Slocum and the Tonto Basin War 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

  DEAD SURPRISED

  Just on the other side of the ridgeline crouched the rustler, his rifle out and aimed where Slocum would have appeared if he hadn’t gotten suspicious.

  “Looking for me?” Slocum asked.

  The rustler jerked around, startled. Before he could train his rifle on Slocum, he caught a bullet in the gut. The rustler staggered and fell to his knees, but he was tougher than he looked. He fought to bring the rifle up and shoot Slocum. Slocum waited a moment and finally saw that the man was going to succeed through either sheer determination or outright meanness. It didn’t matter which. Slocum took an easy shot. The rustler sighed and collapsed, dead.

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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 TONTO BASIN WAR

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / January 2007

  Copyright © 2007 by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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  1

  Lies. Nothing but lies everywhere John Slocum looked. The billowing white clouds swung across the burning hot Arizona sun, promising rain and not delivering a drop. More than once as he rode north from Tombstone, he had seen small oases where water had to pool. It hadn’t. The Arizona desert was almost impossible to cross, and it wore heavily on Slocum and his horse, to the point where they traveled only at night. Even then, keeping enough water on his chapped lips proved damned near impossible. He had to roll a small stone around in his mouth to even pretend he had tasted water, and this old Indian trick was beginning to fail. There simply wasn’t spit left in his body.

  “Lies, all lies,” Slocum grumbled as he rode. He shook his head and caused a small cascade of dust to fall all around him off his wide-brimmed hat. He used his bandanna to wipe away the constant river of sweat on his forehead, cleared his vision and stared ahead into the heat-hazy distance. Mountains. Cool, tree-covered mountains. Or more lies? He knew how distances in the desert were deceiving, especially to a man who hankered after water like he did now.

  Slocum was a betting man, but he wouldn’t risk his life on finding water anytime soon. That kept his pace slow and deliberate, hiding from the sun and only exerting himself until his horse began to flag, then resting the remainder of the night.

  For the first few nights, when he had made only a few scant miles of progress, he had worried about men who might be dogging his footsteps. After a week, he knew that the men he had crossed in Tombstone weren’t anywhere near as dumb as he had thought. They had stayed in town and let him ride into the desert to die.

  Slocum settled his bandanna around his neck again and kept riding slowly toward the mountains. The sun had been up for almost an hour and he ought to find a hidey hole and some shade.

  A feathery-leafed mesquite bush offered as much shade as anything he was likely to find out here, and even had sprouted bean pods his horse could eat. He saw nothing else, not even the towering saguaros riddled with owl nests and flights of annoying insects, so he pushed on in spite of the rapidly rising heat.

  Within a half hour he wondered if he had made a fatal mistake. After forty-five minutes he was saved. He was riding, drifting and hardly paying any attention to where his horse headed when the mare tossed her head and trotted due west instead of northerly to the Sierra Anchas mountains.

  “Whoa, where you going?” The sudden change had brought Slocum out of his deadly lethargy. Another few minutes and he would have fallen from horseback. If that had happened, his bones would have been picked clean by the vultures already circling above, and what the carrion eater
s left would have bleached over the next twenty years.

  “Water,” he croaked out. His eyes squinted against the sun to be certain a mirage wasn’t giving him false hope. Then he realized that he might hallucinate, but his horse’s nose would lead her to water every time. No mirage could produce the eagerness he felt now. Giving the mare her head, he reached the small pool of water within minutes and didn’t bother dismounting. He simply fell into the pool. It was shallow, muddy and the sweetest water he had ever tasted.

  Flopping around in the foot-deep water revived him. He drank slowly until he was strong enough to stand and shake off the water like a wet dog might. Then he dragged the mare back to keep her from bloating.

  “More soon, I promise,” he said to the horse. A big brown accusing eye turned toward him. He patted the horse and looked around for forage. A few weeds grew nearby. He let the mare crop at them before permitting another long drink from the pool. Then Slocum filled his canteen and lounged back in the shade of a scrub oak sprouting up out of the impossibly rocky landscape. He had gotten close enough to the mountains to find a spring.

  He had taken the crookedest gamblers in Tombstone for a small fortune, dared the desert and had beaten it, too. He felt mighty pleased with himself as he drifted off to sleep in the hot morning sun.

  Slocum sat up fast, his hand going to the Colt Navy slung in its cross-draw holster when he heard gunfire. The leather had gotten wet during his plunge into the pool and then dried. The six-shooter came out slower than usual. Slocum relaxed, knowing he had to clean the precision weapon before firing it. The Colt didn’t cotton much to getting dunked in water, but that didn’t take away from the renewed flurry of gunshots echoing across the desert.

  Someone was in a passel of trouble. Whether it was anything he should get involved with had to be decided. Working quickly, Slocum stripped the six-gun down, wiped off the mechanism with his shirttail and wished he had time to properly oil it before using it. The gunfire hadn’t died down, as he had hoped. If anything, it grew more intense.

  “Come on, one last drink, and we hit the trail,” Slocum said to his mare. He led the horse to the pool and let her drink more. He dropped to his knee and scooped up a drink for himself, then vaulted into the saddle. From this added elevation he could see more clearly the direction of the gunfire.

  Luck, if he could call it that, rode with him again. The shots came from the north, toward the Sierra Anchas, where he had sought refuge from the heat. Since he was going that way no matter what he found, he urged his horse forward at a walk. His instincts cried out for him to rush ahead, but that would be foolish. Blundering into the middle of a range war was the surest way of getting shot by both sides.

  Fifteen minutes later, Slocum followed a deep-cut arroyo and then drew rein. He dismounted, tethered the horse to a greasewood and advanced on foot until he came up behind a pair of Apache braves all decked out for the warpath. Slocum sank down behind the arroyo bank and tried to remember even a snippet of rumor that the Apaches were kicking up a fuss. In this part of Arizona there were any number of tribes. Some had been relocated to reservations. The Warm Springs Apaches from New Mexico spent most of their time leaving the reservation, raiding and hiding out in Mexico, causing nothing but headaches for the cavalry. But these braves weren’t Warm Springs. Slocum had never seen this particular variety of war paint before but thought it might be Tonto Apache.

  Not that it mattered. He was as dead from a Tonto bullet as he would be from a Warm Springs or Mescalero. He was ready to sneak back to his horse and avoid the skirmish when he heard a loud voice call out, “We’ll surrender if you promise not to kill us. Take the beeves but let us keep our scalps!”

  Slocum wondered what sort of fool tried to dicker with the Indians like that. If the Apaches thought they had the rancher and whatever cowboys rode with him in a box, they would never let him go free.

  Cursing under his breath, Slocum circled the two braves and worked his way to the top of a rocky hill, where he got a better idea of how desperate the rancher’s situation was. The rancher had a dozen head of cattle, all lowing in fright and threatening to stampede as the Indians kept up a ragged, deadly fire. Slocum did a quick count. Three wranglers herded a dozen cattle and were surrounded by more than twenty Apache braves. The odds were wildly skewed in favor of the Indians. Chances were mighty good they would have steaks for dinner while the cowboys would be buzzard bait.

  “Don’t, Papa, don’t,” came a voice that froze Slocum in his tracks. He wiggled back and studied the trio in the draw. Two men were big, burly and wore their hats pulled down low to keep the sun out of their eyes. The third was smaller and had pushed back a Stetson to let flowing auburn hair blow away from her face.

  Slocum cursed a blue streak. If it had been three cowboys, he might have left them to their fate. But he couldn’t slip away and let the Apaches get their filthy hands on a woman. The men would die. The woman would suffer for years.

  Slocum couldn’t hear the rest of the discussion between the woman and her father because gunfire drowned out the words. As he watched, he saw an Apache warrior wiggling closer. The Indian drew a bead on one of the three. Slocum rolled to his side, aimed and fired in a smooth motion. His first shot kicked up dust into the brave’s face. The Indian recoiled, startled and not knowing what direction the bullet had come from. Slocum didn’t give him time to find out and warn the others in the war party. His second shot caught the Apache squarely in the side of the head. The man fell facedown, dead before he realized he had been shot.

  Rolling back to his belly and keeping his head down, Slocum worried that the others in the war party would have seen him. He poked his head up and looked around. He need not have worried. There was too much commotion for them to notice a couple shots amid the flurry that came from the two cowboys and the woman. Slocum noted with approval how good a marksman the woman was. She never hurried her shots, always squeezed back and usually hit—or at least came close—to her living targets.

  Still, the tide was against the trio. Slocum tried to see how he could help them more than he already had. There wasn’t any way in hell. Too many Indians, too few guns pointing back at them. Even if Slocum crept about and back-shot as many Apaches as he could, he didn’t have enough ammo to make a difference. Getting himself captured, or more likely killed, helped no one.

  “This isn’t your fight,” Slocum muttered to himself, even as he knew he was lying. He didn’t know these people or how they had allowed themselves to get trapped by the war party, but he wasn’t going to let them be captured and butchered.

  He got a better look at the woman as she frantically pumped at the lever of her rifle. It had come up empty. The cowboy beside her soon ran dry, too, leaving only her father with ammunition.

  “We surrender!” the man called, waving his rifle over his head. “Don’t kill us. We got kin who can ransom us!”

  Slocum nodded approval. This would buy them some time. Swapping hostages for cattle, horses or weapons was a time-honored tradition of most tribes. He didn’t doubt the prospect of getting a few more horses for his remuda appealed to the war chief leading the Tontos.

  All the chief had to do was hold his braves in check. From the fierce expressions on the faces Slocum could see, that might not be easy. Slocum guessed the Indians had recently gone off the reservation, and these three might be their first victims. The sight of so many cattle on the hoof had to appeal to the Indians, as well, after the maggoty food they were likely given on the reservation.

  The war chief, a strongly built man, tall for an Apache, stood and let out a bloodcurdling ululation that carried over the desert and halfway into the hills beyond. Slocum watched the two cowboys and the woman throw down their rifles and put their hands high into the air. Then the braves rushed them, roughing them up. It took all his self-control for Slocum not to empty his pistol at the Apaches groping the woman. He had to admire her courage, though. She stared straight ahead and tried not to let it show that the way
they touched her—and where—bothered her. Slocum considered waving, trying to attract her attention and letting her know he would be rescuing her soon. Good sense prevailed. If she saw him, she might react.

  Or the Apaches might spot him. Slocum slipped back down the stony hillside and found a deep ravine to shield him from sight. He ran silently back to his horse and mounted. It wouldn’t take the Indians long to decide what they were going to do with their captives. The men might be killed outright and the woman forced into slavery. Or all three might be taken to the war camp for ransoming.

  Slocum started to ride closer, then held back. The Apaches would leave a trail any greenhorn could follow, because they thought they were alone—and they had just scored a major victory. They would drive the cattle to their camp, even if they killed the men. That was a trail Slocum knew could not be hidden.

  Fuming at the necessary delay, worrying that inaction now might mean three deaths, Slocum dismounted and found a patch of shade against a particularly tall arroyo bank. He sat and worked on his six-shooter, taking his repair kit from his saddlebags and giving the weapon a thorough cleaning and oiling. He had been lucky that it had fired when he had needed it. The next time he had to depend on skill rather than luck, because he would be trying to snatch three prisoners out from under the noses of two dozen alert Apaches on the warpath.

  He tried to nap but kept jerking upright at every sound, no matter how small. When twilight danced through the arroyos and a brisk wind began blowing, he knew it was time to get on the trail. The Indians could be miles away by now, but Slocum doubted it. From what he had seen of the fight, the Apaches hadn’t ambushed the drovers. Rather, the cattle had been driven past the Indians, who probably had no idea anyone was nearby. If the Apaches had ambushed the trio, they would have died within seconds.