Slocum and the Orphan Express 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

  Teaser chapter

  LORD HAVE MERCY, EXCEPT FOR . . .

  Slocum set down the shovel, took off his hat, and spoke over the woman’s grave.

  “Lord,” he said, looking upward, “this here’s Mrs. Tyler, who was took in childbirth. I believe she was a good woman, ’cause she got the cord cut and the baby covered while she knew she was dyin’ herself.

  “Well, tell her I’m gonna do right by him, as right as she did. She was a good mama for what little time she had, and I hope she’ll be a good angel to you, Lord. Amen.”

  He started to put on his hat, then paused.

  “Lord?” he added. “If you can find that good-for-nothin’ husband that run off and left her in such terrible straits, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could give him a good kick in the ass. Amen for true, this time.”

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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 AND THE ORPHAN EXPRESS

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with

  the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / May 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved.

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  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

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  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16603-1

  A JOVE BOOK®

  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 and the “J” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  1

  It was a particularly nasty patch of the Arizona Territory that Slocum was riding through.

  He hadn’t seen a living soul for four days, and not a drop of fresh water for three. All he had for company—besides his Appaloosa gelding, Tubac—was a wind that for two days had been threatening to turn into a full-fledged, hang-on-to-your-hat-and-britches, can’t-breathe-nor-see-worth-shit dust storm, but had so far been content—in this location, at least—to just annoy the holy hell out of him.

  It clogged his food, got in his eyes, stung his cheeks, made it nigh on impossible to see more than about twenty feet most of the time, and it was really beginning to piss him off.

  Of course, he didn’t have much else to be mad at except the weather. For a change.

  He’d just finished making the rounds of bounty collecting for a little job he’d taken on over New Mexico way. Despite having given some of the cash to a couple of down-on-their luck farmers, and some more of it to a pretty little whore who didn’t want to be a whore anymore, he was a fairly wealthy man.

  He’d spent some time up in Prescott. He’d kicked up a storm on Whiskey Row and had himself a high old champagne-drinking and Cuban cigar-smoking time—not to mention one sloe-eyed, extremely sultry, half-Mexican, half-French little smoker of a tart named Cabochon Lolita Gomez. And he hadn’t run into one blessed soul who wanted to shoot him.

  That was one for the record books, right there.

  Plus, he managed to hang on to over seven thousand in cash, most of which was sewn into the lining of his clothes.

  Slocum might have a deceptively devil-may-care attitude toward the ladies and the booze and those cherished Havana cigars, but there were three specific things he took dead serious: his horse, his guns, and his money.

  He was just thinking that maybe the storm was finally going to rise up and blow full force. Grit was beginning to do more than sting his face—what part of it that wasn’t covered by his raised bandana—and visibility had dropped to about ten feet.

  He squinted into the wind, trying to locate some kind of shelter. There had been some big red rocks in the distance a while back when the wind took a break. But he couldn’t see a damned thing.

  He dropped his reins, and shouted through the escalating blow, “You find it, Tubac. I can’t see worth shit.”

  The loud-colored leopard Appy—whose nose Slocum had loosely rigged over with a bandana that morning—may have looked pretty silly, but at least he could breathe. And it seemed he could almost smell those rocks, too.

  Once Slocum gave him his head, he started off at an angle, head down. Slocum was just content to sit there, and finally, about ten minutes later, he practically walked straight into those red rocks.

  They weren’t much, just some jagged sandstone pillars about twelve or fourteen high. They rose out of the flat surroundings like a old dog’s molars jut from his battered gums.

  Slocum was mighty glad to see them, though.

  He picked up his reins again, and reined Tubac back inside. There was quite a stand of the ancient stones, some jagged, some rounded, and the wind whistled through them like the sounds of murdered Apache ghosts. But it was shelter.

  And Slocum wasn’t the sort to be super
stitious.

  He got down off Tubac, and shouted, “Good boy! Now let’s see if we can’t find us a nice corner to get tucked into for the duration!” He led the horse around the rocks, weaving and backtracking and feeling his way along until he found just the right place.

  With no more wind lashing at his back, he stripped the tack—and the bandana—off Tubac, and led him close to a big, curved rock, where he was out of the blow. Or at least, most of him was.

  Slocum watered him, although not as much as he would have wished. He was down to parceling out water until he found a new source.

  “Gonna have to do for now, boy,” he said over the wind howling through the rocks. He ran his hand down the gelding’s once-snowy neck, and saw it come away gritty and dark.

  Shaking his head in disgust, he added, “I’ll take the brushes to you after I get myself some grub.”

  Strapping on Tubac’s feed bag, the wind whistling and crying through his ears, he thought better of the brushing. “Hell, I’ll wait till tomorrow, old son. No sense in doin’ it all over again.”

  He squinted off into the howling wind, then patted the Appaloosa on his grimy neck. “Maybe this damned storm’ll quiet down some by then.”

  When Slocum awoke the next morning, he thought the wind was still crying loud and strong.

  Half-asleep and disappointed, he pulled off the bandana he’d tied over his lower face and pushed his hat off his upper face, only to discover that all was calm. The day had dawned crystal clear.

  But why did he still hear the wind?

  Tubac heard it, too. The gelding’s head was turned toward an opening in the rocks, and his ears were pricked and alert.

  “Sonofabitch!” Slocum muttered beneath his breath. He quietly stood up, feeling old injuries slither grumpily past the pain of waking and long-broken bones remembering their places. Unconsciously, he felt for his Colt and thumbed the strap off.

  On foot, he started toward the sound.

  He was past Tubac’s rump before he realized what that wailing sound actually was: a baby. A human infant, crying.

  Muttering, “What the. . . .” he walked toward the sound, weaving his way between spires of rock as he tried to calculate its source. It wasn’t easy with the sound bouncing off all that rock, but at last he wove his way through the maze of rock and to the other side of the ragged outcrop.

  There, half-buried in sand, was a Conestoga wagon. It wasn’t a long-bed, but it was still good-sized. There were no horses or oxen in sight, the traces were half buried in drifted sand, and it had a broken axle, which explained its being abandoned. Well, semi-abandoned. The wagon’s canvas top was tattered but still more-or-less clinging to the ribs, and hung down from them limply, in seeming exhaustion. The rig looked to have been sitting there for a good, long time.

  The baby was inside, although he couldn’t see it, only hear it.

  “Ma’am?” he called. If there was a baby, there had to be a mother.

  But why was she out here, miles from nowhere? And furthermore, where was her husband?

  There was no answer, so he shouted, “Ma’am!” again, this time adding, “Do you need help?”

  Nothing but that bawling baby.

  He stepped slowly up to the wagon, hoping that some jittery female wasn’t in there, scared to death and ready to blast his head off with a Greener.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, ma’am,” he said reassuringly as he closed the distance between himself and the nearest wagon wheel. “My name’s Slocum. I’ve got some water here for you. Not much, but enough to share.”

  He put his boot on the step and pushed himself up, ready to leap back down at the first hint of a rifle’s cock.

  But none came. There was just that baby, crying and crying.

  He climbed up onto the box and peered inside. “Hello?” he said.

  There was a woman there, back in the shadows, but she wasn’t moving.

  Muttering, “Aw, shit,” he scrambled inside the wagon and went to her.

  She was dead and cold, there in the makeshift bed. She’d probably died sometime last night. And clutched in her lifeless and rigid arms was a newborn baby. It couldn’t have been more than a couple days old, at the most. And there was pooled, partially congealed blood on the blankets.

  Birthing blood.

  He worked the baby from her cold arms. It had been wrapped in a white swaddling cloth, which he gently pulled away. The cord had been cut, all right, but his initial thought about the baby’s age had been wrong. From the raw, fresh look of the cord, it must have been born last night.

  Last night. He could have been there, if not for that damned wind cloaking the mother’s presence. He would have heard something. He would have come.

  But he hadn’t heard. And he hadn’t come.

  And now the baby’s mother, whoever she had been, was dead. She had been a pretty little thing, poor darling. Dark hair, poreless sun-browned skin, a high, clean brow. Her staring eyes were deep brown, the color of coffee, and still moist. He closed them with a gentle brush of his hand. She hadn’t been dead more than a few hours.

  He put the squalling baby down on a blanket at its mother’s head, and began to hunt through their stores. Surely they had to have canned milk. It looked to him like they were on a long-haul trip.

  And then he began to think, as he was going through the second makeshift cupboard, that if the mother had been out of water, she’d very possibly have drunk all the milk herself. Or maybe they hadn’t had any need for canned milk in the first place. They might have had a cow that had taken off with their other livestock. And the husband.

  Finally, his hand settled on one dusty can of Michael-son’s Best Canned Evaporated Milk. It was the only one there was.

  He pulled it free of tinned peaches and tinned beef. Then he dug out his pocketknife, punctured two holes in the lid, and turned toward the baby.

  He had risen halfway out of his squat before he realized that the kid couldn’t exactly hold up the can and gulp it down.

  “Aw, hell,” he said. He made no attempt to keep his voice down. The baby couldn’t hear him over its own wails, anyway.

  He looked around the wagon, peering under blankets and tarps, digging through boxes and crates. He found a framed wedding picture of the mother and a thin, tall, blond man. On the back it read, Mr. and Mrs. Justin Tyler in a spidery, handwritten script, but that was all. No date. No first name for her. Only the stamp Fairfield Photography at the bottom. It didn’t even say if Fairfield was the name of a town or the name of the photographer.

  At last, he found sort of a boxed kit that had been made up for the baby, likely weeks or months before. In it, he found a few tiny homemade clothes, knitted booties and such, a slim stack of white diapers, some pins, talcum powder, lanolin and other potions, oils, lotions, and remedies.

  And along with them, a couple of small bottles, complete with rubber nipples.

  “Thank God,” he said as he poured a little of the milk into one of the bottles, then capped it carefully with a nipple. “You were sure prepared for just about everything, weren’t you, Mrs. Tyler?” he asked the still mother.

  “All right, all right,” he soothed as he picked up the baby again. He pushed the nipple against its red lips. “Just a little for now. Wish you could tell me where your daddy went.”

  Luckily for Slocum, the baby took the nipple right away and nursed greedily. “The next one’ll have to be water, kid,” he said. “It’s three days’ ride east to Cross Point, and that’s without holding a baby in my lap. How do you feel about horses?”

  To the sounds of the baby’s suckling, he looked around the wagon, deciding what could be taken along, and what would have to be retrieved later. That baby kit, he’d take that for sure. He just wished there’d been more canned milk.

  He decided to grab a can of tinned peaches, for himself. He didn’t think they’d mind, and he could use something sweet.

  He’d take the picture of the kid’s parents, too. Maybe somebod
y over in Cross Point could identify them, if they’d come through there on their way west.

  And then he realized that he didn’t even know if the kid was a he or a she. He waited until the baby finished nursing, then peeled back the swaddling cloth. He was greeted by a stink that had him blinking and holding his breath, but at least he knew the sex of the child.

  “Well, young Master Tyler,” he said, squinting against the smell as he lay the child down again, “let me go get my gear, and then we’ll see to your mama, here. And to that diaper.”

  Slocum set down the shovel he’d found in the Tylers’ wagon, took off his hat, and wiped his brow on his sleeve before he took up what he hoped was a reverent posture at the side of the grave he’d just covered.

  “Lord,” he said, looking upward, toward the heavens, “this here’s Mrs. Tyler, who was took in childbirth. I believe she was a good woman, ’cause she got the cord cut and the baby covered even while she was bleedin’ to death.”

  He studied the baby. “Wouldn’t be surprised but what she nursed him as best she could, too. Tell her I’m gonna do right by him, as right as she did. She was a good mama for what little time she had, and I hope she’ll be a good angel to you, Lord. Amen.”

  He started to put on his hat, then paused. “Lord?” he added. “If you can find that good-for-nothin’ husband that run off and left her in such terrible straits, I’d appreciate it if you could give him a good kick in the ass. Amen for true, this time.”

  He settled his hat firmly on his head.

  “Well,” he said to the baby, “reckon I’ve done all I can, kid. ’Cept for this.” He bent over and picked up a wide stake he’d made from a board on the wagon’s gate, and upon which he’d painted the legend, Mrs. Justin Tyler .