Slocum and the High-Country Manhunt

by Jake Logan

  And if my money should run out, I will find more and then take it. With the thought of his money, his heart thudded faster and his bare hand patted his coat and found no familiar bump!

  But it had to be—it was there the night before when he fell asleep—and then he did feel it. His coat had shifted in the night, just enough to cause him needless worry.

  “Get up, Delbert,” he said out loud to the still, cold morning. “Today is the day you cross the mountains to the promised land. To a warm place with food and liquor and gambling halls and pretty young things eager for all the fun in the world.”

  He stood, brushed the caked granular snow from his clothes, stomped the life back into his ice-cold legs, and looked upward. It had been dark the night before by the time he had made it to the narrowed end of the steep canyon. Too dark to risk venturing into what he assumed was a continuation—albeit a narrowed one—of the pass. Why risk taking the wrong route because of darkness when you are so close to freedom?

  But now he stood, shivering and looking upward, at the point where the steep blue-gray rock walls towered over him, pinched to a near-close, like the bow of a ship a hundred feet before him. They were impossibly tall, and the only things breaking up the seemingly endless edifice of blue-gray rock were clumps of snow that had stuck in the driving storm of the day before.

  Everywhere he saw sharp angles filled with nothing but black shadows. Sunlight must have been lighting it, and yet the overall vision was one of dark and eternal near-dark. He forced himself to look all the way up to where the massive rock walls ended. Rafts of gray-tinged snow daggered through with great tentacles of ice, overhung the sides like frozen ocean waves. They were the sort of things that only come in dreams, the sort of dreams no one ever wants.

  Great reefs of snow and ice overhung the rock, so high up it hurt his neck to see them. And beyond them, far above, he saw a sky the flat color of gun steel.

  Delbert Calkins groaned and ran up the talus slope covered in loose snow, falling to his knees as he dug in. He tried to climb it, tried to prove to himself what he knew could not be—that there was a passage at that dark place where the rock walls met. He lunged again and again at the slope, sliding backward, dislodging snow and making the lower edge of the slope into a greasy mess. His breath hurt, shot out in bursts, and he finally flopped to the ground, panting.

  Then he gazed at the big cumbersome snowshoes and his mouth tightened in anger. He tore at their bindings and finally managed to rip them from his boots. He threw them away from him and, seething, made another lunging dash at the slope. He made it higher than he had before, but then could go no higher and slid backward again on his hands and knees.

  He sat at the bottom, throwing snow and rock from him, bellowing his rage at the dark, stone walls. Far away, he heard thunder and did not care. He sat still for long minutes, then when his anger ceased to tremble him and his teeth stopped grinding against one another, he sat still and regarded the object of his intentions far above—the narrowed gap.

  There had to be a way through—he just had to get up there. Sure it would be tight, but anything worth having was worth working for, right, Delbert? he told himself. And he stood up with a new idea in mind.

  20

  “Chief . . .” Slocum nudged the old man. It was early but they needed to get up and moving. He slowly unbent himself and even more slowly stood.

  He was as sore as he could remember being since the grizzly mauling, but he had no time or desire to pull off his coat and slather on Sigrid’s tincture. Too damn cold, even if he had the urge to do such a thing. Plenty of time for that later. Once he was back on the trail, he’d be fine, limbered up and stretching. He looked down at the old sleeping man. What little of the man’s face he could see looked a lot older than he had the day before when he’d seemed so spry. But now he just looked old.

  “Chief?” He bent low and nudged the man’s shoulder again. The man didn’t move.

  Slocum tugged off his mittens and dropped to his knees. “No, no, don’t do this to me, Chief. Come on . . .”

  But beneath his fur wrap, the old Cree warrior’s cheeks were stiff and cold, no breath puffed from his blue lips. A look of stony contentment decorated his face. Slocum slowly let out his own breath. “Dammit,” he said softly. He covered the man’s face once more, and left him as he was, leaned against the rock wall, his hands folded in his lap. He could well have been sleeping.

  “Well, Chief, you made it back.” He looked out across the trail, up toward the mass of gray rock not far ahead. “Or it pulled you back.” He looked down at the man. “I’ll return for you, though something tells me you might not want to be moved from here. I’ll think on it. But first, I have something to do.”

  He tied on and tightened his snowshoes, unsheathed his rifle, checked his pistols and his knife. Then he headed out, away from the alcove, and up the trail, staying close to the wall.

  Soon the trail widened and grew steeper. Far ahead he saw that it widened farther, opening out into an upslope of snow and shale, all gray-white snow and tumble-down jags of raw-edged rock from on high. The closer he drew, the darker and more foreboding it became. The walls seemed to gain dozens of feet with each step he took. And at their tops, where they met, angling westward against the spine of the mountain range, rested great curving rafts of glistening iced snow, like eyebrows topping a massive stone face.

  Slocum licked his lips and slowed, but forced himself to keep on walking. No wonder the old man didn’t want to come here in the dark. He couldn’t imagine waking in the morning to this sight. And then he heard something. He stopped and cocked his head. He plucked off a mitten and lifted the side of his fur cap. There it was again, what sounded like screams, coming from far ahead. Screams of anger, of outright rage.

  And Slocum smiled.

  21

  “I have you now, you bastard.” Slocum did little more than mumble it into the scarf wrapped tight around his face. He jacked a shell into play in the rifle and lumbered forward.

  Since he awoke, he’d been vaguely aware that the landscape this high up in the rocks had become much the same as it always looked in the high places he’d ever been to. But there was something extra about this place that seemed almost more barren and forlorn than anywhere else he’d ever been.

  Slocum didn’t really know just what it was that made it so, but the chief’s words about the place not letting you go, about calling you back, kept ringing in his head, echoing like a ricochet shot inside his skull.

  And now that he heard the shouts of the only creature on earth other than himself to be in this place of desperation, one killer by the name of Delbert Calkins, Slocum felt—despite the fact that he wasn’t a particularly spiritual man—as if he’d come to a place of reckoning, a place where two would meet and one would win. But would one be able, or even allowed, to leave?

  I aim to find out, he vowed. And he trudged on, his eyes fixed on the gray, shadowed place before him. From this vantage point, he saw that there was no place to go—the great rock walls narrowed to nothing. Unless there was a slim opening that led through the mountain to the other side, this was as the chief and his men had said—a dead end. In more ways than one, mused Slocum.

  Another few yards and Slocum saw movement in that grim place far ahead. But it hardly looked like a man’s movements—something kept scrambling up, then sliding back down a long slope of scree and jagged rock, hunks of the cliffs above that had sheared off over time.

  Didn’t look like a man, and yet it had to be Calkins. Slocum was just too far away yet to see whatever it was clearly. He doubled his pace, but crouched, too, as he moved forward. He had no desire to spend the entire day up here—let alone another night. The sooner he dealt with this madman, the better it would be for them all.

  He was thankful for the new layer of thick snow that had fallen in the night, because it helped dampen the sliding, clattering so
unds his snowshoes made against the crusted surface of the trail. The minutes seemed to tick by slower. The closer he drew, the more distinct the sounds from the creature became. And the creature, it was now obvious, became a man.

  All other logical reasons aside, it had to be Delbert Calkins because Slocum wanted it to be him, needed it to be him. Something inside him demanded it. He’d been through too much on this long, sometimes foolish trip, and he’d be damned if he was going to be robbed of this chance now.

  Slocum became acutely aware of his breathing, hard and labored and edged with a wheezing from the effort he’d expended so far, efforts that were already depleting his lowered levels of strength and ability. He had never been more aware than now of his injuries from the grizzly. He tried to block out thoughts of the healing wonders of Sigrid and her ointments, massages, and sauna.

  Slocum followed the trail along a sharp upturn, around a massive blackish tumbledown boulder. Then the trail switched back sharp to the left, upturned again, and he found himself in easy sight of the man. He was within fifty yards or so, and what Slocum saw amazed him and filled him with rare hope.

  So this was Delbert, once and for all. He was blond and had his back turned to Slocum. He also didn’t appear to be an overly large man, but of decent build and average height. He was coatless, his outer garments—a fur wrap from the Indians and a wool mackinaw—having been tossed aside in a pile halfway between himself and Slocum.

  Calkins stood facing the scree heap, his arms hanging by his sides, his shirt untucked, his arms rising up and down with his heaving chest. He’d obviously been working hard at getting up the pile, and it was just as obvious to Slocum that he’d been unsuccessful, judging by the churned mess of the slope before him.

  Slocum kept walking forward, leveling his rifle at the man at the same time. Suddenly the man began shouting at the top of his voice. He bent double, clutched his head with clawing, desperate hands, pulled at his hair, then shook his cold-reddened fists at the defeating slope before him. The entire time he faced the pile, keeping his back to Slocum and the trail.

  Slocum used the man’s shrieking fit to close the gap between them by half. He ended up just shy of the discarded coat—the sleeves were inside out and mittens and snowshoes lay some yards off in opposite directions, as if ripped off and thrown away in anger and haste. Just before he guessed he’d be heard, Slocum stopped and raised the rifle higher, curled a finger around the trigger.

  When he spoke, it was with a hard and sharp voice that cut the air. “Now Delbert . . .”

  His sudden words scared his prey into a scream even as he turned to face Slocum.

  Slocum continued: “Should you make it to the top of that scree heap—and I’m not saying you will—were you planning on coming back down for your coat? Seems unlikely, but then again, so is everything you’ve done in the past few weeks.”

  Delbert Calkins faced him, his face a red, sweaty thing, eyes bulging from rage and exhaustion, his shirt sagged half-open. He seemed to take a long time to figure out just what it was he was facing—a man with a gun. A man who knew his name.

  Surely he’s aware he’s still being followed, thought Slocum. He said so to the Cree.

  Then the blond man smiled, a fake grimace that pulled the dropped ends of his mustache wide. One hand rose a few inches as he spoke. “I have been expecting you, though I had hoped you’d be dead or would have grown bored with bothering me.”

  Slocum saw that the untucked shirt half concealed a holstered pistol. He raised his rifle an inch, wagged the end. “Keep your hands still—in fact, raise them high. I know you can do that, Calkins. I saw you holding your head as if it were about to explode just a few seconds ago.”

  That seemed to strike a nerve in the angry man. His pasted-on smile dropped away and his eyes burned like black coals at Slocum. He slowly raised his arms to chest height.

  “Higher, Delbert. Put some effort into it. Or are you too tired from jousting with that hillside?” Slocum stepped once, twice toward the discarded coat. He kicked it with the edge of a snowshoe. “Aren’t you cold, Delbert?”

  “Don’t touch that!” the man shouted, his lips pulled tight against his teeth. The veins in his neck and on his temple stood out, throbbing.

  “Oh?” said Slocum, dragging out the word and doing his best to sound infuriatingly calm. From Calkins’s trembling face and clenching hands, it was working. “Hands higher, Delbert. Otherwise I may be forced to shoot you.”

  Calkins snorted as if he’d heard a lousy joke, shook his head. “She sent you, didn’t she?”

  “Who might that be, Delbert?”

  “That little rich bitch. That foolish brother of hers should have let me be. And her father, what a waste—all that money and he just sits on it. Doesn’t like to gamble, he told me. Have you ever heard such a thing? Doesn’t approve of it, didn’t approve of me. Ha! I showed them.”

  Slocum said nothing, just stared at Calkins.

  The two men quietly regarded each other for a few moments, Delbert’s breath not slowing much, as if he were a steam train working hard on an uphill grade.

  “There’s no way through here, you know,” said Slocum finally. “No way at all.” The effect was startling and immediate.

  “You shut your mouth! There has to be a way out! Has to be! I—”

  “You what, Delbert? You want it to be, so therefore it has to be?” Slocum shook his head. Even as he thought it, he knew that not long before, he had wished for this man to be Delbert Calkins and he had been.

  Slocum guessed that Sigrid and the chief would agree that wishes could be powerful things, but not when you’re faced with a big old rock wall.

  “Look,” said Calkins in a calmer voice. “I don’t know who you are, but you don’t have any right to follow me. Why are you bothering me? Why is this any concern of yours?”

  Slocum mentally ticked through all the reasons that he knew of—murder, multiple thefts, being downright nasty, using people for nothing more than personal gain, and so many more reasons. But he finally said, “Because you peed in the water supply of the village of my friends.”

  For a moment, he guessed he’d surprised Delbert Calkins. The man stood wide eyed. Then he laughed, bent double, and slapped his knees, howling. Too late, Slocum saw the reason for these theatrics—Calkins had snatched up the pistol and worked to shuck it from his holster, but his untucked shirttail got in the way. It slowed him down a few beats behind Slocum.

  But Slocum knew he couldn’t shoot him. Not because the man didn’t deserve it, not because he wouldn’t be justified in killing him right here and now for drawing on him. But because the chief’s words once again came to him. This was a foul place filled with bad medicine. At the same time, Slocum caught quick sight of the massive rafts of snow towering over the gray gloom of the pass that never was a pass.

  He ran forward, his snowshoes more of an impediment than ever, his rifle held out before him, ready to shoot if he had to. “No, Delbert! Don’t shoot! You do and we’ll both die.” He could tell that Calkins was a little surprised that he hadn’t shot him, that he’d let him nearly pull his gun free.

  “That’s the idea, isn’t it, bounty hunter?”

  Slocum shook his head and spoke urgently in a low voice. “Haven’t you ever heard of an avalanche? You pull that trigger and not only will you never make it any closer to the pass you feel for sure exists, but you will never leave this foul place alive. Nor dead either, I’m sure of it.” Slocum was sure he got through to the man, but he was equally sure that Calkins was too bullheaded or too far gone to acknowledge the truth of what he was telling him.

  The chief had said that the man had an inner fire, that spark that Slocum also had that kept him from giving up on a thing—no matter if reason shouted contradictions in his ear and logic poked him in the nose.

  If what he’d said got through to Calkins, Slocum co
uldn’t see it on the man’s face. He had to keep him preoccupied, had to keep him from clawing out that pistol the rest of the way. If he knew Slocum wouldn’t shoot him because of the danger from above, Calkins was loopy enough that he would shoot Slocum, and to devil with the consequences.

  “What makes you think there’s a pass through there anyway, Delbert?”

  “Stop talking to me like you know me. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. Hell, I don’t even like you.” The entire time Calkins spoke he maintained his half-crouched position, poised and ready to pull the pistol free and blast Slocum to hell.

  “There sure as hell has to be a way through to the other side, to the promised land of—”

  “Of what, Delbert? What’s so great about the other side of those mountains anyway?” Despite the wire-tight tension, he was curious to know why Calkins had come up this far in the first place, and why he thought getting over the mountains would solve all his problems.

  “You have to be kidding! We’re a stone’s throw from California—just over that ridge is green, green grass, sunshine, birds, and far down below, where the land levels off, there’s the coast, San Francisco maybe. I’ll take my money and make more money, then I’ll get on a train and head to the Mighty Mississippi and buy me a riverboat and gamble all the time. All the time!”

  Calkins shouted out loud now, his voice echoing all around them, spanging off the sheer gray rock and shattering in every direction. “Money and power and fame and women and money and card games and gold and money, money, money! And I’ll be as far from these damned mountains as I can get, back in a city where civilized people live, drinking good wine and smoking the best cigars and eating fancy meals served under silver domes . . .”