Slocum and the Gila River Hermit Read online

  Now he had to earn his money.

  Slocum mounted and got his horse into a trot along the river as he desperately hunted for either Castle or his daughter in the frothy river. For the briefest of moments, he saw a sunbonnet. Then it was sucked underwater.

  “Hell,” he said, stripping off his cross-draw holster with its six-shooter and tossing his boots to land beside them. He shucked off his vest, making certain his watch was safe enough, then hopped along on the sharp rocks, and finally jumped into the river. Slocum knew he could never fight the current. He angled downriver, aiming to head off Arlene as she tumbled over and over in the churning water.

  Slocum found himself tiring quickly as he expended increasing amounts of energy to swim in the river and not be sucked under. Grimly, he swam on, and then he saw Arlene. She bobbed to the surface, faceup. That was a good sign. Dead men floated facedown in the water.

  “Arlene!” His cry was muted by the sound of the river. He put his head down and fell into a powerful stroke that carried him like a fish through the water. Once, a rising wave swamped him, but he came up sputtering and even more determined to reach the helpless woman. Arlene Castle floated faceup, but she was unmoving and a captive of the river.

  Slocum cut the distance between them and saw Arlene coughing up water. She fought feebly, but she was still alive. Slocum got to her side and grabbed a handful of her dress. The thick material was weighing her down, but he could do nothing about it. Wrapping his arms around her, Slocum kicked powerfully and angled toward the shore opposite the one where he had started. His foot hit a rock. He swore, then realized the meaning.

  “Hang on, Arlene. We’re almost on dry land.”

  “Dry?” She smiled weakly, but his words gave her renewed strength. She was a fighter. Adding what she could to his own efforts, they washed up on a rocky shore and then collapsed, legs still in the river but bodies on solid ground.

  “Come on,” Slocum said, getting to his feet and pulling her farther from the river. “Out of the river.”

  “I’m wet,” she said. Then she laughed. Her laughter turned to hysterics. Slocum took her in his arms and held her until the worst had passed. She looked up, her brown eyes wide with fear. “Pa? Perry?”

  “I saw your brother hanging on to part of the wagon. Never caught sight of your pa.”

  “He was driving. Perry was beside him, and I was in the back of the wagon. Pa didn’t think the current would be so bad.”

  “Perry told him that was the place to cross, didn’t he? You should have waited for me to check,” Slocum said.

  “It looked safe,” she said in a choked voice. “Pa was in such a hurry to get to Silver City that—”

  “That he believed his son. Reckon that’s not such a crime. But Perry ought to have tried crossing first to see how deep it was in the middle of the river.”

  “But it was twice as wide as in the canyon. That means the current would be half as strong.”

  “Doesn’t always work that way. Depends on how deep the river is, and here it’s likely to be deep enough to make it necessary to put floats on the wagon or even build a raft to ferry animals and wagons across.”

  “That would have taken days,” Arlene said. She put her arms around herself and began to shiver. A small wind blowing down the canyon turned her wet flesh to ice.

  “You’re going to have to get out of those clothes.”

  “What?” She looked up at him with disbelief, eyes even wider than before.

  “I’ll see what I can do to get a fire started. Dry your clothes while I hunt for your pa and brother.”

  “Y-you saw Perry?”

  “He was hanging on to a piece of wood broken off the wagon,” Slocum said.

  “Oh.”

  Slocum wasn’t sure what the woman meant by the simple response. As he gathered firewood, he reflected that it could mean most anything. He built a small fire pit and then remembered he had left his tin of lucifers on the other side of the river. Patting himself down didn’t produce anything made of steel.

  “Here, will this help?”

  He looked up. Arlene held out a wagon brace.

  “I found it washed up not too far from here.”

  “Let’s see if it’ll do the trick.” Slocum found a flinty rock, held it near some dried bark and moss he had put under the smaller kindling, then began stroking the steel brace against the rock. It took more than fifteen minutes to get a fire started.

  “You are persistent,” Arlene said as she warmed her hands over the small fire. She still shivered from her wet clothing, and Slocum saw goose bumps on her skin.

  “Not as persistent as I’ll be finding your pa and brother. Get those clothes dry while I look.”

  “John,” she said as he started away. He looked back. “Thank you.”

  He made his way along the river, moving downriver, eyes sharp for any sign of the rest of the Castle family. Twenty minutes of hunting and he found what he had feared most. Slocum waded into the river and grabbed a double handful of cloth as he pulled Caleb Castle free of a partially buried tree. The man’s chest had been crushed, but Slocum thought what had done him in was a bashed-in skull. Caleb Castle might have been thrown from the wagon when it slipped sideways in the water. Hitting his head would have made death painless for him. He would have drowned and never known the cause. The tumble and rush of the river could account for the broken bones in his chest, all done after he was already dead.

  Grunting with effort, Slocum flopped the man onto the riverbank like a beached fish. Slocum sat, rested, and then knew he could not put off the unpleasant chore much longer. He had started to heave the corpse up onto his shoulder like a sack of flour when saw the man’s eyelids flutter.

  “Son of a bitch,” Slocum muttered. “He’s still alive.”

  Caleb Castle moaned and stirred a little, then belched out a stream of water before passing out again. Slocum lifted him, then staggered a few paces before getting his balance. Returning to where Arlene huddled by the fire took less time than his careful search downriver, but it was much less cheerful. Although he had found the man alive, there was small hope Caleb Castle would survive long, as stove up as he was.

  What was best for Arlene Castle was something he had not pondered on much.

  “I found him,” Slocum said, putting the limp man down on a grassy section nearby. “He’s in a bad way.”

  “I thought he would be dead,” Arlene said, staring down at her pa. “He took quite a spill when he was washed away from the wagon.”

  “Washed away? You were swamped by a wave?”

  Arlene nodded sadly. She stared at her father’s still body where Slocum had dropped it near the fire. Except for occasional twitches around his mouth, Castle might have been dead. Slocum wondered if, even this near death, Caleb Castle was bad-mouthing everyone around him.

  “I don’t know what to feel, John. I don’t love him, and he certainly does not love me. But he is my father.”

  “Blood is thicker than water,” Slocum said, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. He had seen feuds between brothers worse than anything between strangers. He had fought through the entire war where father was pitted against son as well as brother against brother. Their savagery was unmatched, even by Apaches on the warpath.

  “I’ll look for your brother. Since your pa went out first, I suspect Perry ought to be upriver from here. Probably got to the shore and might be as badly bunged up.”

  “John?”

  “What?”

  “You’re hurt.”

  Slocum tried to lift his arm and found the pain was almost more than he could tolerate. He had forgotten the Spanish bayonet plant in his back.

  “I’ll tend to it again after I find your brother. You should look after your father.”

  “Sit. Now,” she said. Arlene began tearing broad strips of cloth from her skirt. “If you lose too much blood, I’ll have to come hunting for you.”

  “Is that so? That might not be so bad,” he said,
grinning crookedly. She looked up at him, and the shy smile on her face encouraged him.

  “You might not like being in my sights, John Slocum.” She pulled tight on the bandage, making him gasp. With expert knots, she fastened the swaths of cloth around his chest, then added a loop over his right shoulder to keep the bandage in place as he moved about.

  “That feels a world better,” he said, carefully moving his arm to see how much he could expect from it.

  “And this is a crime,” she said, holding up the bloody bandanna she had taken from him. Arlene looked at it in distaste and then dropped it into the fire, where it sizzled and popped. As the cloth scorched, it filled the air with the coppery stench of blood. A sudden flare illuminated her face, making her appear downright angelic. Then the flames subsided, and Slocum returned to the here and now.

  “Won’t be long before your brother and me’ll be back here to dry our clothes.”

  “Hurry,” she said. Arlene heaved a deep, shuddery sigh and then went to tend her father’s wounds.

  Slocum set out, eyes peeled for any sign of the man who had been washed away by the river. A half hour of hunting brought him to a place on the river where he could see all around. The spot afforded him a good view of the far bank. His eyes worked across the section of water and up the steep canyon walls. He reached for a six-gun that was no longer hanging at his side when he spotted a man standing on the canyon rim. A glint of sunlight off field glasses told Slocum he was being watched closely. He let his hand fall back, wishing the whole time he was on the other side of the river—with his trusty Colt Navy in his hand. Whoever watched made no effort to come down to the canyon floor and help.

  When the man sensed that Slocum had spotted him, he stepped away and disappeared. Slocum shrugged it off. Whatever help he might have gotten from the man was long overdue. He studied the river again, nodding to himself when he saw how it caught at rocks near the center of the current. Satisfying himself there was nothing more to be seen there, he made his way back toward the spot where Caleb Castle had so foolishly attempted to cross the Middle Fork River. What he found made him feel hollow inside. After seeing Perry Castle hanging on to the piece broken from the wagon, Slocum reckoned Arlene’s brother would be able to reach shore.

  He had made it ashore. And he still held on to the six-foot-long piece of wood from the family wagon. What Slocum had not seen before, but knew now to be true, was that the broken board had impaled Perry Castle. Even when Slocum had spotted him in the river, he was likely dead.

  Slocum sat and stared at the body, wondering how Arlene would react to losing all her family in a single afternoon. Her reaction of numbness to her pa’s likely death might have been the result of shock at all that had happened to her. But now? With her brother dead? Slocum wasn’t too eager to find out how she would take it.

  He looked up and saw the sun dipping down behind the tall canyon rim. Night came fast in the bottom of canyons, and it would be entirely dark by the time he got back to Arlene and the campfire.

  It was a distasteful chore, but Slocum pulled the board from Perry’s chest, then hefted yet another body over his shoulder and headed back to the campfire, all too aware that this time his cargo was cold and very, very dead.

  2

  “It’s me, coming back with your brother,” Slocum called when he sighted the low fire burning near the shore of the river. His voice was muffled by the incessant roar of the raging water, but Arlene sat up, and then stood. Silhouetted by the firelight, she made a mighty pretty sight. He saw her entire form, the outline of her hips and legs, along with the way she reached up, arms outstretched for him.

  “John, come on over.” Her voice carried a weariness to it that told him she already suspected that her brother wasn’t alive.

  He dropped Perry Castle just beyond the circle of light from the fire, where she couldn’t get a good look at the corpse, and went closer. The reason he saw Arlene’s legs and the rest so easily was that she had shucked out of her heavy skirt and blouse and left only her thin cotton undergarments on. Slocum thought she looked mighty fine this way but said nothing. This was a day of double grief for the woman and such compliments might not be appreciated.

  “What happened to Perry?” She sank back down by the fire, brought up her legs, and gripped them tightly so she could rest her chin on the tops of her knees.

  “Looks like he died the instant he went over. It was mighty messy. He was run through and through with a board off the wagon.”

  “This isn’t even the hard river to cross, is it?”

  “Reckon the Gila River will be harder,” Slocum allowed.

  “We have to reach Silver City soon,” she said.

  “Even without your pa driving matters so hard? What’s so all-fired important?”

  “That’s been eating away at you, hasn’t it, John? You’ve got a nasty curiosity bump, but I don’t blame you for wondering. It’s like this.” She pulled her legs in a bit tighter and never noticed that her undergarments were bunching up to expose the undersides of her legs. And a bit more. The firelight showed a damp brown patch between her legs she probably did not want to show off to a man like John Slocum.

  Or maybe she did.

  “There’s a land auction at the end of the month—only eight days off. Or there will be if tax money’s not paid on the land. My pa has a right to that land. It was his brother’s.”

  “Your uncle?”

  Arlene nodded. “The land is good land, rich farmland. We can be rich if he claims it. Uncle Chad was a wastrel and a scoundrel, but he had won it from the town’s mayor in a card game. He never made a dime doing a day’s honest labor to earn money to pay taxes, so the land is being seized unless a rightful heir shows up and claims it.”

  “And pays the back taxes,” Slocum said.

  “That’s right. For the price of a hundred dollars, the Castle family can be rich again.”

  “You come from rich folks? Your pa didn’t have that look about him.”

  “My mother’s family owns thousands of acres in Illinois.”

  “Why not forget the Silver City land and go back? You just lost your pa and brother.” Slocum knew Caleb Castle wasn’t dead yet, but he might as well be. Men didn’t get that tore up and live.

  “Go back to Illinois?” Arlene laughed harshly. “That side of the family disowned Ma when she married Pa. Said he would never amount to a hill of beans, and they were mostly right. He spent more time scheming and conniving to get money than it was ever worth. He could have been rich if he’d worked rather than tried to do others out of their due.”

  “How’s you pa doing?”

  “He is asleep. Or in a coma. It’s hard to tell, but he is still breathing. Barely. I got him to drink some water.”

  “If he dies, you won’t be able to claim the land. Women can’t own real estate.”

  “There might be a little bit of finagling to do, but I learned from Pa how to get things like that taken care of, all proper-like. Besides, he’s not dead. I can stand in for him. It doesn’t matter if he’s unconscious, does it? I’ll get that land, then sublease it to the others in the wagon train.”

  “They’re all friends of your pa’s?”

  Arlene nodded.

  Slocum heaved a deep sigh. Some of Caleb Castle’s love of cutting corners had rubbed off on his daughter. If the mayor of Silver City wanted his land back, there would be a considerable amount of pressure put on her to give up the claim. If the law wasn’t up to it, a woman with an unconscious father would fall victim to any of a dozen different nasty fates.

  “Rushing to Silver City isn’t going to help you any if you end up like him.” Slocum jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Perry Castle. He looked around but did not see Caleb.

  “I moved him upslope under some trees, where the ground’s not as rocky. I stayed here so you could find me. Me and the fire.” Arlene sniffled a little but did not cry. “He would hate it knowing I was looking after him. He was alwa
ys so independent.”

  “I can bury your brother in a while.”

  “Let him burn in hell,” she said without so much as a quaver in her voice. “Pa won’t be long following him there. The two of them can make trouble with the devil together.”

  “I saw how they treated you,” Slocum said.

  “I didn’t know if you had or not. I . . . hoped.”

  “Why’s that?” Slocum moved around the fire and sat beside her. The view wasn’t as exciting—or maybe it was. Her thin muslin undergarment clung to her body like a second skin. He saw the swell of her fine breasts and the way her breathing caused them to heave. Arlene turned a little and looked at him. Her brown eyes were wide and guileless, but they were also welling with tears. As much as she tried to hold back her emotions, she wasn’t succeeding entirely.

  “I hate them both for the way they treated me, but they were the only family I had left since Ma died.” She looked up at him, chewing on her lower lip. “It wasn’t anything Pa did. Ma died of diarrhea. No way of stopping it.”

  “Dysentery?”

  “That might be a fancy name for it. She kept getting weaker until she finally didn’t wake up one morning last year. That’s when we moved on to Fort Wingate.”

  Slocum nodded slowly. Caleb must have just heard about his brother’s tax woes and how the farmland was up for grabs, if only a relative claimed it.

  “I can do it, John. If not for my pa, then for myself. That land belongs to the Castle family.” Arlene’s resolve did not convince him. She needed more than determination against a mayor who was probably as crooked as a dog’s hind leg and maybe had the entire town in his hip pocket. Most small towns didn’t cotton much to outsiders, and if Arlene’s uncle was a gambler, then nobody much liked him.

  “We have to get the other wagons across the river.”