Slocum and the Orphan Express Read online

  He thrust it into the ground at the grave’s head, then gave it a couple of whacks with the shovel, just to make sure it was in good and firm. He wondered how long the words would last, seeing as how he’d written them in a watery whitewash that they’d apparently used on the wagon from time to time.

  He supposed that if it didn’t rain much—out here, it might not rain for months and months—it’d probably stay painted long enough for somebody over in Cross Point to haul a real marker out here for her grave.

  That was, if Cross Point was still a town in thriving operation. He hadn’t been there in a long spell.

  “I got everything packed up, kid,” he said, even though the baby certainly couldn’t understand him. “Got your little case and the rest of that can a’ milk. Damned if I’m takin’ those dirty britches you was wrapped up in, though.”

  He snugged Tubac’s cinch and once again checked the packs he’d tied behind his saddle, and the extra water bag. Mrs. Tyler hadn’t been out of water, after all. She’d had nearly a full bag.

  Shaking his head, he patted Tubac’s chestnut and white neck. “Damn shame,” he muttered to the horse before he picked up the baby. He’d cleaned the child up the best he could, and then diapered him and wrapped him in one of Mrs. Tyler’s spare petticoats. It was nice and clean, and Slocum didn’t think she would have cared.

  The child in his arms, he carefully swung up into the saddle. The baby didn’t cry. That was a good sign, he thought hopefully.

  “See?” Slocum said to the tiny boy with the tiny and very serious face. The kid reminded him a little of his grampa, mainly because he was so wrinkled and pruny. Well, that would pass, he reckoned. He just wasn’t sure when.

  “We’re gonna take us a ride on this nice big horse,” he said, being of the opinion that babies were a little like cows. They didn’t fuss too much if you just kept on talking or singing to them. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to sing.

  He reined Tubac around and headed him east, toward Cross Point.

  2

  When Lydia West awoke that morning, the wind had stopped. Slowly, she crawled from under her blanket and out of the little hollow in which she’d taken shelter, not believing that such a miracle could have happened.

  But it had.

  The desert was still, the sky was clear. There was a light, teasing breeze, but that was all. The only thing that betrayed the former presence of that blinding, endless, screeching wind was a coating of fine, powdery dust on everything—including her.

  She walked toward a low shrub and gave it a half-hearted kick. Dust shivered down from its leaves to the ground.

  “Winston?” she said to no one in particular. There was no one else there. “I can see clear across this goddamn valley.”

  And it was endless, or so it seemed. How many miles until she reached those low mountains in the distance? There was hardly a bush or tree or even cactus of any consequence in sight.

  Lydia frowned, sighing, and then began to pick up the few possessions she had with her. The few possessions she had in the world, she reminded herself.

  She assembled them in her shawl, which she had patched several times over the last few days, and made a secure pouch, which she tied to her waist.

  She shook out her once emerald-green skirts the best she could, although it didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered anymore, did it?

  She didn’t have enough water to make it to Cross Point, unless she lucked across a tank or a spring. She didn’t even have enough to make it much past sundown.

  And even if she managed to get back to civilization, what then? She’d have to tell the sheriff, and pretty soon the whole town would know that Winston had been a fool and that she was, too.

  And a sullied one at that. Not that she wasn’t sullied to start with.

  “Damn you, Winston,” she muttered.

  Then, tying her scarf over her head and pulling it forward to shade her face from the merciless sun, she set off toward the east.

  For some reason, Lydia had been thinking that if only the wind would let up, if only she could see more than a few feet, she’d make better time. She didn’t, though. The wind and the dark clouds had at least kept the sun from her, and today was clear and hot. Beastly hot.

  She had to stop by ten in the morning and huddle in the meager shade of a small pile of rocks, making herself sip carefully at her dwindling supply of water.

  Before, it had seemed almost magically easy. Winston had married her, right out of the clear blue sky, and taken her away from Madame Trudy’s up in Flagstaff. She’d never really loved Winston, not in the all-out, romantic way. However, she’d surely been grateful to him for taking her away from Trudy’s viselike financial grip, and vowed to make him the best wife that she could.

  Hell, she just couldn’t get ahead at Trudy’s, what with the charges for laundry, charges for the room, charges for meals, charges for this and that.

  She wasn’t a shirker. Far from it. But at the end of each week all she’d have left for her toil beneath ranchers and cowboys and miners and passers-through was about a quarter.

  If she was lucky.

  So when Winston West came along—and then came back again and again and again, the last time with a ring in his pocket—she wasn’t about to tell him no.

  They had moved south, where nobody knew her. Well, at the time, she’d thought that Winston had done it for her. Winston put his savings into a little ranch and some livestock, and they’d been fairly happy. That was, until she found out.

  Found out about Winston, that was. It turned out that he wasn’t a Colorado rancher’s pleasant-faced second son after all. Neither was he a Baptist, nor did he have an income from back home, nor was he single. And his name wasn’t even Winston West.

  Now, Linda could have forgiven any of those things. She could, in fact, have forgiven them all. She wasn’t so pure herself, was she? But at least she’d come into the marriage with all her truths hanging out in plain sight, so to speak.

  Winston, the sonofabitch, had been a big pack of lies right from the beginning. And a married pack of lies, to boot!

  She’d found out everything all at once, last week, when Billy Cree and his gang rode into her ranch yard and shot Winston dead, right there by the stock tank. He didn’t even have time to put his bucket down, let alone run for his rifle.

  Billy Cree and his boys, Randy and Wes, had finished off the day—and the following night and morning—by raping her. It was highly unpleasant, to say the least, but at least they didn’t kill her right off. And when at last they were done with her and gathered in the parlor, arguing over whether to kill her or not, she’d pulled down Winston’s spare Colt pistol and her old .22 derringer, and shot all three of them from the open bedroom door, just like fish in a barrel.

  The last one to go—Wes, she thought it was—had time to draw his pistol and get a shot off, but it wasn’t any good. She imagined it had lodged somewhere in her parlor wall.

  Even after they were dead, they had all looked so surprised.

  The bastards.

  She supposed she’d sat there for hours, just staring at the bodies, fallen atop each other like so much kindling, before she got the strength—and the energy—to do something.

  She and Winston had lived far from the nearest town, Override, and Override wasn’t there anymore. It had closed its last door and banged its last shutter about a year earlier when the silver vein south of town petered out. The other ranchers—all three of them—had pulled up stakes and gone too, leaving them the only living souls within a forty-mile radius.

  She should have known right then that Winston wasn’t on the up and up. She remembered thinking, Who the hell would want to ranch so far from anything remotely resembling civilization?

  Lydia knew she had to go somewhere, but Override wasn’t it. The nearest inhabited place was Bethel, but that was across the high mountain range to the west, and she didn’t think she was up to that.

  Cross Point was in the op
posite direction, and she’d have to cross some low hills, but she decided it was her best option.

  Cross Point it would be, then.

  She’d stood up and washed herself double-hard and put on some clothes, and then she went out into the yard, where Winston’s crow- and vulture-picked body had been lying since yesterday afternoon.

  While, one by one, she hauled and tugged and carried rocks to cover the body good enough so that the coyotes couldn’t get to it, she vaguely wondered whether she should put Winston Q. West on the marker, or his other name, as spoken by Billy Cree and his buddies: the Show Low Kid.

  In the end, she left him no marker at all.

  She’d packed up enough water and food to make the journey, thrown in several small personal things she didn’t want the desert to have, and turned out all the livestock—what there was up by the house, anyway—except her riding horse. She shooed away the outlaws’ horses, saw them canter off into the distance. The next morning, she left.

  She had abandoned the outlaws’ bodies in the house and left the door wide open, as an invitation to coyotes and other vermin. She had no intention of returning. And she didn’t much care what happened to Cree and his friends’ earthly remains, although she halfway hoped it was reasonably gruesome.

  Now it was four days later. More like four days of hell.

  She’d run straight into a windstorm that she thought would never cease, lost Winston’s poor old horse to a big, fat diamondback rattler, and lost half her supplies, too. And at the moment, she was sitting hunkered in the pathetic shade of those rocks and beginning to wonder, quite seriously, if she’d get out of this alive at all.

  She supposed most people would have asked themselves that question about four days ago, when the wind was just beginning to howl up a storm and that dad-gum snake bit her horse.

  Not her, though.

  Despite everything that had happened to her in her twenty-six short years, Lydia West was still an optimist at heart. Somehow, she always expected that things would be looking up any minute.

  Well, sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t.

  And right now was beginning to look like one of those “didn’t” times.

  She sighed, and wearily hoisted herself up to her feet.

  “Damn you, Winston,” she muttered, and started out toward the east again.

  Slocum dropped his reins and let Tubac walk along beneath him. The kid was crying again, which had interrupted an awful nice daydream about Cindy-May Cummings and her sisters, Annie and Pitty-Pat. They had all three set upon him one night, up in Prescott, and they had shown him a time he’d never forget as long as he lived.

  One sucked his cock while another kissed his mouth and rubbed her titties against him, while another one nibbled his ears and talked dirty to him and . . . other things.

  Why, there were practically as many titties to grab at as there were on a nursing barn cat. And a whole lot riper and nicer, too!

  But then, all those nice and nasty thoughts went whoosh when the baby started crying.

  Slocum supposed he couldn’t blame him. Only about a day old, if that, and this kid had seen more crud than most men see in five years.

  Reluctantly leaving behind thoughts about Pitty-Pat and Annie and Cindy-May, Slocum fished the little bottle from his pocket and carefully tried to pour in water from his canteen without dropping the kid or the bottle. Or the canteen.

  He finally succeeded, and slipped the nipple onto the bottle. He wagged it at the baby, who just kept on crying.

  “Damn it, kid, take it,” he muttered, gently forcing the nipple between the baby’s lips.

  After a moment, the baby began to suck.

  He didn’t look real pleased about the offering, though.

  “Sorry,” Slocum said. “Your milk’s in my saddlebags, what there is of it. You’re gonna have to go slow on the white stuff, or you’ll run out. Ain’t no cows or goats out here. No general stores, either.”

  The baby kept sucking lackadaisically at the bottle and ignoring Slocum.

  “Well, as long as you ain’t cryin’. . . .” Slocum mumbled, steadying the baby in the crook of his arm. The kid had a shock of fine, silky, setter-red hair, and brown eyes with sorrel lashes that halfway covered his cheeks when he slept.

  Which hadn’t been a hell of a lot.

  “I’m tired of tellin’ you stories, junior,” Slocum went on. “You mind if I shut up for a while?”

  The baby gave no sign, so he figured the kid didn’t much mind one way or the other.

  Good, because Slocum was working on a sore throat. Hell, he hadn’t talked so much right straight in a row since the time he was down in Mexico with Tad Thurnston about five years back. Thurnston had gotten himself a concussion from Birdy Ramirez cracking him over the head with a tequila bottle, and Slocum had to talk to him all night to keep him awake.

  Course, Thurnston up and died two days later when Birdy Ramirez snuck in the shack and nailed him with a .45, which then demanded that Slocum go out and ride Birdy down and plug him for Thurnston—but that was beside the point.

  The kid finished his bottle and spat out the nipple with a little bubble. Slocum was all set for him to start bawling again, but he didn’t. Instead, he yawned wide and sort of twisted and scrunched his little old man’s face around, closed his eyes, and went right to sleep.

  Careful not to disturb him, Slocum tucked the bottle back into his pocket.

  Good old Tubac had kept up a slow and steady pace in just the right direction all during the feeding, and Slocum supposed there wasn’t much point in it, but he picked up the reins anyway.

  And then, quite suddenly, he was glad that he had.

  “Whoa, son,” he said softly as he reined Tubac to a halt.

  He twisted, reaching back toward his saddlebag. Fishing out his spyglass, he hooked the top lip of it on the lip of his saddle skirts and pulled it open. He raised it to his eye.

  “Jesus.” He breathed as he squinted through the lenses. “A woman? What the hell’s a woman doin’ out here? And on foot!”

  Then again, what was that other woman doing out here having a baby all by her lonesome?

  It was turning from a real strange day into a truly remarkable one.

  Smacking the spyglass on his thigh to close it, he stuck it back down into his saddlebag, and reined Tubac south, toward the solitary moving speck that he knew was a woman in a green dress.

  He couldn’t tell much more than that from this distance, but she was a woman all right, and she was alone.

  Hell, she’d probably be as glad to see him as he’d been to see her.

  After all, old or young, ugly or fair, she was a woman, wasn’t she? She’d have to know something about babies.

  3

  At first, Lydia thought that the shape approaching through a shimmer of desert heat was a lost, lone pronghorn. Nothing to be afraid of.

  But as it neared, she realized that it was a horse, and that it was mounted.

  There was nowhere to take cover, nowhere to run, and he was loping right down on her.

  She crouched down, feverishly hunting through her makeshift bag for Winston’s spare Colt, the one she’d shot Billy Cree and his buddies with. In her other hand, she held the little .22 derringer.

  She would not be raped again, by God. She wouldn’t suffer that. She’d kill the sonofabitch before he had a chance to touch her.

  Her fingers found the Colt’s butt-end just as the rider slowed to a trot. By the time he had slowed to a walk, she freed it and held it out at arm’s length, pointed directly at his heart.

  Or so she hoped.

  “Stop right there!” she shouted to him.

  The rider, who seemed to be cradling a bundle of rags for some odd reason, reined in his horse, quickly looped the reins over his saddle horn, then waved his free hand.

  “Don’t mean you no harm, ma’am!” he shouted. “It’s just that I got this—”

  “You can turn right around and leave the wa
y you came,” she shouted back. The effort made her dry, scratchy throat hurt. “But drop your water,” she added quickly.

  She reasoned that it was only fair that she got something out of this.

  The cowboy let a water bag slide from his saddle to the ground with a damp and sloshy plop. It looked about half-full, which was dandy with her. She’d make it to Cross Point just fine, thank you.

  “Look, lady,” the cowboy began.

  But she cut him off with a wave of Winston’s pistol and a shouted, “Now, go on! Get out of here!”

  “You’re not—” the cowboy began again, and this time she stopped him by raising the derringer, too, and firing a shot into the air.

  The sound startled even her, but the cowhand’s horse did nothing more than lift its muzzle a tad and cock its ears. And before she had time to fully take in how very odd that was, a baby started crying.

  A baby?

  The cowboy looked down at the bundle in his arm and started talking to it softly. She couldn’t make out the words.

  She knew that the bundle of rags was a baby, though. She hadn’t made it up in her head. The sun hadn’t baked her that nutty, not yet.

  “Get down off your horse,” she called, before she thought about it. And as he carefully dismounted, she realized what a stupid thing that had been, asking him to climb down even if he did have a child with him.

  A man could still lay aside a child and rape her, couldn’t he?

  A man could just as easily lay that child aside and kill her.

  Hell, he wouldn’t even have to shift the kid to do it. He could reach for his gun one-handed, couldn’t he? And his right hand was free.

  He began to walk toward her.

  “One hand in the air, if you don’t mind,” she called out in a rasp.

  He complied, although he looked a tad grouchy about it. Actually, as he came closer, she decided that if the circumstances had been different, she would have thought him a very interesting looking man. Not handsome in a classical sense, but ruggedly so, as if he’d been around and seen some things in his time. It was a look she liked on a man.