by Jake Logan
Slocum wasn’t sure if that was the man’s last gasp or if he’d farted. He winced at what he had to do, but knew there was no way the man would live much longer. He thumbed back the hammer once more, toed the man with his boot as a last check, and felt the peculiar unresponsive feeling only a dead body can offer.
“Good,” said Slocum, moving toward the back door. He had to move the legs of the dead barman, since they were also blocking the door, but he managed to clear them away enough to yank open the door.
Fresh, cold air flowed in, and never had anything tasted, felt, or smelled so good. He yanked harder and pushed his way though. Immediately, even though his eyes recoiled at the light stabbing them, he scanned the long plain beyond the back of the soddy. He saw nothing. He dragged his leg through the narrow door gap and stood outside, relishing the full, deep breaths he pulled in.
He coughed, spat, and ran around the right end of the hovel. There were the three bonerack horses, clustered at the far end of the leaning corral. They looked a lot worse than he had first noticed—open sores, and so thin it seemed as if their bones would poke through their hides in a hundred spots. He thumbed back the hammer of the Colt and made his way around to the front.
Just as he’d expected, his Appaloosa and packhorse were gone. He saw the tracks, smaller than a fourth fat man would make, but someone had made off with them for sure. He ran along the full front of the building, and there, heading southward away from the left end of the building, someone was astride the Appaloosa and kicking and flailing for all he was worth. Whoever the someone was, they weren’t much of a rider, though Slocum was sure the Appaloosa wasn’t helping matters much.
A horse thief is a horse thief, and I am sunk if I lose my horses and gear out here. He was thankful that whoever it was hadn’t gotten as far as someone with riding experience would have. He lay down in the snow, prone, levered a shell, cocked the hammer of the rifle, and pulled in a deep breath. He sighted on the broad black-clad back of the retreating form—then shifted his aim slightly in hopes of hitting a shoulder instead of the middle of the back. He’d done enough killing for today.
He let the breath half out and fired. He didn’t wait to see a reaction. At that distance, he wasn’t too sure his shot would do anything more than piss off the thief.
He cranked another round in and was about to repeat the procedure when the black coat whipped sideways and flopped off the horse’s back.
“Now that’s more like it,” he said, standing up and wincing at the dull pain in the leg the fat man had fallen on.
He kept his eyes on the horses and they did slow, but only because the rider’s left leg was tangled in the stirrup. He considered retrieving one of the horses in the corral, but rejected the thought immediately. They wouldn’t carry him ten feet without wheezing. Instead, he took off at a lope through the hard, crusted snow straight across the sunned, snowy span toward the slowly retreating figures. The throbbing in his leg worked out with each long step he took. Soon he saw the Appaloosa turn, as he had hoped it would.
Slocum noted with dismay that the rider must be dead, or damn near so, because he saw the man’s head whapping against the horse’s legs near the ground. His shoulders and arms rose and fell hard with each erratic step the Appy took.
He bet himself a double shot of bourbon that the horse would tire of this flopping mess that it couldn’t seem to get shed of. Question was, would it take off at a hard run in an attempt to dislodge it, or just stop altogether? He hoped for the latter. And soon a smile began to pull wide on his stubbled face.
The horse was stopping, and with it the packhorse. Now he just had to make damn sure as he approached that they wouldn’t bolt when they caught sight of him. To the horses he would appear to be another in a long series of threats and annoyances, and he knew the Appaloosa had probably reached its tolerance limit for the day.
Slocum kept up his loping run until he drew within fifty yards of the huffing beasts, their breath pluming in the chill afternoon air. Nothing that he could see rose from the flopped form still hanging from the left stirrup. The Appaloosa pranced in annoyance and Slocum winced when he saw the horse step down hard on the thrashed rider’s arm. Damn, he thought, that had to hurt. If the man were alive, he would surely have reacted.
As he drew closer, Slocum saw the battered form, blood and snow ground together into the patched, black wool coat. The head was hatless and a thatch of dark hair ended his hopes that it might be Delbert Calkins. No such luck. Still, he felt bad for not being able to take the thief alive. But then what would he do with him? He was days from anywhere he might drop off the bastard, let alone finding any law. He guessed he was well into Canada anyway. No worry about it now. The rider he’d shot was looking dead from this distance.
“Whoa, boy. Easy now, easy,” Slocum kept up a steady, calming patter, or what he hoped was calming, to appease the nerved-up stepping of the Appaloosa. It worked, and when he reached the packhorse, which, as old Mose had promised, proved to be a steady creature of even character, the beast barely trembled. He ran a reassuring hand along its rump, up along the load, noting it was still secured well.
When he reached the horse’s head, he grabbed the lead line and ran his hand along it to the Appaloosa. The big horse, as he’d expected, danced. Slocum had to look down again at the pulped mess that was the man he’d shot. And he got the biggest shock of his surprise-filled day: The shot man was a stout, dark-skinned woman, Indian most likely, as sadly evidenced by the flayed open coat and shirt, a bare breast exposed and speckled with blood.
“Oh hell,” he said, looking at the battered face and pulped limbs in the blood-and-snow-pocked black wool coat.
He ground-tied the Appaloosa and laid the rifle down just away from it. Then he grabbed hold of the stirruped boot of the unfortunate thief and wrestled it through the wood-and-leather stirrup. The leg flopped free and he dragged the body away from the horse a few feet. He glanced down at the poor woman and bent to cover her exposed breast. Her shirt was a ragged mess, but he managed to pull the coat tightly around her. And as he bent low over her, he noticed a faint puff of breath rise from her mouth into the frigid air.
“Oh God,” he whispered. As if he didn’t feel bad enough. “Hey?” he whispered. “Hey, ma’am?”
All manner of emotion rushed at him and he fought to quell it as he reached toward her battered face. Her eyelids fluttered at his touch.
“What the hell have I done?” he whispered.
“Aaaah,” said the woman. “I . . .”
Slocum leaned close and put his ear to her face.
“I . . . should have killed them myself.”
“Who?” said Slocum.
“Bastards . . . hiders . . .”
“They hurt you?”
The trace of a smile appeared on her face. “You save . . . me,” she said. “Thank you.”
It was like a punch to the gut. How could this have all gone so wrong? He exhaled and stared at her fluttering eyes. It looked like she was trying to open them, but losing the struggle. He figured he couldn’t feel much worse, so he pressed his luck while he could, knowing she wasn’t far from leaving this life altogether. “Ma’am . . . a blond man, golden hair, nice clothes, mustache . . . did you see him just a week ago?”
“Yes, he took my money . . .” she said, her eyelids still fluttering, then settling. He felt her head relax. “Such a pretty boy . . .”
And that was it. She sagged beneath his hand, and he felt the life leave her. Her head flopped to the side, and a last small breath drizzled out of her bloodied mouth.
Slocum sat like that for long minutes, until the cold seeped in under his coat. What could all this mean? Had she really seen Delbert? Where did she come from? Probably was sold to the barman for whiskey. Or stolen. He looked down at her as he laid her flat on the ground. With her eyes closed, her battered face seemed almost peaceful.
He slung the girl’s lifeless, broken body over the Appaloosa’s saddle, tied her there. The horse still fidgeted at the odd-feeling weight, but Slocum tugged the reins and they walked back to the low soddy.
Looking at it, he wished he’d never stopped. Wished he’d never agreed to tail this Delbert Calkins. He sighed. What’s done is done, he almost said aloud, but even then he knew that the man had committed a crime, perhaps more than one, as such heartless characters generally did. And someone had to try to bring them to justice. If he didn’t tail Calkins, that foolish innocent, Ginny Garfield, would end up robbed and worse in some stage-stop town on a cold trail in the middle of nowhere. Her job was staying where she should be—doting on her dithering rich father and considering how best to spend the fortunes that would eventually be left to her.
And besides, he could no more quell his urge to rove free than he could stop breathing. He had to keep moving. Like some sort of fish someone had once told him about. He forgot what it was, but when he heard that if it stopped moving it would die, he understood that immediately.
Slocum looked around, couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the place, the bodies. If he left them all inside, it wouldn’t be so bad, because they would freeze—at least for a while. Scavengers might show up, and if the place started stinking, they’d surely find their way in through the partially blasted-out roof and walls.
He toyed with burning the entire place with the bodies inside, as the ground was far too cold to dig in, but decided there was no way he could do that. It might end up looking like someone was trying to cover up a whole lot of killing. Well, wasn’t that what it was? A whole lot of killing?
He sighed and dragged the girl’s body off the saddle, carried her in through the back door. There was nothing for it. She hadn’t wanted to be there, that much was certain, but he had no intention of leaving her out there on the plain for the wolves to get at.
It took him a few minutes, but Slocum managed to drag the sloppy carcasses of the two foul hiders and the barman down to the far end. He rested a hand on the small ramshackle stove and found it had nearly gone out. Good. The sooner the bodies cooled, the better.
Next he kicked aside the smashed remnants of the makeshift bar and laid the girl out. Beside her he laid the dog, who he bet had been like the girl, and had not wished for life among such savage men.
He wondered again how she had fallen in with them. Sold? Traded? Kidnapped? Didn’t matter now, he told himself. For better or worse, she was now at peace. She had seemed pleased to have made it away from the clutches of the men. He stood over the girl and the dog for a moment, had no words to say, but hoped his thoughts might suffice.
When he left the dugout, he dragged the door shut hard behind him, wedged and angled poles from the corral before the doors. Then he turned his attention to the two horses, noting their labored breathing, the fact that they barely flinched when he went over to them.
Up close, he noted their sores had festered, weeping blood and pus. Their eyes were crusted over and their legs looked as if they pained them. He suspected they were frozen clear through, living skeletons too tough to know they were already dead. They were too far gone—there was no way he was going to be able to trail them behind his packhorse as he’d originally hoped.
He couldn’t leave them to continue on as they were. What little feed there was consisted of an armload of foul yellowed chaff, more straw than hay, and of no value for eating. They would starve to death like the snow-covered racks of bones nearby, and then be savaged by wolves. Or worse, it might happen before they died.
He knew what he had to do. To each horse he apologized, then shot them both in the temple. They staggered, dropped, and wheezed out their final breaths.
“Sorry,” he said again. “Shouldn’t have been this way.” Then he mounted up on the Appaloosa, and leading the packhorse, he rode away without once looking back.
Before he made it to the far western slope on the horizon, low, dark shapes appeared on the rise to the east of the trading post, from the direction he’d traveled. They were wolves and they were grateful for the stranger’s leavings.
8
A week after leaving the trading post behind, Slocum still hadn’t come upon a settlement. He reckoned he was getting damn close to the mountains, as swells in the landscape were becoming more numerous, as were an increasing number of ground-hugging bushes and small trees. He was pretty sure he was in Canada, but beyond that he had little notion if he was still on Calkins’s trail or if he was just striking off on a long, fruitless quest.
Late in the day on what he guessed was a Friday, Slocum came upon a camp so suddenly it seemed as if it had appeared by magic. He had seen no sign of it, smelled no campfire, and yet there it was below in a small, snowed vale when he crested a rise. A thin old man in buckskins sat hunched before a decent cook fire, squinting into the full brunt of the smoke and sputtering about it. A few dozen yards away from the camp, a mule was doing its best to reduce a shrub to ground cover.
“Ho the camp!” said Slocum, reining up atop the rise.
The effect his words had on the old man was almost comical. The thin figure, red-eyed and snarling from the get-go, sprang to his feet, a skin hat askew on a head that Slocum guessed had very little hair on top, and a long beard parted and knotted at the end as if it were a thready gray napkin. The man’s set of buckskins looked as if they’d spent time seasoning under a gut pile.
“What you want?” The old man’s hands hovered near his waist, though to Slocum’s eye he wasn’t wearing any side arms. He did see a tomahawk and a big ol’ skinning knife, both fringed and beaded with decoration. Slocum guessed the old-timer could probably part his hair with that Indian axe.
Slocum held up his hands. “I come in peace.” He smiled. “Just want to know if you’d care to have a visitor for a spell.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed even more. “Depends on who the visitor is and how long he thinks a spell ought to be.”
“Fair enough response. I’m the visitor, and as for a spell, that depends on how welcome I am. Could be anywhere from how long it takes to drink a cup of coffee to a night’s rest before I move on in the morning.”
The old man considered this, kept one hand by his tomahawk, while the other gnarled claw he ran through his beard thoughtfully. “Ain’t got no coffee, so that’s out.”
“I have some.”
With that, the old man’s eyes widened and he almost smiled. “You do? Good beans?”
“Any beans are good when you don’t have coffee.”
Then the old man really did smile. Slapping a hand on his knee, he said, “Truer words weren’t never spoken. Ride on down here and yarn out that coffee of yours. We’ll flap our gums for a spell.”
Slocum did just that, and within a few minutes, he had his horses picketed and had unpacked a sack of Arbuckle’s. He passed it to the old man, who was practically salivating. “You mind if I stick my sniffer in that bag? It’s been so long since I had anything but the memory of a cup of coffee that I figure I’d better ease into this experience, lest I explode from the commotion.”
“Go right ahead, sir,” said Slocum, not bothering to hide his smile. This could be a fun visit. He sensed the old-timer was harmless and lonely. And starved for coffee.
After the man had his good, long sniff, and they rested the tin pot on the rocks to boil, Slocum asked him just where he was.
The old man looked at him as if he’d asked him whi
ch way was hell. “By God, if ever there was a man who couldn’t answer that, it’s me. I’m Whiskey Pete, by the way. That’s what they call me here and there and in another time. On account of I liked the stuff a little too much and it always got me in trouble. But I left all that behind. Nowadays, I just wander with Ethel, my mule over yonder.” He nodded toward the hobbled beast browsing the bushes lining the camp.
“I don’t ride her, though.”
“No?” said Slocum, pouring two cups of strong, hot coffee.
“Nope, I just feel odd and queasy asking an animal to do something for me when I can do it pretty well myself.” The old man made a funny sound with his nose. As he warmed to his subject, he leaned forward, using his hands to speak as much as his voice. “Why should that mule have to do its job and mine, too? I ask you.”
He leaned back, as if awaiting an answer. Slocum was about to oblige when Pete leaned forward again. “I don’t judge another man, you see. Can’t do that without seeming like I’m full of beans. But I will offer my opinion.”
“I can see that. Before you cogitate on it further, try this on for size.” He handed the old man a tin cup brimming with aromatic coffee.
“Oh Lord, I almost forgot, what with all that palaver I was getting up to.” His eyes glistened like a child with a penny standing before the candy counter. He closed them and sipped.
Slocum watched as the cup half disappeared into that ornate beard and pretty soon the man’s eyes snapped wide.
“It is without doubt the best cup of coffee any man within a hundred miles of wherever it is we are has had. By God, but it’s grand stuff is coffee.”
Slocum sipped and nodded. “Yep, I will agree with you there.”