Slocum and the Rebel Cannon

by Jake Logan

  Tessa sashayed off, giving Slocum a good look at her hindquarters moving seductively. He wondered if the show was just for him or for any man who happened to notice. It hardly mattered. He appreciated the movement. When she vanished into the hotel, he got into the rear of the wagon and strapped on his six-shooter. Feeling dressed once more, he went to the nearest saloon.

  He licked his lips, remembered what whiskey tasted like and how long it had been. The grumbles in his belly convinced him a beer or two along with some food would not pose much of a problem as long as he stayed in the background. At this time of day, there weren’t likely to be many customers.

  Slocum walked to the swinging doors, looked into the saloon, and then went inside. Two men played high-low at a table near the door. Neither bothered to even glance in his direction as he walked in.

  He ordered a beer from the stocky man behind the bar. The barkeep looked to be fifty and moved with an arthritic shuffle. His one good eye was hardly in better condition than the milky, blind one.

  Slocum helped himself to the fixings for a roast beef sandwich, slathered on a healthy dollop of mustard, and washed it down with the beer. He strained to eavesdrop on the two men playing cards, but they kept their voices low. He doubted they had much to say that he wanted to hear. The barkeep talked to himself all the time, and Slocum was certain he had no desire to hear more of the man’s maundering.

  After a second sandwich and beer, he’d started to leave when a man swung into the saloon as if he were king of all he surveyed. Slocum’s eyes narrowed as he sucked in his breath and held it. The man wore his six-gun low on his left hip. He didn’t have a right hand, and wore a battered CSA garrison cap pulled down on his scarred forehead.

  Slocum’s green eyes locked with the man’s icy blue ones. The shock of recognition startled the one-handed man. Then he squared off and rested his hand on the side of his holster.

  “Slocum,” he snarled. “We got a score to settle.”

  6

  “Been a long time, Toombs,” Slocum said. “What was it? Just before the Lawrence raid?”

  “Seems like yesterday to me, Slocum. You blowed my damn hand off. I missed all the fun Quantrill had fer us. And I never quit hatin’ you!”

  Slocum studied the man closely, looking for the slightest twitch that would signal that Toombs was going for the six-shooter at his hip. They had ridden together under William Quantrill, murdering and pillaging and trying to convince themselves this was the way war was fought. Leastways, Slocum had tried to convince himself until the lies and blood had piled up too much, even for a war-hardened captain like him. Killing Yankee soldiers was one thing, but he had become increasingly disaffected with wanton murder of civilians, and had drawn the line at massacring young boys in Lawrence, Kansas. Quantrill’s brother had been killed, and he had exacted revenge by leaving more bodies to bury than there were people to bury them. Protesting the slaughter had gotten Slocum gut-shot by Quantrill’s right-hand man, Bloody Bill Anderson.

  But the uneasiness with them had started earlier, and Rufus Toombs had been a big part of that. He had pushed Slocum by calling him a gutless poltroon for his complaints. No man got away with that. After a bare-knuckles fight had left Toombs bruised and bloody, he had slunk off. The kind of man Toombs was had come to the surface fast after the whupping. Slocum had blasted Toombs’s gun hand off with a shotgun when the man tried to bushwhack him. After all these years, Toombs had not mellowed, and still groused about missing the chance to murder eight-year-olds who just happened to be in a Yankee-controlled town.

  “You still the same back-shooting coward you always were, or have you grown a spine?” Slocum asked.

  “I wasn’t tryin’ to shoot you in the back, damn you, Slocum. You snuck up on me with a shotgun. A shotgun! I never had a chance. You shoulda kilt me then and there ’cuz now I’m gonna kill you.”

  “Been practicing with your left hand, Toombs? If not, you’d better apologize. I hope you decide to go for your iron. You’re right about one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Toombs’s hand began to twitch.

  “I should have killed you on the spot back then. No tellin’ how many lives you’ve taken since then. And you probably shot each and every one of them in the back.”

  Toombs went for his gun. Slocum was faster. And more accurate with his first shot. Toombs grunted as the slug ripped through his chest. He still managed to draw his gun, but it discharged into the floorboards, kicking up a pillar of dust and splinters. He dropped to his knees and fought to lift his six-shooter for another shot at Slocum.

  “Die, damn you,” Slocum said. This time he aimed for the man’s head and did not miss. His bullet tore through Toombs’s forehead. When the former Confederate soldier crashed to the floor, he was deader than a doornail.

  The barkeep laid a pistol on the counter, stood on tiptoe, and looked at the body stretched out on his floor. “You two know each other?” he asked.

  Slocum slid his Colt Navy back into his holster, glad he had taken the time to strap it on. Knowing Toombs the way he did, he knew he would have been dead if he had not been able to defend himself.

  “Did once,” Slocum said to the barkeep.

  “I seen it all. He throwed down on you, mister. Another beer?”

  Slocum saw that both cardplayers had disappeared. It would be only a matter of minutes before the town marshal showed up, waving his gun around and demanding to know what was going on. Slocum dared not be tossed in the town hoosegow for even a few hours. Any lawman worth his salt would ask around if his prisoner was wanted for anything else. Both the Texas Rangers and the army would end up fighting over Slocum, each wanting to stretch his neck.

  “I’ll take a rain check on that beer,” Slocum told the barkeep.

  At the doors leading out into the main street, he stopped and stared at the trio of men running toward him. The poker players must have alerted the three gunmen wearing Confederate caps similar to the one now drenched in Toombs’s blood.

  He backed away, then found the door at the rear of the saloon and left in a hurry. Slocum did not recognize the men coming to see what happened to their partner, but he knew their type. The hard expressions, the pistols slung at their hips, the Confederate regalia all told him they were likely riding on the wrong side of the law.

  The hot sun burned at his face as he hurried to the stables. He saw half a dozen horses crowded into the stalls. Toombs and his partners had just come to town since these animals had not been here the day before.

  “You come to check on yer horse?” The stable owner moseyed out of the tack room.

  “Is the shoe nailed down again?”

  “Surely is.” The man looked at Slocum curiously. “That there’s a saddle horse, not a draft animal.”

  “So?”

  “I thought you used it to pull the preacher man’s wagon. No way could that horse do a chore like that. Too high-spirited. ”

  “I ride alongside most of the time. The other horse does the pulling. Is the mare fed and watered?”

  “Groomed, too. You lookin’ to doin’ some explorin’ around Bitter Springs?”

  “Where’s the road to the north go?” Slocum’s mind raced as he considered what to do. He wished he had time to pay his respects to Preacher Dan and his lovely daughter— especially Tessa!—but he felt the jaws of a vise closing around him. As if the Rangers and the cavalry hunting for him weren’t enough, he had killed an old enemy and had at least three killers on the other side of the law on his trail, too.

  “Well,” said the liveryman, scratching his chin thoughtfully, “if you veer on to the northeast, you can go to Frijole. Take the western branch, and you end up out on a dry salt lake. That way leads to Cornuda and on over to El Paso. Bad desert there, but that’s the way most of the army shipments come, the ones not from Fort Union, that is.”

  “Thanks,” Slocum said. He grabbed his saddle and threw it over the mare’s back. The horse whinnied in complaint. It didn’t take l
ong to get used to standing around in the shade with all the food and water you could want. He rattled his canteen and held it up. “You fill this up for me?”

  The stable owner looked at him curiously, then took it silently and went to fill it for Slocum. This gave Slocum the chance to whip out his knife and cut the cinch straps almost all the way through on the saddles of the four new horses. He tucked the blade back into the top of his boot when the man returned with the canteen.

  “All full. You might want to take a canvas desert bag, too. Gives a taste of cooler water.”

  Slocum began to get antsy about leaving. The man seemed intent on jawing.

  “If you’ve got one handy, I’ll buy it,” Slocum said.

  “Over at the general store, they got a couple. My brother owns the store,” he said, as if this made the suggestion on the level.

  “Won’t be gone that long,” Slocum lied. It would take an hour for the Rebs to repair their saddle cinches. That would give Slocum a little head start. Casting doubt about where he headed might give him a few more minutes if they waited for him to return.

  “I can surely understand that,” the man said. He grinned almost shyly. “That daughter of the preacher man, she’s a real peach.”

  “That she is,” Slocum said. He swung into the saddle and rode around the back way to Preacher Dan’s wagon. It took Slocum only a few seconds to grab his bedroll and other items he had stashed there. Pausing a moment, he stared over at the hotel, not sure if he ought to risk going to say good-bye to Tessa. From the ruckus being kicked up at the saloon, he decided he had better get on the trail or he would be in the middle of a new war.

  Regretting it, he turned his back on Tessa Whitmore and trotted out of town, heading north. He remembered what the stable owner had said when he reached a fork in the road after riding a half hour. Due west stretched a dry lake bed, and to the northeast was another town called Frijole. Having had his fill of beans, Slocum went westward and immediately regretted it.

  The hills began to flatten out fast. From his position along a higher elevation in the road, he spotted a dust cloud being kicked up out on the flats.

  “Damn,” he muttered. Reaching back into his saddlebags, he pulled out a pair of field glasses and put them to his eyes. His fear was realized. Through the dust and heat shimmer rising from the arid land, he made out a column of cavalry troopers. He put the field glasses back into his saddlebags and wheeled about. Frijole didn’t seem like such a bad spot after all.

  Nowhere along the road from the fork afforded any real cover. He considered finding an arroyo, getting down into it, and hoping the soldiers rode on past him. Taking such a risk, though, was not something he wanted to do unless absolutely necessary. He galloped back into rockier country, the mountains rising all around by the time he reached the road to Frijole.

  He turned northward, and had ridden hardly a mile when he began to get an itchy feeling at the back of his neck. This section of the road ran through rocky terrain that could provide a fair amount of cover. Slocum decided it was time to rest his horse and get rid of the uneasy feeling that grew with every step he took toward Frijole.

  Dismounting, he led the mare through a maze of rocks, and finally found a sandy spit behind some boulders. It was hotter than hell here, the rocks trapping the burning summer heat, but Slocum was in no mood to hunt for a better rest area. He lashed the horse’s reins to a mesquite bush where the mare could graze on some beans. His mouth like cotton, he sampled some of the water in his canteen and almost spat it out.

  Wherever the stable man had filled it had been polluted. Slocum reckoned that was the man’s way of getting him over to the general store to buy a desert bag. Wiping the water all over his face relieved some of the heat and got rid of trail dust. As Slocum hung the canteen back on his saddle, he heard the steady thunder of approaching horsemen.

  Scrambling up the rock, he slid over the top and wedged himself between two sheer faces to watch the road. Less than five minutes later, he saw two Texas Rangers ride past. The lawmen never so much as glanced in his direction. Slocum waited a few minutes and started to clamber up— and almost got caught.

  Two more Rangers rode behind their partners. Slocum recognized Jeffers immediately. The simple act of staring at the Ranger caused him to turn and look around intently. Slocum flopped down on the rock like a sunning lizard and did not move a muscle.

  “You hear anything?” Jeffers asked his partner.

  “Just the damn wind blowin’,” came the answer. “Why?”

  “I dunno. I heard something. Maybe I felt it. Like somebody’s walkin’ on my grave.”

  “What you been through, you ought to know the feelin’.”

  The two rode on, never spotting Slocum. Thinking they were out of earshot, Slocum slid on down the backside of the rock to the sandy spit and then collapsed to the ground. He held out his hands. They shook the slightest amount.

  “They’re getting to you,” Slocum told himself. “What you need is a bottle of whiskey and one of those Mexican señoritas down Sonora way.” He touched the money in his pocket, thinking it might have evaporated. After all he had been through since finding that strongbox, losing it might be the best thing that could happen to him. What had seemed like good luck at the time had given him nothing but misery.

  He leaned back, pulled down his hat to shade his face, and chuckled. He ought to throw away the money he found and get on back to Bitter Springs and rob the bank. Money he had come by honestly enough gave him trouble. That told him he ought to sample some ill-gotten gains if he wanted to change his luck.

  Scraping sounds alerted him that he wasn’t alone. His hand crept to his six-shooter as he sat up and looked around. Whatever he had heard wasn’t human. He stood and peered down a narrow draw in time to see a rabbit running away from the road as if its life depended on it. Slocum made his way back around the rock and listened hard. Caught on the wind were sounds coming from the direction taken by the Rangers.

  “. . . damn good thing you saw ’em. That’d been a fight if we crossed them Rangers.”

  Slocum could not make out the answer, but he didn’t have to have much of an imagination to know who it was on the road to Frijole. Cutting their saddle cinches had not slowed Toombs’s friends that much. How they had decided this was the way he had headed, he didn’t know. More bad luck maybe, or there might be enough of them to split and take each road, some going westward and the rest coming this direction. That was a chilling thought. If they had split in half at Bitter Springs, some going down toward Fort Suddereth and the rest coming up to the fork, that meant they had split again there. Half had gone across the dry lake bed and the rest had headed for Frijole—and there were still at least two of them.

  Not once did he think those men were any kind of trackers who had sorted out his hoofprints among all the others and come after him. Or had they? Slocum slid back to where he had tethered his horse and examined the right front hoof. While the shoe was securely in place, he saw that the farrier had nicked it in several places so it would leave a distinctive print. Still, while a tracker as good as Slocum himself might follow the faint marks, he doubted the men decked out in the gray Confederate garrison caps could.

  He slid his rifle from its sheath and went back to the top of the rock to watch the road. He wasn’t above shooting them both out of the saddle. If they had ridden with Toombs, they were rotten to the core and deserved their fate. They probably had wanted posters following them around Texas.

  An idea slowly took form in Slocum’s head. He hurried back to his horse and mounted. The going was rough, sliding between rocks and riding parallel to the road. He headed back to the fork and took a few seconds to see that the Texas Rangers had returned to Bitter Springs. Putting his heels to his horse, he galloped a quarter mile until the slower-moving lawmen spotted him. Slocum stayed low in the saddle and immediately swung about and hightailed it in the direction of Frijole.

  When he was sure the Rangers were coming af
ter him to see who was so willing to gallop a horse in the Texas heat, he cut off the road and lost himself once more in the jumble of rocks. His mare panted harshly from the exertion, but they were hidden from the road as the Rangers raced past.

  It took them only seconds to spot the Confederate-capped men and begin shooting. That told Slocum he had been right.

  “Too bad I can’t claim the reward,” he said, patting his horse.

  “Too bad you mighta cost me a pair of good men,” came a cold voice. “Like you already cost me the services of Rufus Toombs.”

  Slocum swung around. He had not heard the man with the sawed-off shotgun approach. He stared down the double barrels of that deadly weapon and knew the man holding it would squeeze the triggers and never think twice.

  Slocum knew him all too well.

  “Howdy, Jack,” Slocum said. “It’s been a spell.”

  “That it has, Slocum,” answered Rebel Jack Holtz as he raised the weapon and sighted along the barrels. “And it’s gonna be a lot longer till the next time. See you in hell.”

  7

  “Don’t go doing anything you will regret, Jack,” Slocum said. “You always were a hotheaded son of a bitch who shot first and thought later.”

  “I’ve thought this through, Slocum. You killed one of my best men.”

  “If Toombs was one of your best, you’ve got a sorry-ass bunch of men riding with you.”

  Rebel Jack Holtz did not lower his shotgun, but Slocum saw his finger relax on the triggers.

  “Why’d you have to go and kill Rufus?”

  “Toombs was a back-shooter from way back. I doubt he killed anyone face-to-face in his life. Him and me tangled when we rode with Quantrill.”

  “I rode with Quantrill, too,” Rebel Jack said. “But it was after you got shot.”