Slocum and the Apache Campaign Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  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

  APACHE AMBUSH

  He didn’t dare make a move until he learned where they were. A fly or two buzzed by him and some quail whistled nearby. No Apaches. Some doves cooed and then flapped their wings as they left a nearby juniper.

  Was that a sign? Through the sights on his rifle, he studied the thick evergreen boughs for any sign. He dried his left hand on his pants. The bitter smell of spent gunpowder in his nostrils, he listened hard.

  Then a buck burst out of the boughs that Slocum was staring hard at, brandishing a cap-and-ball pistol aimed at him. He looked down the sights and fired. Behind him a war cry cut the air as another Apache bore down on him with a tomahawk. Slocum was bringing the rifle around. Another shot rang out, and the racing Indian jerked his head up and broke his stride as a second bullet struck him in the back.

  On his feet, Slocum was ready to bust him with his own rifle, when the buck wilted into a pile before him. Riding down the bench through the junipers with a smoking pistol in his fist was his scout Chewy.

  Slocum dropped his chin and shook his head—too damn close.

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  SLOCUM AND THE APACHE CAMPAIGN

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / May 2007

  Copyright © 2007 by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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  PROLOGUE

  Heat waves distorted the faraway mountains. Mary Jennifer Harbor blinked her dry blue eyes at the hazy peaks from under the brim of Jed Slade’s sweat-stinking felt hat. No matter about the distant ranges—how far away was water? Her dry mouth and throat reminded her the only liquid she had managed to locate in the past twenty-four hours was from a barrel cactus she’d found under the lacy shade of a mesquite tree. With a sharp rock she’d finally busted into the spiny bundle and took several pieces of the watermelon-like flesh to chew on as quick as she could. It had not been sweet or cool or good tasting, but it had been wet. There weren’t even any of them in the country she stumbled through that morning.

  Nineteen, unmarried, she’d came to Arizona to teach school. What would her finishing school friends in St. Louis think of her now? Poor Mary—lost in an endless desert—her very best dress ripped and torn, the hem in dusty rags and the bustle wearing sores on her hip. Indecent or not, in the darkness of the night before, she’d undressed, shed her confining corset and cast it aside—too hot and too binding for her to move in. The bustle was next. She’d have done that already, but she knew she’d have to stop and rip the dress’s length shorter if she abandoned the bustle, or the trailing parts would hang on every stickery bush in this damned prickly country.

  Her language, she noticed, had turned to be like the vocabulary of the driver Jed Slade who’d driven her in the buckboard from Lordsburg. The regular stage had been wrecked, the driver killed, so Slade agreed to haul her and the mail in a buckboard to Bowie, Arizona. He had mentioned, between spitting tobacco to the side and wiping his whisker-bristled mouth on the back of his unwashed hands, that the barrel cactus was edible and a water source. Pointed them out to her in passing. He’d said a lot more about the desert and survival. She wished she’d listened closer, but his revolting unwashed body odor kept filling her nose, and sitting with her hip and shoulder touching him on the spring seat made her skin crawl.

  When he claimed the streak of smoke in th
e sky was from Indians attacking the next stage stop—her heart quit.

  “We’ve got to get off this gawdamn road. Them red fuckers will be swarming on us like ants before you know it.” He turned the team south and headed off through the flat desert at breakneck speed, dodging bushes as he was about to upset them. Her right hand grasped the iron side rail and the other the board seat under her for dear life. She kept breathing in deep. For her to faint would surely mean her death falling off the jolting hell-bent wagon.

  “Damn you sonsabitches!” Slade swore at the racing horses as he stood up to turn them in time before they struck a ditch.

  “Mr. Slade, is this necessary?” she finally managed to get out.

  “Hell, you bet your pretty ass it is!” He shook his head in disgusted disbelief, as if he could not imagine she would even ask such a thing. “Why, them red devils would bust your cherry faster then you can say Simon Brown.”

  “What do you mean?” She fought down her dress after they bounced over another bump.

  “Why, they’d rape you, girl. Them red niggers would stick their dicks in you like a porcupine shoots quills in a dog’s nose.”

  She felt her face turn crimson red. He was talking about things she kept out of her mind—acts she didn’t even imagine because they were so horrible. So gross, nice girls never even whispered them to true friends. Here she was in the middle of nowhere with the most vulgar man she could ever imagine lived on the face of the earth, on a wild ride to hell. The New Mexico-Arizona Stage line management would certainly get a very sharp letter from her about his obscene behavior when this was all over.

  He wheeled the lathered, hard-breathing horses into a dry wash and stood up to stop them. “Whoa! Sorry, there ain’t no facilities here. But it’s better to be alive to piss here than dead and doing it in the hereafter.”

  Her face heated again with embarrassment and she quicklike glanced aside.

  “Don’t wander fur. We’re smack-dab in the heart of Apache country.” He got off, unbuttoned his pants, and she looked away in time not to see what he had extracted.

  But facing the north, she could hear the stream of his urination. What an animal. How could she ever get clear of him? How far away was Bowie? At the base of some mountains? He must have really had to go, for she could still hear it running.

  “That’s better,” he said and she dared not to look.

  “Aw, you probably never seen a pecker big as mine before,” he said, getting back on the seat beside her.

  “I am not interested in your anatomy. Let’s get on to Bowie.” She gave him all the room on the seat she could. He was still too close to her.

  “Damn, I never knowed that was what they called it. It’s an an—at—tommy. By Gawd, I heard ’em called dicks, pricks and dongs on a donkey, but not that. Course I ain’t educated like you are.”

  She sat up straight and squared her shoulders. “Can we go now?”

  He spat aside, then nodded at the team. “We ain’t got no fresh horses to change here—got to let these cool a spell.”

  “Walk them then.”

  “Listen, darling.” His fetid breath in her face and his possessive arm hugging her shoulder, he moved against her. “What you need is a little loving.”

  “Get your hands off me this minute.”

  “I like a gal’s got spunk. I’ve had ’em tried to buck me off before, but by grab, I kept my old pecker stuck in their cunt till the end. Bet you’d buck some too.” He pulled her around to face him, his yellow teeth exposed and his beady eyes boring holes in her like a wild animal. In the struggle to defend herself, she felt his hand try to squeeze her breast through the corset. She caught her breath in cold fear at the thought of him fondling her.

  In a fit of Herculean pent-up rage, she rose and shoved him off the wagon seat. She was still in his iron grasp, and they both went flying onto the ground in a pile. At their screams, the spooked team bolted and tore out. She looked in fear at the un-moving Slade pinned underneath her, then glanced in shock at the departing horses and buckboard. They were running away at breakneck speed. At last she rose to her knees, and realized as the numbness began to evaporate that he no longer held her in his grasp. Knelt beside him on the ground and short of breath, she rubbed her sore arms and noticed that his eyes were wide open, but not blinking.

  “Slade—Slade, the damn horses have ran off.” She slapped him hard. “Wake up, stupid!”

  Nothing.

  She peered at the darkening pool of blood on the ground beneath his head. His stark white forehead was exposed since he’d lost his weather-beaten felt hat in the spill. The thin gray black hair ruffled in the hot desert wind—nearly bald. His whiskered jaw was slack, the half-rotten, yellow lower teeth and brown tobacco wad exposed. Must have hit a sharp rock on the back of his head in the fall. She pushed herself off of him—then his leg gave a final involuntary kick and she screamed. Then fainted.

  1

  With his jackknife, he cut little curls of wood off the small block of juniper in his palm. Squatted under a mesquite tree, he waited in the afternoon heat. No need to be in any hurry. At her present course she’d waltz right past him on the game trail. He’d seen her coming that direction almost thirty minutes earlier through his brass telescope from off the ridge. A nice-looking young white woman in a one-time expensive dress, a little tattered and dusty, and certainly not where she belonged—there would be a story there.

  She was deep in Apache country. Not the ideal place for an attractive tenderfoot woman to wander around in with no canteen or horse. He rubbed his callused index finger over his sun-cracked lip. Had to be an interesting explanation in this, and she’d soon be where he squatted. He could hear her hard breathing and the sounds of her shoe soles on the gravelly ground.

  “Oh,” she groaned and looked around as she came off the rise toward his site.

  He busied himself notching the juniper until she was almost past him. Then he glanced up at her tattered, dusty hem and smiled. “You looking for a streetcar?”

  At the sound of his voice, she shrieked and whirled. “Who—who’re you?”

  He looked up from his carving, knowing that eye contact with a flighty horse or an upset person sometimes panicked them. “You must be lost.”

  “I am. Who’re you?”

  He kept his attention on the block and his knife. “They call me Slocum.”

  “What—what’re you doing out here?”

  He looked up, closing down his left eye. “I live out here. What’s your excuse?”

  “Oh . . .” Her mud-streaked handsome face looked too red from exertion and the sun. The blue eyes tried to read something about him.

  “I never heard your name, ma’am.” He rose and removed his dented four-corner hat with the stiff brim and trailing chin string.

  “Ah—Mary—Mary Harbor. I’m going to Bowie. They’re expecting me.” She swallowed, then wet her cracked lips and swallowed again before she managed to square her shoulders. “I’m going to teach school there.”

  “How did you get out here?” Out of habit, he shifted the .44 in his holster.

  She threw her arm back to the east and looked pained. “He said Indians were attacking the stage station and we had to go across country.”

  “He?”

  “Yes, he—Jed Slade. The man driving the rig.”

  “And?”

  “Well, he drove like crazy out through the desert for miles and then he said the horses needed a rest.” Her eyes squeezed shut and tears spilled down her cheeks. “And then he attacked me.”

  He folded up his jackknife and pocketed it. “Attack you?”

  She nodded swiftly. “And I tried to escape him. We fell out of the wagon struggling and the horses ran away. Jed—Mr. Slade hit his head on a rock. He died.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two days ago. I think.”

  “I have a canteen on my horse. I imagine you need a drink.” He started for the hipshot roan horse behind the short trees.r />
  “Oh, yes. How did you find me?”

  “I guess, Miss Harbor, you found me.” He lifted the canteen and handed it to her.

  She made a face and looked around as if to locate something to tie him there. “You live out here?”

  “Mostly.”

  She screamed in horror, and he whipped around to frown, then laugh at her fear-filled look. “He won’t hurt you. That’s Chako. He’s an Apache scout.”

  She held the canteen he gave her in both hands and trembled.

  “It’ll be all right.” Slocum tried to assure her.

  Her eyes turned blank, knees buckled, and he moved in to sweep her up in his arms.

  “Go get my bedroll.” He tossed his head at the teenage Apache with his red headband, a faded army shirt, breechcloth, and knee-high, pointed toed moccasins.

  Chako smiled. “Guess I look plenty bad.”

  “No, she’s been through hell to get here. You seen a team and buggy?”

  “No, why?” Chako asked, undoing Slocum’s roll from the saddle and bringing it over. He unfurled it.

  “She and Jed Slade were coming this way, I take it, and they thought—he anyway thought Indians were attacking a stage station, so he took off into the desert.”

  “You know Slade?” Chako asked with a frown of disapproval.

  Slocum nodded—gently lying her down. “They must have been desperate for someone to drive to have sent him.”

  “The stage driver was killed . . . ,” she managed.

  Slocum blinked at the groggy-looking girl as she tried to get up. He pushed her back down. “Take it easy.” He took the canteen that Chako had recovered for him and held it to her lips. “Sip it.”

  Chako squatted close by, obviously fascinated by her looks. “She’s pretty.”

  “Yes,” Slocum agreed and wet the kerchief from around his neck then wiped her face. “This should help cool you. When did you have any water last?”