Balum’s Harem
A Balum Series Western #8
A novel by
Orrin Russell
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Orrin Russell
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover design and illustration by
Mike Pritchett
1
He first noticed the oxcart tracks two days out of San Antonio. They cut through a dry wash a mile out, but his eyes caught them easy enough — there wasn’t much else to look at. The last few cabins clinging to the outskirts of the city had petered out the day before. What remained as far as the eye could see was nothing but dust and desert and a vast unfolding sky under which Balum and the roan were the only living souls. Them and the sand lizards. And now the oxcart.
When he reached them he pulled the roan to a stop and tilted the brim of his hat against the sun. Dust devils twisted and spun and died around him. Sweat soaked his back, ran in cool trickles down his neck. Other than the horse’s stamp of a hoof, the desert lent no sound. Balum knew he needed more water soon, knew the horse needed it, understood to a depth few men did the consequences of finding oneself trapped in the desert with an empty canteen and not a lick of shade, yet something in the oxcart tracks arrested his attention enough to rein in the horse in all that miserable heat and lean from the saddle for a closer inspection.
The depth of the wheel ruts suggested a heavy load. Cut into the ground not six hours ago. Moving slow, based on how much sand had caved into the hoofprints. And that right there was the problem — the hoofprints. Not an ox but a horse, and only one at that, hauling a massive load through the Chihuahuan Desert without a prayer of finding water for another forty miles. Under those conditions, the only way that cart would make it was if a good part of that weight was in water. Barrels of it.
Balum raised his eyes. An empty horizon. For now, anyway. By tomorrow he’d catch up, though he had no wish for company. Where he was going he needed to arrive alone and unnoticed, and he needed to get there fast.
But now this. A would-be silver miner not bright enough to hook his cart to an ox-team. By the time Balum caught up with the poor fool he would be half-mad from dehydration and begging for help. Balum was certain of it. There was nothing that lay ahead but the boomtown, another five days down the trail. Big Tom’s town.
He gave the roan a tap with his spurs and rode alongside the oxcart tracks with the urge biting at him to stick a wad of chaw into his cheek, but his wits got the better of him, for spitting in the desert was a fool thing to do when water was scarce. Instead he let his mind drift with the creak of the saddle and the steady plod of the horse’s hooves until suddenly he reined in and bent forward along the roan’s neck.
The driver had hopped off the cart to water the horse. Footprints lay everywhere. Only this was no silver miner. This was a woman.
He rose back up, looked ahead, looked behind. He took in several lungfuls of dry hot air, and after a while he clucked the horse forward and rode on.
That it was a woman who drove the cart changed nothing. His degree of empathy perhaps, nothing more. Still, he wanted no part of it. He had no wish to slow his pace, for the quicker he arrived to the silver town the better for Joe, who by now was surely mired in a mess deep enough to bog down a buffalo herd. Neither could he skirt around the cart, for the land turned rocky on either side of the desert, and he’d not ruin his horse’s hooves simply to bypass an inconvenience. He would simply have to deal with it. With her. Hope like hell she was carrying more water than what she had used on the horse.
Such was his disposition for another half an hour until he crossed a second set of tracks. A lone rider on a small horse. Worn-down shoes with more than one nail missing. A party unconnected to the oxcart as far as Balum could tell. Whoever it was had stopped to study the wheel ruts much the way Balum had. The rider had paced some, ridden a few yards off, then changed trajectory and fallen in line after the cart. Now what would make a man do that? Balum urged the roan on a bit faster, despite the heat. He knew the answer.
A few miles on, the woman had again dismounted to water her horse. The rider trailing her had pulled up to study the ground. He would have realized it was a woman, not simply a cart overloaded with valuables. What effect this new information had on the rider’s intentions, Balum could only guess. He swung down, untied the rawhide lacing that held the near-empty canteen to the saddle, took a small sip for himself, then wet a rag and sponged water into the roan’s mouth. Again and again until the canteen sloshed uncomfortably low. Rarely did Balum speak out loud to the roan — it seemed a silly thing for a man to do, talk to his horse — but he spoke to it there under the crushing sun, a word of encouragement, a seriousness to his voice that the animal seemed to sense and appreciate, then he slung a foot into the stirrup and no sooner landed in the saddle than he spurred it forward, a hard trot into the shimmer of heat that might well have been the world entire.
2
He figured he would see them from afar, two splotches on the horizon, their shadows made long by the orb of fire setting over the far rim of the earth. Instead the land stretched upward, almost imperceptibly, the only giveaway being the roan’s gait as it leaned slightly forward, head bowed, shoulders and thighs pushing off the sunbaked sand ever higher, until suddenly, like a mirage swept away, the climb ended. The ground fell away. A twenty-foot drop that ended in a hardpacked bowl of clay.
In the bottom, the oxcart. The horse standing wasted in its yoke. Head hanging. Off to the side another horse, a wilted nag, more skeleton than flesh.
Some twenty yards beyond it the woman, her screams hardly audible from the bowl edge, muffled as they were by the old man’s hand. The two wriggled one on top of the other in the sand, the woman flailing and the man struggling over her, his own frame no more impressive than his horse’s. He had lost his hat in the scuffle, and from the base of his otherwise bald head grew long wisps of hair that swayed over the woman’s face like lard-greased candle wicks, grey and thin and grimy. His clothing amounted to no more than homespun rags faded into the color of the land around him. He ripped at them with one hand in an attempt to jerk his trousers down while keeping the other clamped against her mouth. His progress was slow — his victim nearly outweighed him. She’d not yet lost her clothes; a green dress covered in desert dust. Even her sunbonnet remained in place. It stayed put even as she swung a hand into the old man’s jaw. It knocked him back but in an instant he was on her again, the rank hair swinging violently as he attempted to pin her down, remove his clothes, remove hers also.
All this Balum saw within the space of two hoof beats. He urged the roan down the drop-off. It reared back and half-slid on its haunches in a commotion of dust and rock until it regained itself once more on the hardpack and scampered back upright.
The old man in his frenzy took no notice. Not of the roan’s hooves stamping the earth, nor the creak of the saddle when Balum dismounted. Not of Balum’s bootheels over the clay or the slide of the Dragoon from its holster.
Not until Balum grabbed the old man by the strings of his lank hair did any sign of awareness hit him. His neck jerked back. Fear replaced the lust in his eyes. His mouth opened from his stale white beard, whether to scream or protest, Balum never knew, for Balum slammed the butt of the Dragoon into the few yellow teeth protruding from the man’s gumline and hurled him away from the woman. The old man landed with a whump and when he came to his knees his beard was soaked red and there was a
wild look to his face.
‘Don’t kill me,’ he rasped, still on his knees, one hand raised in supplication. ‘You can have first go at her if that’s what you want. I ain’t picky.’
The Dragoon barrel followed the man’s head. ‘You armed?’
‘Armed? No, man. Just with my pecker is all,’ he attempted a bloody grin and adjusted his crotch, his trousers hanging halfway down his hips.
‘Get up,’ said Balum.
The man obeyed.
‘Pull up those drawers.’
‘What you got in mind, mister?’
Balum turned his head a few inches. The woman had regained her feet. The top few buttons of her dress had been torn away which made her attempts at covering her neckline useless. Her breath came sharp and she turned away and marched to where the oxcart sat. After some bit of rummaging she drew out a shawl and covered her exposed cleavage.
Balum turned his head back. ‘Doesn’t matter what I have in mind,’ he said. ‘Matters what she does.’
‘The hell it does. There ain’t nobody to know nothing. I said you could have first go. You can have what’s in the cart too. Ain’t that fair enough?’
‘Old man, you keep up that line of talk and I’ll knock out what teeth you’ve still got left.’
The man squinted an eye but otherwise shut up. He looked at Balum and he looked at the woman who was crossing the clay with the shawl pinned tight in front of her, then set his hands over his hips.
‘Ma’am,’ said Balum when she came abreast of them. ‘It ain’t in me to shoot an unarmed man. Even if he does deserve it. But I’ll say this: if it’s in you, then I reckon that’s your right,’ he extended the revolver. ‘The only justice in this slice of the world is what one dishes to another.’
The woman’s eyes widened. She leaned away from the gun, clutched the shawl tighter, shook her head. ‘You don’t expect me to shoot him right here in cold blood, do you?’
‘Do you expect me to?’ said Balum.
At that she paused, then said, ‘He should be locked away. For the rest of his miserable life.’
The old man scowled. He spat in the dust.
‘I don’t disagree, ma’am,’ Balum holstered the revolver. ‘Right at the moment though, we’re without a jail. And where I’m headed they surely won’t have one.’
‘We can’t just let him go. He’s an animal.’
‘I’m not taking him with me. I doubt you’ll want to either.’
‘Surely not.’
The old man scratched at his beard. He smiled, displaying an array of yellow rotted teeth still wet with blood. ‘I’ll just be getting on my horse,’ he said. ‘We’ll forget this ever happened.’
He turned and took a step and Balum grabbed a fistful of hair and jerked him back.
‘You’ll get on your horse alright,’ said Balum.
He dragged the man to the roan, unmindful of the slapping hands and the string of profanity, and tossed him deftly to the ground beside the horse’s hooves and pinned him there with a boot over his back. With his knife, Balum cut a section of cordage from his bedroll and bent down and tied the man’s hands in back, tight enough so the fibers cut into the flesh at his wrists. Without lifting his boot from the man’s back, Balum turned to his saddlebags. It took the space of a few seconds to locate pen and paper. He’d bought them before leaving San Antonio with the idea of writing Angelique as he made his way back to Cheyenne, and as he pulled them out he felt not a small amount of anger at the thought of wasting the paper on such a man as that beneath his boot heel. He smoothed the parchment over the saddle and dabbed the pen with his tongue.
‘Ma’am,’ he said as he wrote, ‘you have any pins or any such thing in that cart of yours?’
‘I have suturing needles.’
‘Those’ll do.’
He finished the note and pulled the man to his feet and pinned the paper to his shirtfront, then led him by an elbow to where the nag stood and shoved him into the saddle.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ growled the old man.
‘Sending you on.’
‘On where? How am I supposed to ride like this?’
‘I’ll point your horse toward San Antonio,’ said Balum. He walked around the scrawny creature and stopped on the other side and unlooped the canteen from its sheath. The weight of it nearly brought a smile to Balum’s face.
‘Hey! You can’t take a man’s canteen!’
‘It won’t do you any good with your hands tied behind you.’
‘Goddamn you! I’ll die of sunstroke before I get to San Antonio.’
Balum unscrewed the cap and allowed a brief trickle of water to wet his throat.
The old man shook and wiggled in the saddle. He looked down past his beard with his face twisted up and scowled at the upside-down letters pinned to his shirtfront. ‘What’s that supposed to say, anyway?’
Balum glanced at the note he’d written. In block lettering it read CAUGHT VIOLATING A WOMAN. DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL.
‘I guess it doesn’t matter much, does it?’ he said. ‘Like you say, you’ll most likely be dead before you reach San Antonio.’
3
The reflection in the mirror hanging over the wash basin of the Silverlight Hotel, the most respectable hotel Tin City possessed, was that of a man thoroughly and completely unable to think straight. Crazy. A fool, a fruitcake or, as some put it, plum loco.
He dipped his hands into the bucket and splashed his brow with water, then raised his head again to the mirror. Long black hair framed his face. A hard face, copper-skinned, old knife scars. A ragged bullet wound on his throat that folks either stared at or looked away from. Black eyes blinked back from the mirror. Apache eyes. He could spot an antelope at thirty miles if the air was right, but those eyes were useless for what he needed now, which was to see his way free of the silver boomtown with what he’d come for.
And what he’d come for was Valeria.
He understood right then what folks meant when they called a man lovestruck . The stories he’d grown up with about young braves risking their necks for women, hatching harebrained plots and running around like fools suddenly made sense to him. He’d never quite understood them before. How a man could walk so blithely into danger, his mind seemingly no better able to reason than a gin-sot halfway through his bottle.
Now he did.
He had met her on his first visit to Tin City and not a day had passed over the following six months without his thoughts returning to her. Valeria. Eyes as black as his own, a señorita, a dancer at a girlie show, but that didn’t matter — everyone needed to survive in this world. Joe knew that. He had ridden into the boomtown alongside Balum the previous spring, and when they had ridden out that same afternoon they did so leaving the town with the task of burying two dead men they left in their wake.
And so, on his second visit, not but two weeks ago, folks there had remembered him. Yet he had searched her out, discovered that the man who ran the town, Big Tom, considered Valeria his own. Joe didn’t care. He found her, found that the feelings he’d nursed for her all those six months past were not the delusions of a fool, but instead were reciprocated wholeheartedly in her.
He had left town that time in a shattering of glass and a flurry of gunfire, clinging to the top of the stagecoach while Balum lashed the team down the lane in a cloud of dust and fury. He had not had time to turn to see if Valeria was at the broken window, but it was no matter. He had vowed to return for her. It was enough.
And he did. Here he was. He had arrived two days ago, entering by night to avoid curious eyes, stabled his horse in the livery, paid upfront for a room at the finest hotel the town offered. He had the money; the bounty from Buford Bell filled his pockets. He had waited only until the town quieted, then walked softly down the lane to the Acropolis — the saloon that contained what Joe considered the finest girlie show on earth. He did not enter but instead scaled the side wall and climbed around to the window, repaired now, and rapped li
ghtly on the glass.
What a reunion it had been. She had fallen into his arms and right then he wished to steal her away. Big Tom held her trapped in the upstairs room like Rapunzel in her tower. Joe had kissed her, held her while the two of them considered a half-dozen harebrained plans of escape that made sense only in the minds of the two lovers, but there was nowhere to go but the desert, and Big Tom would be right behind them. He left her finally before the break of dawn with only a hazy promise of stealing her away, the promise of escape.
Now, standing in the hotel washroom, he still had no plan. Some bit of sanity that remained within him told him to wait for Balum. Balum would think straight. But when would he arrive? He might be two days down the trail, maybe two weeks. There was no telling how long he might be held up in San Antonio. What if they held a trial for Buford Bell and required Balum to stay and testify? It could be up to a month for court proceedings to end. Too long for Joe to wait. Not with Valeria so close, trapped in that upstairs room and suffering whatever abuses Big Tom accosted her with. All Joe could think of was climbing that wall, rapping on the windowpane and holding her tight against him. But the risk was too great; the consequences of being seen too severe. Already he wondered if news of his arrival had spread. A presence such as his own was hard to conceal. Not solely for the fact that he was half Apache, armed with a Colt .45, hair hanging halfway down his back, but for the fact that he had already been twice in this town, each time leaving an impression upon its residents they’d not easily forget. People in a town like this had loose lips. The liveryman, the hotel clerk — either one might have outed him already.
Wait for Balum , he told himself. But even as he said it he questioned his ability to follow such advice. His good judgement had abandoned him completely.
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