. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and streamed along his spine. The hairs on the back of his neck stiffened and began to tingle.
Two riders seemed to wade through the watery mirage, their shapes distorted and ghostly, as if they were the dead rising from a desert lake.
He set his rifle and scabbard down and waited as the riders left the mirage in their wake and continued their steady pace straight toward him.
Slocum patted the belly gun he kept inside his belt and lifted his .45 Colt an inch out of its holster, then let it slide back so that it was loose, but ready to draw at a second’s notice.
One man was taller than the other, and older. The younger one was wild-eyed and nervous, with hair poking out from under his hat like straw. The older man was lean, whiplash thin, with a shadow of beard stubble flocking his chin. He was the one who spoke first as the two men halted a few yards from Slocum, their eyes fixed on him as if he were an escaped convict in prison stripes.
“Howdy, stranger,” the tall man said. “You got business hereabouts?”
“If I do,” Slocum said, “it’s my business.”
“Maybe not.”
“Oh?” Slocum said.
The younger man looked as if he were all wound up with coils of springy wire and was about to explode into a dozen pieces.
“Wasn’t that Swain and his daughter you rode
up with a few minutes ago?” The tall man’s eyes were like twin gun barrels, dark, ominous, unflinching.
“Might have been,” Slocum said. “So what?”
“So, you’re steppin’ into something that ain’t none of your business.”
“Let’s blow this jasper plumb to hell,” the young man said, his blue eyes full of sunlight that shot spears at Slocum.
“Steady, Roger,” the tall man said.
“Come on, Morg. We can take him.”
Slocum braced himself. The towheaded young man was arching his hand just above the pistol hanging at his hip.
“Let’s give the man a chance,” Morg said. “He ain’t got no business here, and he probably just wants a drink of cool water afore he is off, back to where he come from.”
“Seems to me, you two are the trespassers here,” Slocum said. “I was invited.”
The man called Morg scowled, and the expression on his face changed in an instant.
But Slocum had his eye on the towhead named Roger, whose springs were ready to uncoil.
“Shit,” Roger said, and his hand dove for the butt of his pistol.
Slocum went into a crouch and drew his pistol so fast, it was a blur in his hand.
Roger pulled his pistol free of its holster. Almost. The pistol had not quite cleared leather when Slocum hammered back, aimed, and fired. His pistol bucked in his hand and he swung it on Morg as his bullet plowed into Roger’s gut with a sound like a heavy slap.
Roger let out a grunt and his hand went limp. His pistol slid from numb fingers and spanged on the rocky ground.
Morg stiffened, but kept both hands in sight as Slocum’s pistol barrel settled on a line of sight straight to his chest.
“You want to eat some lead, too, mister?” Slocum said.
Roger groaned. He teetered in his saddle, but held on. He clutched his stomach, and his fingers ran with red blood.
“God, Morg,” Roger gasped, “it hurts real bad.”
“You won this one, stranger,” Morg said, “but if you come to Socorro, we’ll meet again.”
Morg grabbed the reins of Roger’s horse and turned around.
The two rode off as Penny emerged from the house, her face flushed, bathed in sweat, her eyes wide as an owl’s.
“John,” she said as she rushed up to him, “what have you done?”
“Those two,” he said. “I shot one of them.”
“Do you know who they were?” she asked.
“I haven’t the least idea of who they were. The young one was a hothead and he drew down on me. I shot him in the belly.”
“That was Roger Degnan,” she said. “His brother, Patrick, is the sheriff of Socorro.”
“Know who the other man is? The kid called him Morg.”
Penny shivered against him.
“That’s Morgan Sombra. The people in town call him Shadow. He’s a mestizo who works at the saloon. John, he’s a gunman. A killer.”
“A killer, eh? Well, he must be off duty today.”
“Come on inside,” she said. “John, you’re in grave danger now.”
“From those two?”
“From the same bunch who kidnapped and tortured my father. Oh, what have I done? I fear you’ll be killed. All on my account.”
They entered the house. It was cool and smelled of mint and wisteria blossoms. Slocum slid his pistol back in its holster. He would reload it after he had a sip of the tea in the glass Penny handed him.
She led him to a chair in the front room. He sat down.
“Penny,” he said. “Those two men were no different from many others I’ve run into out West. Don’t you worry yourself none about me. How’s your pa?”
To his surprise, she leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. Then she flitted away and disappeared down the hall. He thought he could smell alcohol and some kind of medicine. He drank the cool tea as that fleeting kiss burned on his forehead.
3
Slocum ejected the empty hull from his pistol and pulled a bullet from his gun belt. He slid the cartridge into the empty chamber, then fished out a cheroot from his pocket. There was a clay cenicero on the little table next to the divan. He lit the cheroot and put the dead match into the ashtray.
He looked at his pistol before he slid it back in his holster. That’s when the thought occurred to him. He got up and walked outside, strode to where Roger had dropped his pistol. He picked it up and dusted it off with his hand, carried it back into the house.
He sat down and examined the pistol. A wry smile curved on his lips. The pistol was a converted Remington New Model Army .36 caliber. It had a wooden grip and the straps were brass. He had carried such a pistol in the war, when it was cap and ball. This one now had become a percussion model and the cylinder was filled with brass cartridges. He laid it on the table and puffed on his cheroot as he looked around the room.
The furnishings were Spartan, but colorful. The chairs were made from nail kegs with stuffed deer hides for cushioning. There was a rainbow-weave serape draping another chair, which was fashioned from sturdy oak and the wood polished to a high sheen. Flowers jutted from earthen vases lacquered with vivid colors. The walls were bare but painted a soft lavender with green trim at the ceiling and floorboards. The sofa on which he sat was sturdy and comfortable, well cushioned with stuffed woolen cloth. He tapped ashes into the cenicero and listened to the noises coming from another room, the tinkle of bottles and the clink of metal, footsteps, and guttural sounds he assumed were made by Penny’s father, Jethro Swain.
A few minutes later, Penny appeared in the doorway.
“John,” she said, “come with me. I want you to see what they did to my father.”
He got up and mashed his cheroot in the ashtray. He followed her down a hall and into a bedroom. The room was windowless and the bed, just large enough for one person, stood waist high. There were open cabinets with apothecary bottles, salves, unguents, and flasks filled with various colored liquids. It smelled like a hospital or a field infirmary, with the pungent aroma of alcohol and other medicants burning his nostrils. She had lit lamps in front of a large mirror on the dresser that was slanted so that the reflected light shone on the bed.
Jethro lay on his back, naked except for his shorts. His eyes were closed, but he looked at peace, with no sign of the pain that must have been coursing through his body.
“See what they did to Pa,” she whispered.
“Is he asleep?”
“I gave him laudanum. I sewed up a wound in his back. Luckily, it didn’t puncture his lung, but he lost a great deal of blood.”
Slocum walked close to the edge of the bed and looked at the marks on Jethro’s body. There were dark smudges that looked like burn marks on his legs and arms, his chest and neck.
“Cigarettes,” he said.
“The larger ones were made from cigars. They tortured him, John. Look at the soles of his feet.”
Slocum bent down and looked. There were striped scars on his heels and pads.
“A hot poker, I think,” she said. “Red hot.” She winced as she said it.
Slocum stood up straight.
“Why were they torturing him?” he asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time. Is your pa going to be all right?”
“They fed him opium and I gave him laudanum, so I don’t know about his mind or his addiction. But his body will heal.”
“They wanted something from him,” Slocum said. “Information?”
“Yes. Oddly enough, I think the opium helped Pa withstand the torture.”
“What did they want from him?”
He looked up at her when she didn’t answer right away.
She worried her lower lip as if deciding how much she should tell the man in black who was, after all, a stranger. Perhaps a Good Samaritan, but not someone she knew well, or could trust.
“You don’t have to tell me, Penny,” he said. “None of my business. But from the looks of your pa,
they worked him over pretty damned good. I’d hate to think they tortured him just because they didn’t like him.”
“They wanted something from him,” she said, her voice soft and barely audible. “And knowing my father, I don’t believe he told them what they wanted to know. I know he wouldn’t. He had too much respect.”
“Respect?”
“Yes. For—for his brother, my uncle.”
He started to walk out of the room.
“Wait,” she said. “You helped us. You deserve to know. I think you do. It—It’s just that I don’t know who you are, or even if I can trust you. I hope you understand.”
“Best keep those reasons to yourself, Penny,” he said. “You don’t owe me anything. And you’re right. You don’t know me.”
“Who are you?” she said, and then put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle anything else she might say.
“Nobody. I’m just a drifter. I am like the wayward wind, the tumbleweed, the little dust devil that blows across the prairie and then disappears.”
“Do you have a home, or a ranch? Where did you come from?”
“The land is my home. The sky my roof, the streams my well, the woods my larder, the campfire my kitchen. I need nothing else. The West is my home and I roam it at will, beholden to no man, with only my own mouth to feed.”
“You don’t look like a drifter. Are you wanted by the law?”
“Wanted?”
“I saw you shoot Roger. You were very fast on the draw. Are you a gunman?”
“I feel like I’m being questioned by someone with a badge right now. I don’t think of myself as a gunman, although it is a tool I use when the situation calls for it. I don’t like killing a man, but sometimes, in this life, it’s a matter of survival. I aim to survive for as long as I can.”
She looked him up and down, at the flat-crowned black hat, the black shirt, the gun belt bristling with cartridges, the revolver, the black pants, and the stovepipe boots. She looked at him and sighed in resignation.
“Very well. It’s my Uncle Obie, Obadiah. There’s something funny about that Socorro Saloon. They know Uncle Obie has been mining silver, but they don’t know where his mines are. What’s more, they know he’s not just taking out ore and taking it to the refinery in Albuquerque, he’s smelting it himself. They tried to get Pa to tell them where Uncle Obie lives and where his mines are.”