Slocum and the Comanche Captive 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

  A LOSING BATTLE

  Slocum danced slowly with her in the dirt, circling around the red light. They went around smoothly as if on a polished dance floor.

  “Where’s my partner Heck?” he asked her under his breath. “You seen him?”

  She looked up at him and grinned as if slightly embarrassed. “Oh, he and Rosa are having their own fandango.”

  “So I ain’t lost him.” Slocum laughed softly and took a better hitch on his hand around her waist. They danced away in easy circles.

  “No problem,” Matilda said, and looked up at him. “The señora? Paco said the Comanches kidnapped her.”

  “Mary’s a fine lady. She lost her husband and son too.”

  Matilda nodded as he swung her around to the music. “It is not a good time. Both of my husbands were killed.”

  “Comanche?”

  “Banditos the first, and maybe Indians killed the second one.”

  He looked off into the starlit night. The killing never stopped. The war was over and another begun—maybe more than one. The thought made his guts roil as the soft music filled the night and he spun the firm-bodied Matilda around in a circle.

  Maybe, maybe they would soon be moving cattle.

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  SLOCUM AND THE COMANCHE CAPTIVE

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / September 2007

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  1

  The burro he rode wearied by the hour. Against the glare of the sun and the dazzling heat waves, he kept Judas in a dogtrot by continually beating on its butt with a stick. Streams of sweat ran from under the hatband of his weathered felt hat, down his whisker-grizzled face, and dripped off his chin. The moisture made his silk kerchief and shirt collar damp enough to cool him around his throat and chest, despite the harsh oven heat sweeping his face in blasts of wind.

  The first sign of life he saw was a patch of yellow canvas stretched over some wagon bows. How many cow outfits could be out in this desolate dead mesquite and black brush? No way to know, but he suspected there weren’t many. He drew closer and saw some shaggy brown mustangs, heads down and standing hip-shot, swatting flies with their long tails. Satisfied this was the cow camp he sought, he shut Judas down to a walk.

  Someone came around the wagon armed with a shotgun. Bare-headed, the gun bearer looked Mexican. Slocum waved at him.

  “No Comanche!” he shouted, figuring the man trusted no one—which was the best way to survive out there.

  “What business you got here?” the graybeard demanded in Spanish.

  “Looking for Colonel Banks.” Slocum said, and set Judas down a few yards from the menacing twin barrels aimed at him.

  “He’s asleep.”

  Slocum stepped off his burro and nodded. “Don’t bother him. I’ll wait until he wakes up.” He pulled the crotch of his pants out of his crack and gave his genitals more room. Standing straddle-legged, he looked up as a tall man came around the wagon.

  �
�It’s all right, Lopez. He’s a gringo.”

  Lopez nodded like he knew and dropped the muzzle down.

  “What can I do for you?” the gray-headed man asked with an appraising eye on Slocum.

  “I could use some work. Jimmy Ray Collins said you might need some ropers down here.”

  The man nodded as if taking it all into consideration. In his forties, broad-shouldered, he wore buckskin pants, galluses, and a white shirt. The knee-high boots looked dusty over a good polish job. Straight-backed, he spoke with all the authority of a former colonel in the Confederacy.

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Slocum.”

  “Well, Slocum, I pay a dollar a head for any tied-down steer that ain’t got a broken neck or leg.”

  Slocum looked over the low thorny brush and nodded. “That include found?”

  Banks nodded, and folded his arms. “You don’t get three steers a week, you owe me for the grub. It’s fifty cents a day.”

  “You got some good cow ponies for a man to ride after ’em?”

  Banks shook his head and laughed. “Just mustangs. We’ll have to trap a few for you. See, we kinda exist out here.”

  “I savvy exist.”

  “Well if’n you don’t know, then you’ll learn real quicklike.”

  “Could I ask what you plan to do with all these wild cattle?”

  “We’re branding them, making steers out of them, yoking them to gentle them, and plan to get enough to drive them to Sedalia, Missouri, and sell them next year.”

  Slocum nodded. He’d heard all about what those Bald Knobbers did to Texas cattlemen up there. He’d take his chances catching wild ones and leave the cattle drive to the rest of them.

  “We rope them at night when they come out of the brush on these moonlit nights.”

  Slocum nodded.

  “The water barrel is there.” Banks gave a head toss toward it on the side of the wagon. “Help yourself. Won’t take much to satisfy you. It’s only a tad better than hot piss.”

  “Obliged. Sorry to wake you up.”

  Banks shook his head to dismiss Slocum’s concern. “I can always use another good hand.” With his emphasis on good hand. “Turn your jackass loose. He won’t leave these horses in case you need to ride him out of here later.”

  “Thanks, my horse foundered a week ago and died.”

  “Trouble with a good horse. These damn broom-tails we ride, you couldn’t kill them short of cutting off their heads and burying them away from their bodies.”

  “Tough,” Slocum agreed.

  “So are these cattle. Closer to part deer than anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “You a Texan by birth?” Slocum asked, ready to try his first gourd full of the colonel’s urine.

  Banks acknowledged that, then asked. “You a Georgian?”

  Slocum nodded.

  “I figured so. Were you an officer?”

  “Yes. Captain.” Slocum lifted the yellow gourd dipper and slurped in his first mouthful. Hot, wet, and gyp-tasting. The colonel didn’t miss the taste.

  Banks took out the makings and rolled himself a cigarette, licking it shut with the tip of his tongue. He stuck it in his mouth and held out the makings toward Slocum.

  He returned the gourd to its place and took the pouch and papers. “Much obliged.”

  With an acknowledgment, Banks continued. “Out here we’re all enlisted men. I’ve got the corporal stripes.”

  “I savvy that.” Slocum turned his attention to making himself a smoke. The notion about having one floated his teeth with a flood of saliva. He’d not had any nicotine in over two weeks. He handed the makings back when he had the cigarette in his lips. With a match he struck with his thumb-nail, he fired up. The hot smoke in his lungs at last, he felt the comfort he expected and it set him more at ease.

  “We’ve been lucky—so far.” Banks squatted in the shade of the weathered gray wagon and puffed on his roll-your-own. “Ain’t had any Injun trouble so far. But that won’t hold. Them Comanches’re liable to find us and there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Guess you need to sleep with your gun out here?”

  Banks nodded. “I don’t figure we’ll get this bunch gathered without having some visit by them.”

  “They’ve been abducting several kids around the Llano and Mason.”

  “Dumb damn Krauts anyway. Letting kids herd sheep and goats out there with no one armed to protect them. They’re easier than pigeons to pick off.”

  “They’ve sent some rangers out there.”

  Banks shook his head in disgust. “A dozen rangers to cover thousands of acres and there’s hundred of them bucks. They’ll lose that war worse than we did.”

  Slocum nodded. He tried not to let the bitterness over the defeat of the Confederacy show on the outside. It was over— his family farm abandoned, a dead carpetbagger judge he’d shot pushing up oxeye daisies, and him on the run from the federal authorities. That summed up his life since Appomattox the year before.

  “Can you break your own string?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. We can trap some tomorrow and then it’s up to you. I ain’t got a man to spare. You’ve got ten days to be in the saddle and roping.”

  “Or after that the food bill starts?”

  “Right, then the feed bill starts. In the morning we’ll run in a bunch of them mustangs in our trap. There’s several bands around, and then you can pick out the ones you want.

  Might even get lucky, we’ve found a few broke ones among them.”

  “Thanks.”

  Banks laughed. “You won’t ever say that again.”

  “No, but you’ll find I appreciate having a chance.” Banks looked out at the plains distorted by heat waves as if in deep thought and disgust. “Them broncs don’t bust you up, roping them longhorns’s liable to do it.”

  Slocum’s cigarette finished, he squatted down beside the man in the wagon’s half shade from the blazing sun. “I didn’t come looking for a job picking roses.”

  Banks squinted against the sun as if looking at something distant, then shook his head hard in disgust. “That fucking war anyway. I should be home growing cotton and tobacco—not chasing after these bony cattle that once got away from some Spanish conquistador.”

  “Life deals us all some bad hands.”

  “Why am I telling you this for—hell, you’ve got the same story. I had any whiskey left, we’d drink some.”

  “And I’d toast the better days.”

  “Fuck, yes.”

  At supper time, he meet the crew. Paco, a Mexican whose blind eye looked white as a dead fish’s. Corky, a thin kid with a pockmarked face and blue eyes that averted looking at anyone. Matt was a hard-jawed fella in his thirties. He wore two guns in cross-draw fashion and his gazes at Slocum spelled suspicion. Hadley was a towhead and grinner in his twenties. He spoke first. “Well, there, Mr. Slocum, mighty fine to have you all here at our little camp meeting.” He went on to fill his tin plate while laughing.

  “I seen you some’airs before?” Matt asked, giving Slocum a cold cut from his hard eyes as he swept past him.

  “I’ve been lots of places.”

  “I’ll recall it one day,” Matt said, going on.

  “Buenas tardes, señor,” Paco said and nodded to him.

  “Gracias, amigo,” Slocum said.

  “I’m Corky,” the kid said. “I do all the dirty jobs. Them bastards don’t respect or like me.”

  “That’s a shame,” Slocum said, and fell in to follow him to the black kettle where they’d been dredging out stew for themselves.

  “Yeah, it damn sure is,” Corky said over his shoulder, and began to fill his plate with the dipper.

  “Ha!” Matt laughed in a taunting fashion from where he sat cross-legged on the ground. “Shut your mouth, you little shit, or I’ll notch your other gawdamn ear, kid.”

  A wary silence filled the late afternoon air. When the kid straightened from filling his p
late, Slocum saw the black scab on the kid’s right ear and the deep V cut in it.

  “You might end up ear-notched yourself,” Banks said, coming behind Slocum. “I said any more of that crap, Matt, and you’d answer to me.”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel,” Matt said, and went to shoveling in the chunks of beef and rice with a spoon.

  “You better have heard me,” Banks said, and went to filling his plate.

  Slocum took a couple corn tortillas from the stack and nodded to Lopez, who was standing by observing the others. “Gracias, hombre.”

  A smile parted his gray beard and he showed his white teeth. “Está bueno.”

  “Sí,” Slocum said, and went to sit apart from them. He didn’t know his allies and enemies amongst this motley crew. There were plenty of rabid killers on the frontier—it paid to learn who they were before one moved into a group. He wasn’t there to make friends—he needed the work and the chuck. His belly button had grown to his backbone over the past few months drifting westward. Any work at all was hard to find. Many outfits couldn’t afford to even feed you for your efforts, let alone pay you anything for making a hand. He’d split fence rails for his food in east Texas. Worked out his last horse, rounding up some stock after his own mount was stolen one night while he slept. Things in Texas were tough and he regretted leaving Arkansas—but he hoped the dead boy he’d turned into authorities as himself got his name off the federal wanted list. Colby had died of pneumonia up in the Nation and he’d hauled his body down to Van Buren and identified him to the U.S. marshal as John Slocum. Same age, same hair, near the same size and eyes. He’d even collected the fifty-dollar reward—the paper was discounted to thirty-five by a storekeeper in town.

  “We’ll rope cattle till midnight, then come in tonight,” Banks said with the plate of food in his lap. “Dawn, we’ll round up some mustangs for Slocum here.”