Slocum and the Devil's Rope Page 18

  “Could be he intends to get on the boat farther downstream,” Slocum said.

  “Kinda dumb wearin’ out your horse when you could rest up here and enjoy our fine hospitality.”

  “Downstream?” Slocum asked.

  “Didn’t pay much attention, but if he wanted to buy a ticket on the boat, that’s the only direction he’d go.”

  Slocum left the shot of whiskey on the bar and stepped back into the bright, cool day. Pendergast had intended to go as far as he could downriver, but the flood waters kept him from that. Slocum gathered his reins and stepped up, turned his horse upriver, and started riding. It took less than a half hour for him to confirm what he had thought Pendergast would do. Anyone on the outlaw’s trail would assume he had ridden downstream. If the boat had set out when he had arrived, he would have gone that way since travel was faster on the water. Barring that, he wanted to avoid any possible pursuit since he had most of the loot.

  Slocum picked up the pace. Pendergast couldn’t be too much ahead of him. The barkeep had mentioned only the bank robber, though the rest of Pendergast’s gang might have been with him but out of sight. Still, the more Slocum considered that, the less sense it made. Pendergast had intended to get away from his men, to steal their cut of the money except for his staunchest henchmen, Herman and Abe. He might be running from the others in the gang as much as any posse on his trail.

  His horse began to tire from the pace, so Slocum took a break, letting the horse dine on some new grass poking up from the muddy soil while he looked over the trail. He dropped to hands and knees and looked at the prints in the soft earth critically. He hoped to find a nick in one horseshoe to give a definite identification but nothing unusual showed. On hands and knees he examined another print and another, then stopped to consider what a new set of tracks might mean.

  A rider had come from the direction of Central City. An outlaw? Marshal Swearingen? Slocum didn’t think the marshal was the kind to send his entire posse back and press on after a fugitive all by his lonesome. If anything, Swearingen would offer more reward money and worry about paying it when they actually caught the gang.

  A single rider. From the distance between the front and the rear hoofprints, the horse was galloping. After Pendergast. This made Slocum think another of Pendergast’s henchmen had joined him. He stood and looked into the misty distance. He sucked in his breath. He had picked up the tracks of a scout Marshal Swearingen had sent out. The posse appeared as if by magic and homed in on him like they were bees and he was a pollen-laden flower.

  “What you doin’ out here?” The first rider held his shotgun across his lap as he rode up to Slocum.

  “Where’s the marshal?” Slocum looked at the six others who joined the first rider.

  “He gave up, but we’re after ourselves some bank robbers.”

  “I don’t recognize any of you,” Slocum said.

  “We were just ridin’ through when we heard ’bout the reward. We kin be real good citizens when that banker fellow—”

  “Roebuck,” Slocum supplied.

  “—when that banker ponies up the reward. We got ourselves a description of the robber.” He swung his shotgun around and pointed it at Slocum.

  A cold chill passed through him as he stared down the twin barrels. These men didn’t know that Magnuson and Norton had alibied him. He was likely to end up dead if he didn’t convince them in a hurry he wasn’t Pendergast.

  “I work for Mr. Magnuson,” Slocum said.

  “Don’t much care. Don’t know this Magnuson, but we do know we’re huntin’ for a hat with a hatband made from snakeskin. Show us your hat.”

  Slocum stepped closer, aware of the knife’s edge he walked between living and dying. He tipped his head down to give the bounty hunter a look at his Stetson.

  “Mighty nice hat,” the man said, “but it ain’t the one we’re lookin’ for.”

  “Glad to hear that,” Slocum said. He hooked his fingers through his gun belt, fingers pressing down on the top of the derringer he had taken from Abe. If things went south, he’d get at least one shot at the shotgun-wielding man.

  “You know anything about a man with such a hatband?”

  “The folks back at the river landing might. Downstream a few miles.”

  “Landing? There a boat?”

  Slocum allowed as to how there was. All he wanted was this posse to let him be so he could run down Pendergast and finish his business with the outlaw. A few hours would be all he needed.

  “Much obliged,” the bounty hunter said. “We got ourselves a new trail to follow, men,” he called. “If there’s a boat, he must be headin’ downstream.”

  Slocum watched them ride away. He slid the derringer back under his belt, heaved a deep sigh, then pulled his horse away from where it grazed. The horse tried to balk, but time pressed down on Slocum. He had seen the likes of the men in that posse—bounty hunters—and hated them with a grim, cold revulsion he could never put into words. They hunted men for money and seldom cared if the one they caught had a wanted poster nailed up somewhere. Slocum had been lucky that Roebuck probably had demanded the return of the hat for them to claim their reward.

  The horse settled down, and Slocum pressed on as fast as he could, eyeing the twin tracks in the ground. Did they ride together or was Pendergast in the lead and the other trailed him? He had no way to tell.

  Slocum drew rein and turned his head to the side when he thought he heard a gunshot. It was faint, distant, possibly something other than gunfire. Then he heard three more quick shots. Not knowing what he was getting into, he galloped ahead, found that the bank of the river had vanished and left a floodplain. He cut away from the water and rode toward a distant stand of trees that poked up like a pimple on a young kid’s nose.

  No more shots rang out. Slocum checked his six-shooter as he rode. Six rounds. He drew his rifle and made certain it carried a full magazine. Then he slowed and approached the woods with more caution than was necessary. Only a few yards into the copse he saw bare feet sticking out, toes down.

  He rode over to where Pendergast lay dead as a doornail. He had been stripped down to his long johns. His boots were gone, as was every stitch of clothing, including his hat.

  “The damned hat,” Slocum said. It was the key to releasing the reward money.

  “You wanted to kill him yourself, didn’t you, Slocum?”

  He whirled, rifle coming up. Slocum hesitated when he saw that Tom Garvin had the drop on him. A moment’s shock stayed his finger on the Winchester’s trigger and gave Garvin the chance to swing his black rope like a whip.

  Slocum winced as the rope curled around his wrist. Garvin yanked and sent the rifle pinwheeling through the air. It crashed to the ground and discharged.

  “You was gonna shoot me, weren’t you?” Garvin snapped the rope one-handed, and it responded like a thing alive. He held his six-shooter in his other hand to keep Slocum from going for his own gun.

  “Looks like you beat me to Pendergast.”

  “I took a shine to his clothes. He was a snappy dresser, but things is a bit large.” Slocum would have laughed as Garvin held out his arms to show how he had rolled up the sleeves. His pant legs were turned up like a sodbuster with a new pair of overalls, and he had Pendergast’s hat tipped back on his head.

  Slocum’s hand slipped slowly toward his left hip, but Garvin aimed his pistol straight at him.

  “I think it might be interestin’ to kill you, Slocum. You hate me, and I don’t know why.”

  “You brought Pendergast down with your first shot.” Slocum glanced over at the body. “The next three went into his back.”

  “That ’bout sums it up,” Garvin said, grinning wickedly. “He mighta been alive. Just wanted to make certain.”

  “You enjoyed shooting him in the back.”

&nb
sp; “So?” Garvin circled to get behind Slocum.

  As Magnuson’s new foreman moved, Slocum reached under his belt and pressed the derringer into the palm of his hand.

  “Drop that gun belt of yours, Slocum. Make a move for the six-shooter and you’re as dead as that son-of-a-bitch bank robber.”

  “You took his gear, too. You’re getting to be quite a thief, Garvin.”

  “Ain’t doin’ him no good. And that’s a powerful lot of money from the bank. Considerin’ what to do with it. Why, I might salt it away and make a play for that purty little filly that throwed you.”

  Slocum tensed. Garvin laughed at his reaction.

  “What can Josh Norton offer her I can’t? He might meet a sad end, and if I was there to comfort her, why, she might decide to up and marry me. I could use the bank robbery money to buy into the Bar M. That’d set me up real good.”

  Slocum had nothing to say. He coughed to cover his move, pulling back the hammer on the derringer.

  “Where’d you ride in from, Slocum? You followin’ the riverbank?”

  “Came from a riverboat depot.”

  “Do tell.” Garvin paused a moment, then laughed. “You’re a mighty smart cayuse, Slocum. Pendergast wanted to use it as a way to escape, but the river’s too high.”

  “That’s the way it was,” Slocum said. “But you found Pendergast first. How?”

  “Just part of my good luck.” Garvin moved more to position himself completely behind Slocum. “I have good and then bad, but right now I’m ridin’ high.”

  Slocum twisted around, thrust out his gun hand, and fired. The derringer’s slug tore into Garvin and staggered him. Then he recovered and opened fire. Slocum wasted no time bringing his horse to a gallop to get the hell away. Garvin kept firing until Slocum was far away.

  Working his way through the wooded area, he came out on the river and looked back. The posse of bounty hunters hadn’t taken his bait and were riding hard for the woods. Slocum wanted to settle accounts with Garvin, but he knew that tangling with the bounty hunters wasn’t a good idea. He clutched the derringer with its single round remaining, then pressed his hand to his left hip, where his Colt ought to have ridden. He wasn’t going to leave his six-shooter back there with Tom Garvin.

  Taking a wide circle of the woods, he heard rapid gunfire, then nothing. Trying to count the rounds wasn’t possible because the shots had been spaced so closely together that it sounded like one huge report, almost howitzer-like in intensity.

  He hesitated, then dismounted and sat on a rock, staring into the woods as if he could see through the tree trunks and undergrowth. After a few minutes, he got too antsy, mounted, and rode straight to the spot where he had shot it out with Tom Garvin.

  He drew rein and stared. For a moment he thought Garvin was still alive. The black rope tied around his neck twitched and writhed as if it were alive, but the man couldn’t have been. His hands had been tied behind his back and his feet dangled three feet from the ground.

  His hat with the fancy snakeskin hatband was missing. The bounty hunters had their proof they had found the bank robber. It was Garvin’s bad luck he had stolen the one thing that identified him as Pendergast.

  “Good luck and bad. This is the worst luck you’re ever going to have,” Slocum muttered. He rode around the slowly swinging body, found where his gun belt lay, and retrieved it. Once it was snugged down around his waist, he felt like he could whip his weight in wildcats.

  He considered going after the bounty hunters because they weren’t likely to admit to finding the loot from the bank robbery. They would try to bilk Roebuck out of both the stolen money and the reward on Pendergast’s head. He could do that, maybe save Roebuck a few dollars. He could return to the Bar M and have it out with Christine.

  John Slocum mounted and rode back to the pier. A ride downstream on the riverboat was the best idea he could come up with because it got him the hell away from everything.

  21

  The circling buzzards bothered Willie Wilson. The rain had made travel awful the past few days, but he intended to get downriver, eventually following the swollen stream that fed into the bigger one. He’d heard tell there was a riverboat that would take him a considerable distance faster than he could ride, but he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Shaking some droplets of rainwater from his yellow slicker, he used his bandanna to dry his face. The way the buzzards spiraled downward told him something had died not too far off.

  He had a lot of vices, and curiosity might be his worst since he had finished off the pint of brandy that had served him over the miles, he’d run out of tobacco days earlier, and there wasn’t anything female within miles.

  His horse shied as he started through the woods. He found a game trail and followed that to an area that hardly deserved the name of clearing. The sight that greeted him caused his belly to clench up.

  A man had been hanged. Crows had already pecked out his eyes and other choice tidbits, and now the vultures were coming to pick the carcass clean.

  “Git outta here!” He drew his six-shooter and fired a round to scare off the carrion birds. They looked at him with cold hatred in their beady red eyes and then took to wing, running clumsily a few feet and then launching into the air.

  The body was past identification. The face was pecked and destroyed by insects. The one thing Willie noticed was the black rope that had been used as a noose. It was ebon-black with silver threads chased through it.

  “Now that’s a real purty rope,” he said to himself. Willie grunted as he reached over and lifted the body up. To his surprise, the rope uncurled from around the dead man’s neck and hung loose from the tree limb.

  He dropped the body and grabbed the rope.

  “Ouch!” He pulled back from it. “Damned thing bit me.” He looked at his hand but saw no wound. Bending over, he snared it and pulled it off the tree limb. “How about that?”

  The rope coiled itself easily and felt right in his hand. He spun it a few times, liking the ease with which he kept the loop open. Roping calves would be easy with it. A quick twist of his wrist brought the rope to his knee, where he fastened it to the saddle.

  Willie looked down at the body, considered giving it a decent burial, then rode off. He didn’t have any idea what words to say over a grave, and besides, the birds and bugs had started picking off the putrid flesh. Let them dine.

  He reached down, touched the rope, and felt a glow of pride, of accomplishment, of power. With this he could be the best cowpuncher ever. Willie Wilson rode on, humming to himself.

  Watch for

  SLOCUM AND THE TRICK SHOT ARTIST

  402nd novel in the exciting SLOCUM series from Jove

  Coming in August!