Slocum and the Sawtooth Sirens Read online

  Hunt or Be Hunted . . .

  Madge looked up at the same time Slocum did.

  The men rode toward them and drew rifles from their scabbards. One of them spotted Slocum and halted his horse. He brought the rifle up to his shoulder some fifty yards from the wagon.

  Slocum’s right hand dove for his pistol. In a split second the butt of the .45 Colt was in his hand. Madge heard the whisper of steel sliding out of its leather cocoon and turned to see Slocum raise the pistol, cock it with his thumb on the rise, and level it at the man with the rifle. Then the pistol belched fire and sparks, and the sound of the explosion deafened her ears.

  She turned her head to see the man twitch as the bullet from Slocum’s gun smashed into the center of his chest. He let out a cry and dropped the rifle. He flung both arms upward and blood spurted from the black hole in his breastbone.

  The man was dead.

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

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  SLOCUM AND THE SAWTOOTH SIRENS

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA).

  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.

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  a division of Penguin Group (USA),

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61018-3

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Jove mass-market edition / September 2013

  Cover illustration by Sergio Giovine.

  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.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for

  author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  More All-Action Western Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  1

  John Slocum had the bull elk in his sights, but the animal was still too far away for him to take the shot.

  He lay flat atop a ledge, his Winchester ’73 snugged up against his shoulder. Just above the game trail, the graceful boughs of a blue spruce provided welcome shade as he waited for his prey to come closer.

  The elk paused as it entered the clearing below. Wary, it moved its regal head from one side to another, lifted it, and Slocum saw the nostrils distend as the elk sniffed the thin air for man scent.

  A slight breeze drifted through the timber. The golden leaves of the aspen by the stream below the meadow began to shake and shimmer like the yellow wings of large butterflies.

  The elk’s nostrils widened as they caught the breeze, and the animal seemed to sense the aroma of water. It took a single step toward the creek, then stopped again.

  Slocum drew a breath and inched his finger toward the trigger. Curled into a half-moon, it was a hair away from the metal when he heard a rumbling sound, the clank of wagon wheels on the ridge road beneath him. The elk bolted into the air, turned as it hit the ground on its hind legs, and scampered into the forest, the tawny rump disappearing into the trees.

  Then he heard the whipcrack of rifle shots and saw the man driving the wagon rear up and slump forward. The reins slithered through his hands and fell to the floorboard. The boy next to him snatched them up and pulled hard to stop the pair of horses. The boy ducked down under the seat and cowered there as the team halted. The horses were wild-eyed and nervous. Their ears twitched as if stung by a swarm of wasps, and they snorted steam from their nostrils.

  Slocum walked back to the copse of spruce and juniper trees where he had left his horse, Ferro, tied to an alder bush. He mounted up and slid his rifle back in its scabbard. He rode down the ridge to the road and halted next to the wagon. Looking down at the cowering figure, he saw that the boy was shivering as if showered by a gelid rain.

  Slocum tapped the boy on the back.

  Only it was not a boy.

  “D-Don’t shoot, mister,” the girl said.

  She was dressed in denims and a blue chambray shirt. The man next to her moaned.

  “I won’t shoot you,” Slocum said.

  The girl turned to the wounded man next to her and put her arms around his shoulders.

  “They—they shot my pa,” she said. “Can you help me?”

  “First of all, who shot your daddy?” Slocum asked.

  The girl’s face was ashen. She had brown eyes that were wet
with tears, and he saw the spun gold of her hair under her old Stetson hat. She wore a small-caliber pistol in a holster and a gun belt filled with .38-caliber cartridges. Her father wore a gun belt, too, studded with .44 cartridges. The pistol in his holster looked like a converted Remington Army pistol that had once been a cap and ball model.

  “Somebody who doesn’t want us to reach where we’re going, I reckon. Please help me.”

  Slocum swung down from the saddle and climbed up on the buckboard. The wounded man had a hole in his shoulder. He was still alive, but breathing heavily. Blood oozed from the wound.

  “Is—is Pa . . . will he die?” she asked.

  “Not if I can help it,” Slocum said. “I can pack the wound with moss and mud and bandage him, but he’s got to see a sawbones.”

  He looked in the back of the open wagon. There were crates with the Winchester stamp on them and wooden boxes of .30-caliber Winchester cartridges.

  “Your pa going to start a war?” he asked.

  He lifted the man onto the seat and saw that the bullet had gone through a muscle and missed his vital organs.

  “Those rifles and cartridges are to be delivered to a mining camp near Sawtooth,” she said. “We picked them up in Cheyenne from a gun dealer there.”

  “What are those miners aiming to do with all this ordnance?” Slocum asked.

  “They’re, uh, they’re getting some men together to fight off . . . well, I shouldn’t really say,” she said.

  “Do you have a canteen? Water?” Slocum asked.

  “Yes. In the wagon.”

  “You wash his wound while I get some mud and moss from the creek and some bandages from my saddlebags.”

  Slocum jumped down as the young woman stood up and reached into the back of the wagon for a canteen.

  He looked back up the road that ran atop the narrow ridge, but saw no sign of anyone. He walked to the creek and filled his hat with clumps of mud he dug out from under the bank. He snatched up moss that he scraped from the base of two aspens and added them to the mud. He heard the soft rustle of aspen leaves, and his heart hammered in his ear until he felt the fresh breeze against his face.

  Yet some tic of warning flickered in his brain. He thought about the one shot he had heard, and it was a bad shot from some formidable distance. Where was the shooter? Why had the rifleman not come down to see if his shot had struck true or if his target was still alive? Something was wrong about this whole thing. There was no sign of the shooter, and it was dead quiet except for the gentle rustling of the aspen leaves.

  Slocum walked back to the wagon and climbed up onto the seat. The young woman’s face had regained some color, but her eyes were wet and wide with worry.

  She said not a word as Slocum cleaned the wounds and saw water drip through the exit hole in the wounded man’s shoulder. He packed in mud and moss, pushing it deep through the flesh. Then, he wrapped a thick gauze bandage around the wounds and tied a knot to hold it in place. The wounded man opened his eyes.

  “Only thing I can give you for the pain is some Kentucky bourbon,” Slocum said to him.

  “He—he’s still in shock,” the girl said.

  “Then he’ll have to ride it on out,” Slocum said. “What’s his name anyway? And yours?”

  “I’m Madge. Madge Nolan, and my pa is Jesse. Pa, this is . . .”

  “Slocum,” he said, “John Slocum.”

  Madge sighed. Her father blinked his eyes and struggled to rise.

  Slocum pushed him back down on the floorboards.

  “Best you stay put for a while longer,” Slocum said.

  He checked the brake and saw that Madge had set it so the wagon would not roll. He was about to step down and climb back into the saddle when there was a thrashing in the trees near where he had been hunting.

  The bull elk emerged from the pines in a bound as if it had been shot out of a cannon. The animal leaped over clumps of grass and rocks, on a downhill dash, its hooves thumping on the earth, its muscles rippling as it headed for the creek. It bounded across the creek in a long leap that cleared the water. Its antlers seemed weightless and flowing as it disappeared among the white-barked aspen, its feet snapping twigs and branches that lay on the ground.

  Seconds later, two men on horseback appeared on the slope where the elk had made its run.

  Madge looked up at the same time as Slocum did.

  The men rode toward them and drew rifles from their scabbards.

  One of them spotted Slocum and halted his horse. He brought the rifle up to his shoulder some fifty yards from the wagon.

  Slocum’s right hand dove for his pistol. In a split second the butt of the .45 Colt was in his hand. Madge heard the whisper of steel sliding out of its leather cocoon and turned to see Slocum raise the pistol, cock it with his thumb on the rise, and level it at the man with the rifle.

  Then the pistol belched fire and sparks, and the sound of the explosion deafened her ears. She turned her head to see the man twitch as the bullet from Slocum’s gun smashed into the center of his chest. He let out a cry and dropped the rifle. He flung both arms upward and blood spurted from the black hole in his breastbone.

  The other man, his rifle halfway out of its scabbard, turned and watched his companion tumble out of the saddle and hit the ground with a resounding thud.

  Then the rider pushed his rifle back in its scabbard, dug spurs into his horse’s flanks, bent over the saddle horn, and followed the path of the elk. He flattened himself even more as his horse bounded over the creek.

  But Slocum did not swing his pistol to track the fleeing man. Instead, he holstered it and walked up to the place where the dead man lay. The horse stood hipshot several yards away, his eyes fixed on his master’s body. The whites of the gelding’s eyes showed as they fixed on Slocum.

  Slocum looked down at the man he had shot.

  The man was dead. He lay facedown and there was a large exit hole in his back. Blood soaked the ground beneath him.

  Slocum squatted next to him and patted the pockets of his denim trousers. He felt a wad of something soft and snaked the material out. There were five bills folded in half. They looked to be fairly new ten-dollar greenbacks. The dead man’s shirt pocket yielded a sack of smoking tobacco, a sheaf of cigarette papers, and a box of lucifers.

  The man carried nothing to identify him.

  Slocum unstrapped the man’s gun belt, walked a few feet, and picked up his rifle, a Sharps carbine.

  He walked back down to the wagon, where Madge was tending to her father. She looked up as he climbed into the wagon. He placed the man’s gun belt and rifle back onto the wagon bed.

  “I put some of the mud and moss on both wounds,” she said.

  “Good,” Slocum said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  He pushed more mud and moss into the wound, then wrapped it with a loose bandage and tied a bow to secure it in place.

  “That man you shot,” she said. “Do you know who he is?”

  Slocum shook his head.

  “Cass Hobart,” she said. “He works for Hiram Bledsoe.”

  “Who’s Hiram Bledsoe?”

  “The man who owns Sawtooth, and lets everybody know it.”

  “What about the man who got away?” Slocum said. “He got a name?”

  “Jerry Bassett. He also works for Bledsoe.”

  “Well, Hobart had fifty dollars in his pocket. Probably a down payment for killing your father and, I imagine, stealing those guns you have here. Bledsoe probably offered each man a hundred dollars to commit murder and robbery. They’d get the other fifty when they finished the job.”

  Madge shuddered.

  “We’ve got to get this wagon to the miners. There’s food back there as well, enough to keep them going for a couple weeks, plus they need the rifles and ammunition.”

  “You weren
’t going to drive right into Sawtooth, were you?”

  Madge shook her head. “No. There’s a crude logging road that will take us to where our friends are hiding.”

  “I’ll hitch my horse to the wagon and drive your team. Along the way, I’d like you to tell me what’s going on between your friends and this Hiram Bledsoe.”

  “What about my pa?”

  “That moss ought to keep the wound from getting infected. He’s going to have a powerful hurt in that arm when he wakes up.”

  “Why is he unconscious now?” she asked.

  “Shock. He lost some blood. He’ll come to soon, I reckon.”

  Slocum jumped down from the wagon. He tied Ferro’s reins to a box of rifles inside the wagon, then walked to the front and climbed up into the seat. He picked up the reins and released the brake.

  “Let’s make that delivery,” he said.

  She looked back up the slope where the body of Hobart lay. A cloud of deerflies hovered over the remains.

  “What about Hobart?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we bury him?”

  “He wouldn’t have buried your father,” Slocum said. He looked up at the sky. Buzzards wheeled in wide circles. He clucked his teeth to the horses and snapped the reins across their backs.

  Madge shuddered when she looked up.

  “I guess he’ll have some kind of burial,” she said.

  “Those turkey buzzards look a lot like undertakers with wings, don’t they?” he said without a trace of humor.

  Madge clamped her lips together and braced herself against the side of the wagon as it rumbled over the ridge.

  Slocum didn’t say what he was thinking. But the worms and coyotes would finish off what the buzzards didn’t eat. In a few days, unless his partner came back, Hobart would be just a skeleton in a tattered shirt and trousers.

  The dead man would have a burial, all right, if he stayed there long enough. The blowing sands and dirt would cover what was left of him and he would leave no trace of his bushwhacking presence in the world.

  2

  The settlement of Sawtooth lay sprawled in the shadow of Sawtooth Mountain, a conglomeration of log cabins, stores with crude false fronts, a two-story hotel, a saloon with a gambling parlor and a dance hall, and various other businesses necessary in a town of that size. There was no newspaper in Sawtooth, since Hiram Bledsoe, the founder of the settlement, did not want reporters snooping around in his small empire.