by Logan, Jake
She stopped chewing again, and her stomach growled. She swallowed the meat. “Can I have a drink from your canteen?”
He passed it to her. “So, are you going to tell me just what you’re up to?”
“Why should I?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll paddle you sore and drop you off at the doorstep of the farm. Though I’m sure that’s nicer treatment than you’d get at the nearest town for horse theft.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” But the statement rode up at the tail end, as if she wasn’t so sure about him.
“Judith, I have about had enough of you, your family, this valley, the whole works. I want my horse, then I want to go away, far away from you all. None of you make any sense. Your mother wants to go to California, has wanted to for years, and when she finally gets up the nerve to leave that crack-minded father of yours, she encounters hard luck and buckles under to him again. I’m the only man who has probably ever been kind to you women and you tie me up, then steal my horse!”
Despite his order to her earlier to keep her voice down, Slocum found himself growling at her, his voice beginning to shout. He took another bite of snake, chewed, then leaned forward and said, “You give me one good reason why I shouldn’t dump you with them and leave. One good reason.”
She looked at her dusty boots again. “Because I love you.”
“No,” he said in a low voice. “No, Judith. You only think you do. You’re too good for the likes of me, ma’am. You’re special, you’re young and full of the promise for the future. Besides, you’re too young to be engaging in such acts. There’s nothing wrong with them, mind you, but I’m an adult and so are your sisters. Don’t be in such a hurry.”
“Ruth said the same thing.”
“Ruth’s a wise woman. Look, the last thing you do if you care for someone is tie them up and steal their horse.”
She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. “We . . .” She looked down again. “I did it to save your life. I know what Papa’s like, and . . . I was going to say ‘the others,’ but it’s only Pap and Zeke left now, ain’t it? But trust me, they would have killed you. Look what they did to Luke. Don’t you see? You wouldn’t have ridden away. Like I told you before, you’re too good a person for that. You would have stayed and fought them, and they’d have killed you. So we did the only thing we could think of to save you. We knocked you out, then I had to figure out what to do with your horse. I hid. I was only going to tie it in the trees, but the men came storming in sooner than I expected. I wanted to help Mama and the others, but I froze. I couldn’t think straight, not after they done that to Luke.”
He rested a hand on her shoulder. She felt so thin and small. “You did the right thing, Judith. Don’t worry.” Then he lifted her chin and looked at her wet eyes. “You said ‘we’ before. Don’t you think you should tell me the whole truth? If we’re going to be working together, that is.”
He handed her gun belt back without taking his eyes from hers. Finally she nodded. “Okay. It was Mama’s idea. We all, well, she convinced us, after you shot Pete to protect me, and what with Ruth wounded, Mama was worried it would all end badly, with us all shot up. She said we could choose another time to fight, another time to leave. It would be harder in the future, but at least we’d be alive. Ruth and the twins were for it, and the children, well, they don’t know their elbows from their behinds. They just want a sugar tit and a warm bed . . .”
Slocum smiled, nodded to encourage her.
“So, she somehow said she was going to send word to Papa and the boys that we were giving up. But Ruth and the twins and me . . .” She looked down again, picked at her dirty fingernails.
“So how did you knock me out? I don’t recall taking a knock to the head.”
“That was Mama. She put wolfsbane in that coffee she brung you.”
He thought back, remembered its odd, bitter taste. “Isn’t that some sort of poison?”
“Yeah, but she only used a little. It’s an herb she dries. For medicines. You take too much, you can kill a body, but a little of it and you’ll doze off for a good while.”
“I know,” he said, rubbing his neck. “I suppose I should be grateful I didn’t wake up naked, tied to a fence.”
She half smiled. “We all didn’t want no harm to come to you. But we knew you’d get to scrappin’ with Papa and the boys, and we were just sure they’d kill you and we didn’t want that at all. It ain’t your fight, Mr. Slocum.”
He looked at her shining face a moment, then said, “I appreciate that, Judith. I really do, but I think you’re selling me short. I have been known to hold my own in a scrap or two. But thanks just the same.” He got up. “We better fetch more wood. I think we can risk a bigger fire. If what I know about your pa is true, he won’t come at us until nightfall—if at all. He might be too busy . . .” He let the thought die there, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.
“About as busy as you were with Ruth again, huh?”
He dropped his armload of wood by the fire and sighed. “Judith, I—”
She just winked and shook her head. “That’s all right—she can’t help it. Besides, Mama’s right. Men are all the same. Even the good ones.”
“Yeah, well, she may be correct in that assessment. I suppose it’s true in my case, too. But you just wait a good long while before you verify it for yourself, you understand?”
Her smiled faded. “If they get me back there, I reckon I won’t have that particular luxury.”
Slocum’s gut grew cold. He’d almost lost sight of the real reason for seeing that these women were freed from Papa Tinker’s preachy grasp. He was a poisonous man who’d infected his own sons, and was working on a new generation of the same. He’d encountered such families in the past, but had done his best to steer clear of them. None of them had wanted to change their plight, but these women were different. Despite long years of abuse, the mother showed a strong backbone and had passed that to her daughters, too. But they needed help to make the final leap, help he knew now that only he could give.
24
“Well now, lookie here.” Tunk Mueller toed then lifted the edge of the saddle with a worn boot, then bent and dragged it, the bridle and bit, and the saddlebags that had been laid atop it, out of the shadows of the run-down barn. He squatted before the gear, looking about the abandoned old homestead as he laid his rifle aside. “So, hell, that must have been Slocum after me. Recognize this as his fine gear from the Rockin’ D. Sure glad I creased him. Now maybe it’s time to find him and finish the job.”
His horse, standing tied at the corral rail nearby, perked its ears at the sound of Mueller’s voice.
Then he cackled, low and long. “And that means it was Slocum I shot. Thought I recognized his Appaloosa. And he’s fetched up with them women, it seems. Yes, sir, this is a pretty picture, Tunk. Pretty as a newborn lamb.” He gave the yard one more look, then unbuckled the saddlebags, riffling the contents and pausing as he unfolded a well-worn dodger. He stared at it a long minute, then ran a grimy hand across his week-old beard, scratching in concentration. He set it aside, riffled farther, and found a number of tasty items too good to pass up. Some of them were small and personal, by the looks of the care with which they’d been wrapped in cloth and squirreled in a buckskin pouch—a brooch, a pocket watch. There were papers, other useless items. But the brass spyglass could prove useful.
Mueller stood, cradling his rifle and walking slowly about the small yard between the barn and the house. Then he inspected the barn, found lengths of cut-up rope, a little bit of what he thought might be blood on the straw. Then he turned his attention back to the grounds, the hoofprints, bare footprints of children, boot prints of men, women. The house offered more of the same. He roved from spot to spot, making a mental accounting of all the activity that had taken place there, of the rough number of people involved.
As a man on the move these past few years, hounded by lapdogs and do-gooders, Mueller had developed a keen sense of caution. But even with all the sign about the place, he felt no familiar prickling up his spine and into his scalp, the usual way he knew without knowing when he was being tracked, stalked, or watched. Whatever had happened here, he concluded, had taken the participants elsewhere.
Mueller followed the tracks of the horses, the wheels from a heavy wagon, and lastly, laid over them all, the single line of boot prints leading in the same direction. “Slocum afoot,” he said, his mouth spread wide, equal parts grin and sneer. “So that’s what made you leave your traps behind.” He bent low, tried to discern the age of the prints, sniffed at them, even wet a begrimed fingertip and dabbed it in the center of one sandy boot print. It tasted like grit and little else. He spat and rose. He’d never been much of a hand at tracking. But he could, by God, kill a man and rob him blind.
“No sir,” he said, heading back to his horse and eyeing Slocum’s saddle, bridle, and bags. He hefted the pile and lashed it on behind his own saddle. “Ain’t no way I’m going to leave all this behind.”
Mueller’s thoughts turned to the grim scene he’d experienced but a day before out on the plain north of there. He still couldn’t get that boy out of his head. All smiles, even as he was fixing to slice up strips off his mama’s body to feed himself! And he’d offered some to Tunk, too. The gold teeth, now, they were something different. They were just going to waste. Precious metal, as the fancy folk called it, ain’t got no business sitting pretty in a dead man’s mouth. Might as well a living man enjoy it.
As he lashed the load onto the horse, he wondered what he might buy with the gold. A bottle or two, for starters. He lifted the neck of his shirt and wiped his mouth of sweat and chew juice. Maybe a new shirt, too. This red one might have been his favorite, but even a handsome garment comes to the end of its road. Hell, maybe I’ll try a blue shirt next time.
The saddle and gear all sat nicely atop the dancing horse he’d borrowed for keeps from that belligerent Dez Monkton and his screaming biddy of a wife. All he’d wanted was a fair shake—and a look inside the man’s safe. Had to have one, felt sure it must have been in the man’s office. Hell, in his experience, every rancher worth his salt had at least a strongbox. If he had known that all he’d get out of it was a handful of silver tableware, he’d have skipped it altogether. Now he had Slocum dogging his back trail.
He smacked the jittery horse once on the flank. “Calm your worthless hide!” But it only served to have the opposite effect on the beast and it took him a full minute of yanking on the reins before the creature held still.
“Ain’t no way I’m leaving this here outfit behind. I won’t be back this way. After I kill me a Slocum, I’m going to keep on heading back, make sure them cooked farmers are for certain done for, then give their place a better look-see.” He smiled at the memory of them. It had been his pleasure to leave them to die like that. Hell, it had even been amusing to see them try to look at him, all bubbled up and moaning, begging for water, for help. He sort of wished he had thought to do that to somebody. “Time enough yet,” he told himself, with Slocum in mind.
“Bound to have something hid away in that farmhouse. I can find a secret cash hidey-hole better than any ten banditos, mark my words. Then I just may head northeast, circle wide. Make Canada by snow. Get me a squaw and hole up in a wigwam or some such.”
He cackled again and stuffed a knob of lint-covered plug tobacco, his last hunk, into his mouth. “Unless one of them womenfolk strikes my fancy. I do wonder what they are doing heading eastward. But hell, they’re women. Who can know what’s in such a creature’s mind?”
The horse walked on. It didn’t matter to Mueller that he was talking only to his horse. It was company enough. He’d never really gotten on with other people, but horses never complained nor said he was talking too much. “I avoided them when I come through here because they was all totin’ guns and I don’t fancy getting shot up by a woman. They’re liable to shoot off parts of me I’m partial to.” He patted the mare roughly on the neck. “You wouldn’t know about such things, I know, but not ol’ Tunk.”
He laughed and worked the chew in earnest, avoiding the back teeth on the right side, tender ever since that fistfight with a couple of uppity hands at the Rocking D a month or more before. A fight he’d been enjoying when that damned Slocum had stepped in, settled his hash, and called an end to the fight.
Mueller sent a stream of brown chew juice tailing into the dirt, missing the spiderweb for which he’d aimed. “Lousy do-gooder.” He glanced again at the found gear. “I am owed that much and more by that foul bastard, just for putting up with his meddling. By God, I’ll settle his hash this time. Wounded and afoot, he’ll be near useless.”
The horse nickered. Mueller took that to mean the horse agreed with him, so they headed down the lane, eastward toward that farm. The second saddle, tied on poorly, flopped against the dun’s rump, keeping her agitated, but if Tunk Mueller sensed it, he didn’t act on it, so engrossed was he in his one-sided conversation. Soon he lapsed into chatter about the viciousness of his dead mother and his father’s inability to get his head out of the demon bottle.
Then his thoughts turned to the nest of gamblers and whores he’d discovered just over the border in Ojinaga the previous summer. What a fine old time they had had—until he’d lost and lost, one hand after another, at the tables, and had been forced to shoot his way out of that town. It hadn’t been the first time he’d killed a woman, but the first time he’d killed one he’d grown to like. He couldn’t recall her name, but she had been a saucy thing always read for a romp.
Soon enough, he fell silent, knowing that since he was so poor at reading sign, he might at any time catch up with Slocum, and it wouldn’t do to have the man hear him before he could get the drop on him. All he needed was one clear shot, from the side, rear, front, didn’t matter. Only thing he wanted to do was kill Slocum. The rest could maybe identify him, but Slocum for certain could. And that was why that nosy do-gooder was going to die.
25
Slocum checked his rifle and said, “Where does your mother keep that wolfsbane?”
“They’ll never let you get close enough to put it in their drinks. Not after what we did to them last time.”
He smiled. “Who said anything about putting it in their drinks? You let me worry about getting close enough and I’ll get it into their mouths, no worries there.” They have mouths, thought Slocum, and I have fists to jam into them, gun barrels to jam down them. They’ll eat the damned leaves . . . even if it kills them. “First things first, we have to figure out the finer points of rescuing your mother and sisters.”
“What if they don’t want to be rescued? Seems to me they went of their own mind,” she said.
“Maybe so, maybe not. From everything I’ve heard, they’ll still be waiting for the right time to do it. And judging from what I heard the old man saying, it’ll be a cold day in hell before he lets them out of his sight. So it’s up to us to make it happen. You ready?”
She nodded, frowning at him.
“And wipe that scowl off your face, girl. I told you before, you’re too pretty to go around looking angry all the time. Your face will stick that way and then where will you be?” Then he winked at her.
“Okay, Mr. Slocum, so what’s the plan?”
“How many shells do you have for those six-shooters of yours?”
She felt the gun belt, fingering each filled bullet loop. “Seven on the belt and five in each gun.”
“None under the hammer, right?”
“Course not. I might look young, but I ain’t stupid.”
“Never said you were—just a mite sensitive.”
“I’m also going to need to know where that arsenal of theirs is. Your mother said something about it being in
the barn. Is that true?”
“Yeah, but it’s locked tighter than a bull’s backside. You won’t be able to get in there without a key or explosives.”
He wagged his eyebrows and nodded.
“You got dynamite?”
“Nope,” he said, “but I do have gunpowder, as a last resort. How many keys do you think there are?”
She scrunched her eyes, “Oh, I bet there’s only one. Papa don’t trust no one. I thought he kept a key on a leather thong around his neck, but Mama couldn’t find it before we left. Then we just ran out of time, had to get moving.”
“Well, I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. If we’re going to pull off whatever sort of plan we can come up with, we need to work together. You have to do what I say and no questions, you hear me?”
She took longer than he would have liked to answer him but she eventually nodded.
“Good. First thing I want to do is get him and your brother, Zeke, out of the house, and subdue them.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I knock them on the head, then we both drag them off and tie them up. By my own count there are only the two left.” He felt bad bringing up the fact that three of her brothers had died within the last day, but if it bothered her, Judith didn’t show it.
She nodded her head. “It’ll be a blessing to have them quiet for a spell, especially Zeke, on account of him being so foul-mouthed and all. Even Pap doesn’t like him to talk too much. I reckon that’s what they call poetic justice.”
Slocum just stared at her, unsure what exactly she was talking about.
“Oh, you know, Pap’s big on that sort of thing. Said it’s all in the Bible. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with the Bible, as I’m a girl and Pap says that girls don’t have any right to know any book learning. But Mama taught us each how to read and do our figures. She said it would be useful someday.”
“Sounds to me like Ruth isn’t the only clever one in the family.”