by Logan, Jake
They’d tried to sneak around the back of the place last night, but apparently Slocum had foiled those efforts. Was the old man trying to outflank them once again before he would lose the element of surprise that the near darkness of dawn could give him? These shots could be a distraction, though the speech sounded real enough.
He’d seen nothing moving out front, no sign of the old man, his voice echoing off the blunt stone of the house enough that Slocum wasn’t sure just where the old crazy man was positioned. Still safe behind one of those roadside boulders, no doubt.
“I aim to drive you snakes out of your den! You will slither out of that house before I am through, or I will bring it down around you, stone by stone, that is a promise. And I do not speak of this lightly! It came to me in a vision in the night. The Lord whispered to me and told me what I must do.”
There was a long pause. Slocum was sure the women were about to shout something of their own in response. He half smiled at the thought of what it might be, especially if Ruth had her way.
But Old Man Tinker chimed in again. “The Lord God Almighty also said that I was to give you witches one more chance to see the light of truth. In order to save your souls and your lives . . . and those of your children . . .”
Slocum recognized the sound of a honeyed tongue trying to slide guilt into the foolishness the old man was speaking.
“I say again, if you don’t choose to save the lives of your children, you will have no one but yourselves to blame. But if you do cling to the hope that I am offering you by way of God’s grace, then you may come on home, bound, of course, so that you devils might not claw my eyes out. For they are the very eyes that see the truth where you only see lies and evil. And then you can earn your place in my household once again. After a sufficient time of penance, of course.”
“You better shut your foolish mouth, old man! We ain’t going nowhere but away from you! You wad that book of yours up tight and—”
Slocum guessed that the old woman shut Ruth up before she had a chance to finish her choice suggestion to the old man.
“Demons! Devils! Harpies! Witches! You will all burn in the hellfires of eternity!”
As the man shouted, Slocum made his way to the other end of the barn and peered through a gap in the boards near the ground. It afforded him a close-up view of the Appaloosa’s front legs. Apparently the horse was waiting for hay.
“Ain’t gonna happen, fella. Go graze—but don’t get shot or stolen.” He didn’t dare bring the horses into the barn. They’d turned all five horses back into the corral last night for fear of the barn being burned. The little paddock kept them close behind the barn, and was relatively protected from most directions the old man would be likely to attack from. And he didn’t see anything that might be a man moving back there.
18
Other than random rifle shots that continued to pock the building, they heard nothing more from the man for the long hours of the day. The sun’s heat bore down on them, cooking anything in its path. By midday, everything had grown hazy, hot to the touch, and uncomfortable. The old woman had mixed up a poultice for Slocum’s leg wound and it helped ease the swelling and numbed the throbbing pain of it. He reluctantly accepted a crate to sit on in a shady spot in the house.
By the time dark began to fall, Slocum had regained much of his strength and was grateful that the corner of the house most protected for the frontal assault was the cooking area set up by the old woman. She really knew how to feed a big brood. Slocum watched in amazement as she made barely a few handfuls of cornmeal and a small pot of beans into a meal for them all. He refused, knowing their supplies were limited, but brought his own in from his bags in the barn.
He felt less guilty about taking a second cup of coffee. The old woman didn’t want his supplies, but he insisted, and he could see the relief on her face. But it was fleeting. He was sure she was dwelling on the old man’s shouts. And though she probably suspected Slocum of killing a second of her boys, she knew, too, that most of them had slung plenty of return lead in the frequent volleys last night.
“Any chance of talking him out of his crazy plans?”
Ruth shook her head and watched Judith playing with the kids. Some of them were Ruth’s kids, but how many, Slocum didn’t know. It didn’t seem to matter to any of them anyway. One of the twins helped her mother clean up the dishes while the other kept watch out the back. Slocum kept an eye on the front, along with Ruth.
“That’s just the thing, John, he’s genuinely crazy,” said Ruth. “Has been for a long, long time. That’s why we have to get away from him.”
The old lady came up, drying her hands on her apron. “Look, Mr. Slocum, you have to do me a favor.”
He swore he almost saw a smile on her face.
“Well, I’ll gladly listen to what you have to propose. That much I can do, and maybe more, should the idea strike me as useful to our situation.”
She looked peeved, and said, “You’ve killed at least one of my boys, least you can do is help me save one of them.”
“I’d like nothing better than to do that, ma’am. What do you have in mind?”
“It’s Luke. He’s a good boy. It pained me to have to leave him with them, but he’s right at that age, he’ll turn on a dime and side with them. But I can tell in his eyes he don’t really know why he’s doing it. Was that way when we commenced to whuppin’ on his pappy and the other boys that day we left. Wouldn’t listen to me none. The plan had been to take him with us, but by God, he fought like a wild thing, before the tincture took hold, that is.”
“Tincture?” Slocum had no idea what she was on about.
“How else do you think we got them all to let us tie them to the fence?” Ruth winked at him. As she turned back to the window, she said, “Should have tied them tighter. At least that one out there, should have tied him around his neck.”
The old woman darted past Slocum and slapped Ruth on the cheek. “He may be insane, he may have been a poor father, he may have been and still is a lot of things that ain’t very good, but he is the man I love—or did once. He wasn’t always this way. If you want to talk about him in such a way, you do it out of earshot of the little ones. And me, too.”
Backed as he was to the crumbling old whitewashed wall, there was little Slocum could do. He was trapped between the two women who stared hard at each other, their angry bosoms working up and down inches from him. Yes, he decided, he felt very uncomfortable.
“Ladies, this is not the time nor place for this. We have to keep away from these windows and get ourselves ready to move out.”
“Move out?” said the old woman. “Just how do you propose we do that? Ain’t no way to leave, with us being pinned down here by him. It’s not like we can jump on a horse and gallop on out of here.”
“I’m working on that. Now as I see it, we have three of them, by Tinker’s own admittance. If we could lure them in—”
“How?” one of the twins chimed in.
Slocum sighed. “I’m getting to that, Angel.”
“I’m Mary.”
“Oh, fine, Mary.” Slocum looked at the twin. Hard to believe she was one of a set. “Where was I?”
“You mean before you got lost down Mary’s dress?” Ruth snorted and peeked back out the window.
All three women, and Judith, too, smiled at him, and once again, he felt himself redden. “Okay, okay, back to the luring . . .”
But he didn’t have the chance to say anything more because the old man fired another round, then began shouting again.
“You witches in the house! You have run out of time. The Lord has instructed me to burn you out!”
So there it was, thought Slocum. About time the old fool thought of it. He’d expected that threat for a whole day now.
The old woman turned to Slocum. “He wouldn’t dare! Th
ere are children here . . .”
Ruth snorted again. “Dare? Course he dares. He hates us and wants us dead. And the sooner the children hear the truth, the better off they’ll be. He’s an evil bastard with a heart of stone.” She held up a long finger in front of her face and said to her mother, “And you better think twice before you lay a hand on me ever again. You’re part to blame in all this.”
“Enough of this foolish bickering!” Slocum hissed. “If any of them get close enough with a torch, we have to stop them.” He looked hard at them. “We have to wing them, you understand? Or a leg wound. Enough to stop them, but not kill them. They’re too far away to throw a torch from the other side of the road.”
And they waited. And waited. But no torches were thrown at them, no flaming arrows. Perhaps it had been a bluff. Maybe they didn’t even have a campfire. No matter, every minute without fire tossed their way was another minute of relative safety for them all.
Slocum went back to the barn in hopes of broadening their sight line. The horses were all still there, clustered close by the barn, not bothered by the occasional shouts or shots. Amazing what they get used to, he thought. He remembered the cavalry horses in the war. After a while, they seemed to grow accustomed to the cannon fire and screams of dying men. Maybe, he thought, like men, they just grew emotionally deadened to it.
19
Tunk Mueller still rode northward a day after he’d creased the hide of whoever had tried to ambush him, he hoped for good, but somehow he knew that particular wish wasn’t to be. And the more he thought about it, the more it ate at him. Who would be dogging him and why? He’d no doubt left plenty of folks plenty of reasons over the years to pester him. But he hoped he would be able to come across this latest one and finish the job he’d started.
He was about to stop the horse once again, give himself time to think this thing through, when he saw a string of smoke in the distance, down along the barren flatland of the valley below. In the breezeless sky, the smoke rose straight up. That fire could mean food, and food could mean drink. And drink, Mueller decided, could mean people with money saved up. A cash box or at least a coin purse. “Hmm,” he grunted and reached into his saddlebags for the last of his whiskey, confident that he would soon be experiencing the splendors of someone else’s drink.
As he rode, he swallowed back the dank brown gargle. It tasted of tree roots and urine, but it sure, by God, gave a man a reason to open his yawp and growl. He belched long and low and looked down at his hole-filled undershirt. It was once red, but had in the past week on the trail made the journey to mostly brown, with some sooty streaks to break up the monotony. But it was the bear-cub growling of his empty gut that drew his attention.
“I know, I know. I’d hoped to feed you by now.” He patted his belly. “It is an almighty embarrassment to me that I am unable to feed myself and my horse properly.” He said this to the air around him, flashed a glance at the still-far-off smoke at the edge of the forest. “I wish I’d turned out differently than how Pap said I’d turn out. If I hadn’t been clouted and clopped on the ears for everything I did wrong, I might have become a man of means and high taste.”
He upended the bottle and glugged the last of it down, regarded the empty green-tinged glass bottle, and leaned far back in his saddle and let ’er fly. The thing arced high. He tried to follow it, but he lost it briefly in the sunlight, then it reappeared, whipping end over end, and landed with a tunk. The sound was satisfying and brought a smile to his face.
“You gonna to miss that bottle, if’n I was to retrieve it?”
Mueller’s eyes flew wide open and he whipped his head back and forth. “What in the hell was that?” Even the horse ceased its relentless plodding and cast a glance sideways.
“Mister?”
Tunk looked down and not twenty-five feet to his left stood a thin, dirt-covered boy of perhaps fourteen. He wore filthy sacking fashioned into some sort of long garment cinched in the middle with what looked to Mueller like a root.
Tunk snatched up his pistol, cocked it, and aimed at the boy. “Who are you and where did you come from?”
“Aw, don’t shoot me, mister. I ain’t done nothing wrong.”
The kid seemed not half as perturbed at having a gun drawn on him as having someone think him a thief.
“I ask you again, and I am not a man known for his patience. Where in the blue blazes did you come from?”
“I was just out here looking for something to eat. That’s our camp down yonder.” He nodded at the smoke, toward which Mueller had been riding.
“You said ‘our’—that mean you got family?” Mueller regarded the boy.
“Yes sir, that I do. Got me a pappy and a mammy and a baby sister. All of us is camped, waiting for someone with a horse or wagon to haul us on out of here.”
The kid looked at Mueller, but didn’t say much more. He didn’t need to. Mueller understood. “Let me get this straight. You all are waiting out here in this god-awful hot summer sun, waiting on someone to yarn you on out of here?”
The kid nodded as if what Mueller was asking made all the sense in the world. “That’s ’bout the size of it, yes sir. You come on down, I’ll be able to show you real hospitality, you mark my words.”
“Does that involve food?”
The kid paused long enough to scratch his head. “If we had enough food to fill our bellies, do you think I would have been out here roaming the hillside for a bite of anything at all?”
“What do you eat, boy?”
He seemed not to hear Mueller. His smiling eyes had gone glassy. “We’re nearly dead around here.”
Tunk stopped his horse. “You all haven’t been afflicted with some sort of disease, have you?” He leaned from his horse, squinting at the boy.
The boy moved closer.
“No, no you don’t. You keep your distance. I aim to keep mine.”
The boy chuckled, a tired, hollow sound. “I ain’t sick, not yet anyway. But I keep gnawing green bark, I will be.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m nearly sixteen.”
“God, you’ll pardon me for saying it, but you look younger than that.”
The boy said nothing and they kept moving toward the smoke. Though it was still some distance away, they had drawn near enough that Mueller could make out a couple of shapes stretched out near the fire. Could be his folks, thought Mueller.
“What happened to you and your kin that put you in such hard straits?”
“We was rolling along in our wagon, doing our best to get to California. Pappy heard there was a new gold strike and he aimed to get hisself a piece of it.”
“That so?” Mueller tucked away that thought. Information like that might prove useful down the road.
“Yes sir. Pappy’s right fond of gold. He ain’t got much but . . .”
“Go on.”
“Look here, it’s that bottle.” The boy retrieved it, unbroken, from beside a hummock of grass. “That’s lucky.”
“I never said I was fixing to give up that bottle, boy.” Mueller scratched his chin.
“But you threw it away.”
“I threw it, yes. But away? Not hardly.”
The boy turned the bottle over in his grubby hands, then held it up to Mueller. The man ignored the gesture and kept the horse walking forward. The swish of grass and the light clomp of the horse’s hooves were the only sounds for another few minutes.
“You see,” said Tunk. “We often play a game, me and the horse. I will chuck that there bottle far along the trail, in the direction we are headed, and when we come on up to it, why, that horse will pick it up in his teeth as gingerly as you please, and hand it on up to me.”
The boy smiled, his teeth brown nubs in his tight-skinned face. “You’re funnin’ me. Show me. Show me how that horse can do s
uch a trick.” He handed the bottle up to Tunk.
But Tunk shook his head. “Naw, we’re almost to your camp. Don’t want to go clunking anybody in the bean. Another time.”
The boy looked disappointed and rubbed the bottle, but perked up again right away. “You wanna stay for supper?”
“Supper? Why, boy, you said you didn’t have no food.”
“I never did.”
“About close to that, though. Hell, you look like you could eat . . .” He was going to say a horse, but he didn’t want to give the kid any ideas.
“Oh, we got food to eat, don’t you worry none. Mammy won’t mind.”
Mueller’s brow wrinkled, but he said nothing. The boy was so thin, there was less than no chance that they had food enough for themselves, let alone to feed a stranger. Then his nose wrinkled, too. What in God’s name was that hard smell? It seemed to hang right there in a ring around the little camp, like a kill gone off and green with age.
As he dismounted, well outside the camp, the boy went on ahead to the smoldering campfire and laid on another couple of thin sticks. “Mammy? Pappy? This fella here is come for supper.” He smiled at Tunk.
Tunk caught sight of a small rock pile about as long as his leg. Stuck at one end were two sticks lashed into a rough cross with a strip of leather thong.
“That’s my sister,” the boy said, following Tunk’s gaze. “She’s still resting up. She’s powerful tired most all the time.”
“I should say,” said Tunk to himself, eyes wide. Then he raised his voice. “Where’s your wagon, boy? Stock?”
“Gone, they done took ’em all.”
“Who?”
“Oh,” he sighed as if he were tired of telling the story. “It was them who raided us a long time back. Bad things happened then, took all we had.” He looked out over the waving grasses, flat as far as Tunk could see. “I was off on my own.” He waved an arm in no real direction. “Trying to find us some tubers. Mammy’s partial to such things.”