Slocum and the Devil's Rope Read online

  Do You Feel Lucky?

  Slocum turned to keep the two rustlers on his left at bay, only to find that his Winchester came up empty. Using his Colt Navy, he gained himself a few seconds and hunted for the shining brass cartridges that had fallen on the dry canyon bottom. He rolled behind a boulder and stuffed the four rounds he had retrieved into the Winchester. A quick look around didn’t reveal any more rounds of ammo.

  “We got ’im, boys. Charge!”

  Slocum heard the command from his right side. A quick glance confirmed what this really meant. He whirled left and got off all four shots from the rifle before coming up empty. As the hammer fell on the empty chamber, a wry smile crossed his face. Four shots and he had brought down two of the outlaws.

  He turned back to the other direction as those rustlers advanced. And from the corner of his eye he saw three others advancing from the depths of the canyon.

  All he had left were a couple rounds in his six-gun. He vowed to make them count.

  DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts

  Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him . . . the Gunsmith.

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  SLOCUM by Jake Logan

  Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.

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  An action-packed series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventures of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.

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  The blazing adventures of mountain man Will Barlow—from the creators of Longarm!

  TEXAS TRACKER by Tom Calhoun

  J.T. Law: the most relentless—and dangerous—manhunter in all Texas. Where sheriffs and posses fail, he’s the best man to bring in the most vicious outlaws—for a price.

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  SLOCUM AND THE DEVIL’S ROPE

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2012 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Cover illustration by Sergio Giovine.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58882-6

  JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Contents

  Cover

  More All-Action Westerns from Berkley

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  1

  The circling buzzards worried Tom Garvin. He rubbed his grimy neck and then took off his bandanna. It was soaked with sweat and did nothing to mop up the rivers flowing from his face. He tied the faded red polka-dot cloth back around his neck and twisted in the saddle to get a better look at the carrion eaters. They wheeled downward, every circuit in the air bringing them closer to the ground.

  “Somethin’ sure as hell’s died,” he said to himself. He patted his scrawny horse’s neck and got an asthmatic snort in return that told him the buzzards would be coming for them soon enough if they stayed out in the hot sun much longer.

  But there wasn’t anything else he could do. He had to find the beeves that had wandered off or Mr. Magnuson would be sore. The owner of the Bar M Ranch didn’t suffer fools or slackers easily, and Tom Garvin wasn’t either. Leastways, he didn’t think of himself that way. The only reason he had so much trouble tracking the strays from the herd was inexperience. He was barely eighteen and had never punched cattle before.

  Raised on a wheat farm in Kansas, he’d had contact with only one cow before—the old milker his pa had. He wasn’t ever allowed to go near the bull kept in its own pen some distance away, so his experience came in getting kicked as he tried to pull some milk out of chary teats. After the cow died and his pa died and the tax collector took the farm, there hadn’t been anything left for him but to drift westward.

  He was damned glad Mr. Magnuson had taken on a greenhorn like him, and he tried his best to keep up with the other hands. The dour one—John Slocum, by name—tried to help with some suggestions now and again, but understanding what he meant was hard. He had no experience at all riding, much less herding cattle. The swayback nag he rode was part of the ranch remuda. Nobody who needed a horse wanted the bag of bones. It was as much an outcast as he was, and that formed some kinship between him and the horse.

  Garvin imagined the horse felt a similar bond, but he’d be lying to himself if he ever thought on it too long. The horse wanted to be fed, wanted to be watered, and didn’t care about much else, especially being ridden across the rugged landscape in the foothills burning with midda
y sun.

  The buzzards let out another screech and dipped lower. Garvin reached back and touched the stock of his rifle, the one loaned him by Slocum. He couldn’t afford a sidearm, and didn’t much mind not having three pounds of iron weighing down his hip. He wouldn’t know how to use it anyway. On the farm, he had grown up with a rifle pulled in to his shoulder and taking potshots at rabbits and varmints. In lean times, them prairie dogs hadn’t tasted all that bad. A bit like kerosene at times, but better than letting his belly think his throat had been slit.

  Slocum had told him to sling the rifle scabbard so the stock poked backward. That kept it from getting tangled in brush. He reached back and slid the rifle out and brought it to his shoulder, sighting along the barrel to take a bead on one of the buzzards. His horse bucked at that instant, causing his finger to slip on the trigger. A round discharged, spooking the horse even more and causing it to bolt.

  Garvin flailed about for a moment, settling the rifle and grabbing the reins and doing what he could to control the headlong rush—straight for the spot where the buzzards showed the most interest.

  By the time he fought the horse to a stop, he saw the reason for the hungry vultures’ interest. An oak tree, flagged by the wind coming over the western foothills, had one sturdy branch. Dangling from it swung a man with his hands fastened behind his back and a noose secured around his neck. Even from fifty yards away, Garvin knew the man was very dead.

  “Go on, shoo!” He waved his arm in the air, but the buzzards paid no heed. The boldest of the flock landed on the limb above the hanged man and took a tentative snap at tender, putrefying flesh.

  Working to keep his horse steady, Garvin got off another shot. He missed the buzzard by a couple inches, but the passage of hot lead so near its ugly head caused the huge bird to take to wing. It didn’t have enough drop to get wind under its wings and ended up hopping along on the ground, flapping its wings and letting Garvin know how ill treated it was having its meal disturbed. A second shot did more than disturb the vulture. It left the feathered carcass flopped out on the ground for others to cannibalize.

  He trotted to where the wind swung the dead man around. Garvin held down his gorge. He had seen dead men before. His pa had died from the flu, and it hadn’t been pretty. But his tongue hadn’t lolled out, black and drawing flies. His eyes hadn’t bugged out of their sockets, and his face had never been livid with blood that no longer flowed through veins.

  When he got his bile under control, Garvin looked closer. The man had been stripped down to his long johns. Even his clothes had been taken along with his boots. Road agents wouldn’t have bothered hanging whoever they robbed. A bullet and that would have done the deed.

  “What’d you do to piss off the folks what did this to you?” Garvin wondered aloud. His horse turned its head and glared at him. Then it walked a few steps closer so it would be in the dubious shade afforded by the hanging tree. Garvin didn’t fight it over this. Being out of the sun suited him, too. He had been too confounded by the dead man to realize what the horse did immediately.

  He dismounted, shoved his rifle back into the saddle sheath, and then tethered the horse to a low branch that was hardly a twig growing from the side of the oak. Horse no longer a worry, he went to the man and looked up. The limb was just barely high enough so the man’s feet didn’t touch the dirt. In his mind’s eye he pictured how the man had been put on horseback, the limb hardly above his head. The fall had been a short one. Garvin didn’t bother to see if the man’s neck had been broke or if he had swung there long enough to choke to death. Either was a lousy way to die.

  “They coulda buried you at least,” Garvin said. He stepped back and looked at the rope circling the dead man’s neck. “Now ain’t that ’bout the most expensive rope you ever did see?”

  The rope was made from some material he didn’t recognize, maybe just hemp turned black from old age, but it carried silver threads throughout that made it distinctive. Garvin had never seen anything like it before, but then he hadn’t seen much of ranch life yet. This might be rope favored by the old-timers. Somebody had favored it enough to use as a noose.

  He drew his knife and closed the distance to the corpse, his nose wrinkling from the first onset of decay. The man hadn’t been swung here for more than a few hours or the buzzards would have spotted him earlier. Hopping up, he slashed with his knife to cut through the rope. His sharp blade bounced off the rope as if he had tried to sever steel. Grumbling, he tried again. And again his knife refused to bite.

  Garvin considered leaving the man where he swung, then knew that wasn’t the Christian thing to do. No matter what crime he had committed, the man deserved to be buried where the vultures wouldn’t rip at his flesh. He went to the tree trunk and shinnied up, going out on the limb until he was just above the body. The rope had been wrapped repeatedly around the gnarled limb, as if the tree were as much hanged as the man. Pressing his knife edge down hard, he sawed back and forth.

  The rope refused to yield.

  Garvin worked harder and finally gave up when sweat caused him to lose his grip on the knife, and it went tumbling to the ground. Rocking back, he studied the situation, then decided the only way to get the man down was to unwrap the rope, get the knot untied, and then tend to the sorry business of a burial.

  It took him the better part of a half hour to uncurl the stiff rope from around the limb and lower the body. He jumped down, crouched beside the dead man, and worked the silver-chased black rope out of the flesh, where it had cut in deep. Garvin shook the rope free and was puzzled when the gore flew off, as if the rope repelled the blood. Tentatively running his hand over the part of the rope that had been around the man’s neck didn’t show even dampness from the blood. In fact, there was no trace of skin or blood on the rope at all.

  He stood and stepped back, the rope dangling in his grip. A slow smile came to his lips. He had thought the rope was stiff. It moved like a snake in his hands. Garvin wasn’t much at twirling, not like the others in the company, but he found it easy enough to spin a decent loop. He turned around, widened the loop, and found himself performing tricks the like of which he had never seen even in the traveling Wild West Show that had come to Liberal when he and his pa happened to be in town.

  Laughing, he stepped through the spinning loop and hopped back, lifted it over his head, and was enjoying himself when he heard a whinny. Garvin let the rope drop to the ground as he stared at a sleek, well-groomed chestnut mare watching from a distance.

  “Now who might you be?” He hefted the rope and began walking slowly toward the skittish horse. It wasn’t saddled but had been ridden recently from the lather on its flanks. “Might it be you were the one responsible for him taking his last drop?” That the mare belonged to the dead man seemed likely. A mustang would never come by itself so close to any man without putting up more of a fuss.

  A twist of his wrist brought a small loop to the end of the black rope. When he began spinning it overhead, the horse stopped and stared, as if mesmerized by the flash of silver threads amid the black. Garvin let fly. The loop closed over the chestnut horse’s neck. It reared, and he found himself fighting to keep from being dragged behind it. But he succeeded in tugging enough on the rope, shortening the length, and finally getting the horse to keep all four hooves on the ground.

  Garvin patted the horse’s neck. Unlike the scrawny reject from a glue factory that he rode, the horse didn’t mind. It nuzzled him and playfully bumped at him with her head.

  “You’re mine, I reckon,” Garvin said. The horse didn’t argue.

  But first he had to finish the chore he had started. The ground was hard and the grave ended up shallower than he would have liked, but Tom Garvin laid the hanged man to rest.

  2

  Being alone on the trail gave John Slocum time to think. He had found a half-dozen scrawny strays and slowly herded them back toward the
Bar M pens, where they would be fattened a mite before returning to the main herd. Pickings were scarce this time of year, and it wasn’t long before the trail drive to the railhead began. Slocum had worked for Magnuson most of the year and enjoyed the notion of a steady paycheck and three squares a day. The Bar M might not be the biggest ranch around or the most prosperous, but it provided better employment than Slocum had had in a couple years.

  “Get along now,” he said, using the tip of his lariat to swat a balky steer on the hindquarter. The bovine’s protesting moan had no effect on him. He had heard such sorrow in a cow’s lowing too many times to pay it any mind. All he wanted was to get back to the ranch.

  He had more than three squares and a paycheck waiting, and that was what set him to thinking on the lonely ride. Christine Magnuson was a mighty fine filly, and she and Slocum had taken to each other like a duck takes to water. She was spirited and a bit flighty at times, but he found that to his liking. She wasn’t what he’d call beautiful, but she was far from ugly. Definitely pretty. Very pretty, even though her nose had been busted when she was growing up a tomboy on the ranch and her pa hadn’t set it quite right. But Slocum thought that gave her character. It wasn’t as if she were a barroom brawler who’d had his nose broken one time too many or had cauliflower ears from bare-knuckle fights.

  In fact, her shell-like ears were downright attractive. As was her midnight dark hair and blazing blue eyes and the tiny smile that curled her bow-shaped lips and the dimples that formed and—

  Slocum shook himself out of the reverie because he topped a rise not a quarter mile from the ranch house. Why dream when he could get the real thing in the flesh?

  He kept the beeves moving. Whether the promise of fodder or the smell of water moved them faster, he couldn’t tell, but he no longer had to herd them. If anything, slowing them down from a miniature stampede taxed his resources. The few minutes between the ridge and the fattening pen gave him time to ponder one final thing.