Slocum Along Rotten Row Read online

  Table of Contents

  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

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Cornered Rats

  Slocum drew his six-shooter and started walking at a steady pace toward Childress and Pine. He didn’t know if Pine was packing, but Childress had his pistol out and was ready to use it. Slocum focused on the rustler to the exclusion of the lawyer. He got within fifty feet of them before some tiny sound betrayed him. Pine glanced in his direction and warned his hired gun with a loud shout.

  Growling like a mountain lion, Childress spun around and began firing. Slocum returned fire and kept advancing. There wasn’t anywhere for him to hide. He had to trust that Childress wasn’t too good a shot in the dark. One bullet sang past his ear. Another kicked up dirt at his feet. Slocum kept walking. When he got to thirty feet away, he opened fire . . .

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  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 ALONG ROTTEN ROW

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / December 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  1

  “Rustlers!”

  The shout shattering the silence of the desert night brought John Slocum upright, hand reaching for his six-gun. He looked around the drovers’ camp and tried to find who had given the alert. He counted four other lumps in their bedrolls, none stirring. For a moment he thought he had awakened from a nightmare. Then the cry came again.

  Slocum knocked out the scorpion that had taken up residence in his right boot and then pulled it on. The cold leather around his foot brought him fully awake. By the time he had his gun belt strapped down, the outrider had finally reached camp.

  “There’s a whole passel of ’em,” Long Drink Lonigan cried. He dismounted before his horse had come to a halt and staggered a few feet, forcing Slocum to catch him. The tall, thin man didn’t weigh much more than a dried-out soda cracker.

  “Quit your yammering and tell me what happened,” Slocum said.

  “You two gonna shout at each other all night?” The Circle Bar K foreman grumbled, throwing back his blanket.

  “I’m tellin’ you, Kennard, there’s rustlers out there!”

  “Slow down, catch your breath, and then tell us what happened.” Slocum’s grip tightened on Lonigan’s shoulder. This pressure more than the advice calmed the man. He swallowed, his big Adam’s apple bobbing in his goose-scrawny neck.

  “It’s like this. I was checkin’ on them strays, the ones what got away a couple days ago, and found a wash ’bout a mile to the south. Then’s when I seen ’em.”

  “The strays?” asked Kennard. The foreman obviously wasn’t awake yet and rubbed sleep from his eyes before yawning.

  “The rustlers! Ain’t you listenin’ to me? Four of them varmints. We didn’t lose them strays. They was cut out of the herd and stolen! Right from under our noses!”

  Slocum and Kennard looked at each other. They had talked privately about this the day before, but the identity of the rustlers had been a little different. Kennard had suspected two others riding with the Circle Bar K cowboys of the dirty deed. Even if Lonigan was right, that didn’t rule out the two surly cowboys glaring at them from the other side of the mostly dead fire from being involved.

  “Jones, you and Franklin go on back to sleep. We need somebody watching the camp,” Kennard said, singlin
g out the men he suspected. They grumbled and went back to their bedrolls. Slocum wondered if it might not be better to have the suspected cattle thieves riding where he and the foreman could keep an eye on them.

  “What about the rest of us?” another cowboy asked.

  “You guard the main herd. Me and Lonigan and Slocum’ll track down the rustlers.”

  “You don’t believe me,” Lonigan said. He scowled hard. “I seen what I seen.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time you had a nip too many, Long Drink,” Kennard said. “It gets mighty lonely ridin’ night herd and the desert’s enough to drive any man to drink.”

  “I haven’t been drinkin’. Ain’t got so much as a drop of whiskey. Dammit.”

  “Then you might be havin’ hallucinations like you did the time they locked you up in Benson. Remember? You went dry for damned near a week and was seein’ things crawlin’ in and out of the cell.”

  “Wouldn’t have happened if you’d bailed me out. And there was things, bigger ’n centipedes, all comin’ fer me. I tell you—”

  Kennard and Lonigan continued their long-standing argument as Slocum went to saddle his gelding. The horse protested being pressed into service again so soon. He had ridden herd until sundown when Lonigan had taken over the chores of keeping the cattle bedded down for the night. A quick glance up at the stars in the clear spring Arizona sky told him it wasn’t even midnight yet. If there were rustlers plying their trade on the Circle Bar K cattle, they weren’t even inclined to wait until closer to sunrise when a cowboy might be nodding off in the saddle. That made the cattle thieves either stupid or mighty bold. This close to the Mexican border, Slocum put his money on bold. Cut out a dozen or two head and they could have them sold in Mexico before sundown the next day.

  “How do you want to handle this, Kennard?” Slocum asked when they were on the trail, heading due south. The bulk of the herd lay to the west, nearer the Whitestone Mountains. Any beeves wandering away in the direction they rode might be missed entirely as they moved the herd back toward the railhead at Benson.

  “Depends,” the foreman said. He nervously rubbed his fingers on his six-shooter slung butt forward on his right hip in the fashion of a cavalry trooper.

  “We don’t want it to end up like before,” Lonigan said as he visibly swallowed. In the bright starlight he looked like a crane astride his horse. His long nose bobbed back and forth and he was hardly thick enough to cast a shadow.

  “What happened before?” Slocum asked.

  “Me and Kennard, we run into a bunch of rustlers when we worked for the Rolling J over by Tucson a couple years back. They shot us up somethin’ fierce and Kennard, there, he got one in his—”

  “Shut up,” the foreman said. The pure venom in those two words caused Slocum to look at him closely. The foreman had turned as stiff as a board in the saddle. His eyes were fixed ahead, and Slocum wondered what it was the man actually saw. It probably wasn’t the rolling desert, the clumps of ocotillo, greasewood, and prickly pear cactus. More likely he saw road agents ready to ambush him at every turn. The way he jumped when a soft breeze caused the leaves of a nearby mesquite to sway told Slocum he couldn’t depend on the foreman if shooting started. He had probably been shot up good and proper and was gun-shy now. Sending Jones and Franklin out and staying in the camp himself would have better suited the Circle Bar K foreman. Slocum at least gave him credit for doing his job as foreman and not depending on others.

  Still, in a shoot-out, the foreman was likely to be a liability rather than a help.

  “They won’t just give us back the cows,” Slocum said.

  “I know that,” Kennard snapped. “I know that.” He settled down in the saddle. His shoulders slumped, and his gaze fixed on his saddle pommel, not the desert ahead.

  “Lonigan and I can handle it,” Slocum said.

  “Not your job. It’s mine.”

  “I can handle it myself,” Slocum said, unwilling to have a reluctant man with a drawn gun anywhere around him. Not only was Kennard likely to hesitate shooting if it came to that, but he might shoot the wrong one.

  “We stand a better chance together. I know you got the look, Slocum, but this is company business.”

  Slocum said nothing. He knew what the foreman meant. When the owner of the Circle Bar K had hired Slocum, he’d commented on how Slocum looked like a gun slick. He had done his share of killing in his day—far more than his fair share—but he was no gunfighter. Anyone he killed needed killing and this had gotten him gut shot during the war when he had complained to William Quantrill about how their guerrilla band had blasted away at anything that moved in Lawrence, Kansas. Quantrill had a score to settle and had ordered his men to kill any male over the age of eight. That hadn’t much mattered to some of the men riding with Quantrill.

  Slocum had refused and Quantrill’s second-in-command, Bloody Bill Anderson, had drawn and fired three times into Slocum’s belly, then left him to bleed to death. Slocum was tougher than that, but it had taken long months for him to recuperate. When he did, he returned to his family farm in Georgia and found a different kettle of fish waiting for him.

  A carpetbagger judge and his hired gunman had tried to steal the farm. Slocum had left them in shallow graves out by the springhouse and had ridden west, never looking back.

  He had done his share of killing, during the war and after, but he was no gunfighter killing for money or the pure entertainment of watching a man die.

  He wasn’t the kind to let rustlers ride off with valuable cattle either.

  “Where’d you see ’em now, Lonigan?”

  “There. See where the arroyo bank sorta collapses? I rode down there and about fifty yards farther to the south I seen ’em.”

  Slocum held up his hand for silence. He dismounted and walked over the ground Lonigan claimed he had ridden before. The dry, sun-baked ground might have seen a horse ride over it, but Slocum couldn’t tell in the dark. He slipped down the embankment into the sandy-bottomed wash. A couple steps in the direction Lonigan had said was all it took for him to retreat and step back into the saddle.

  “Still men ahead. Didn’t see them but I heard them laughing and joshing one another.”

  “Four, you said, Lonigan?” Kennard was visibly nervous now.

  “We can get the rest of our boys,” Slocum suggested. “That would even the score.”

  “Take too long. I’m surprised the bastards stuck around this long.” Kennard licked his lips and looked around, as if he intended to bolt and run at any sound. “They must not care if they get found out.”

  Slocum nodded. It had to be twenty minutes riding to and back from the camp. What the rustlers were doing was something of a mystery since he didn’t smell a fire burning. They might have slaughtered a cow for a late dinner or worked a running iron on the hindquarters to establish a more legitimate claim. If they intended driving the stolen beeves into Mexico, that didn’t make much sense, though. The Mexicans who bought stolen cattle didn’t much care what brand rode on the rump.

  “They’re just cocky,” Slocum decided. He slid the Colt Navy from his cross-draw holster and made sure it carried six rounds. He usually rode with only five, the hammer resting on an empty chamber to keep from discharging as he went about his chores. Now he needed extra firepower. For this he wanted the half-dozen or more pistols he had carried when he rode with Quantrill. A dozen guerrillas could ride into an enemy town sporting the firepower of an entire company of Federals armed only with muskets.

  When he’d finished, he drew his Winchester from its sheath and made sure its magazine was full. This was as ready as he could get.

  “Give the word,” he told Kennard.

  “Well now, this is a mite dangerous. We ought to think on it.”

  Slocum didn’t listen to the rest of the foreman’s musing. He was afraid to confront the rustlers. Slocum could understand that. He wasn’t too eager, either, to face down four men who’d likely open fire at anything that moved across t
he desert. The difference between him and Kennard was a willingness to push down that fear and do what was right.

  He snapped the reins and got his horse down the embankment into the sandy arroyo. He drew his pistol and rode on, not caring if Lonigan and Kennard backed his move. This was the right thing to do, and Slocum wasn’t going to turn his back and ride away from cattle thieves.

  The soft footing prevented his horse from making the kind of approach Slocum would have preferred—at a gallop. Better to not let the rustlers get the idea they were under attack. Surprise was the only thing in his favor, and the soft crunch of his horse’s hooves against sand and gravel sounded like cannon fire to him.

  When he saw four figures ahead, he let out a whoop and pushed his gelding as fast as it could run in the sand.

  The attack accomplished its purpose. The rustlers spooked. They were mounted and herded a dozen head of cattle ahead of them. Two lit out, charging up the crumbling banks on either side of the arroyo where it was shallowest. Slocum heard their hoofbeats receding in the still night. That left him two outlaws and a dozen head of cattle.

  The beeves almost killed him.

  One rustler got to the front of the small herd and fired several times, getting the cattle to stampede. They were contained by the high arroyo walls and had only one direction to go—straight toward Slocum.

  Slocum got off a quick shot that probably didn’t do anything but frighten the cattle even more. The lack of footing that had hindered his horse kept the stampede from being all that dangerous. The cattle ran only a few yards and then found the going too difficult. Still frightened, they were dangerous beasts, but Slocum was in no danger of being trampled.

  He worked his way around the knot of frightened beeves and found himself caught in a cross fire. One owlhoot shot at him from atop the embankment. The other in front of him began firing a rifle. Slocum bent low and got his horse moving forward. This put him out of range of the outlaw who had already gained the rim of the arroyo. It also caused him to ride smack into the muzzle of the rustler still in the dry riverbed.