Slocum and the Snake-Pit Slavers Read online

  The memory of those fine, if a bit odd, months brought a smile to his face. So where was Marybeth now? He tried not to think of dangerous possibilities just yet, but he did need answers from the old man.

  As if reading his mind, the old man said, “What would you like to know, Mr. Slocum?” Miguel turned from sliding the big Dutch oven onto the scarred work surface of the long family-style table. Steam pulsed outward from beneath the rim of the black cast-iron top.

  The question caught John Slocum by surprise. To his recollection, he hadn’t told the man his name, but then again the old man seemed full of surprises. He apparently knew just who he was, remembered him, and seemed to enjoy this little game of amusement.

  Play along, Slocum told himself, and you might eventually get answers. And a promising hot meal, which teased his twitching nostrils and slow, low-growling belly.

  He plopped his hat upside down on an unused length of bench beside him and waited until the old man and girl were done bustling about the kitchen, ferrying a basket of what looked to be fresh-baked biscuits, a tub of butter, and a pot of coffee to the table. The girl laid out tin plates, silver spoons, folded cloth napkins, and china coffee cups.

  “So you know my name. That means you have me, as they say, at a disadvantage.”

  “I am sorry, sir. But you are known to me.” For the first time the Mexican man smiled, a full, warm grin that lit his face. He extended a work-hardened hand toward the bench before Slocum. “Sit, sit, please, and I will explain everything.” Then a sheepish look crossed his face. “If we do not, my hot-tempered granddaughter here just may toss the lot of it to the pig out back.”

  The girl flashed her sizzling eyes at the pair of them. “I would not, Grandfather, and you know it.” She turned her withering gaze fully on Slocum. “I would dump it inside on a different pig.”

  The old man stood, the bench squawking backward along the smooth-worn floor beneath. “That is enough of this foolishness. While Miss Meecher is away, I am in charge here, and I tell you this is the way it will be. Now, no more games and silly wordplay. You will get along and you will enjoy this modest meal. Or at least you will keep quiet and pretend to enjoy yourself.”

  He knew the words were partially meant for him, so Slocum kept the grinning to a minimum, but he couldn’t help stealing a peek at the chastened young woman. She sat at the far end of the table, closest to the stove and dry sink. He swore he saw steam rolling from the top of her pretty head, and he guessed that if she ground her teeth any tighter, they might powder.

  The beans, as the prevailing aromas dictated, were a delectable if simple feast that he ate two helpings of, though only begrudgingly and at the insistence of the old man. It seemed to Slocum that they had less than most folks, and worked hard to maintain whatever reputation they might have left as a trailside eatery and a stop worthy of the name.

  “Miss Meecher?” said Slocum between spoonfuls of beans and bites of biscuit sopping in bean juice.

  “Sí, sí. Shortly after you were here nearly three years ago, my granddaughter came to live here. She had nowhere else to go. I was Miss Meecher’s handyman and I was much needed, but Tita was most helpful, too. At that time, as you might recall, there were several stagecoaches through here a week, plus overlanders who are off the beaten trail and looking for respite before pressing onward west.”

  “Sounds like Marybeth got some much-needed help then.”

  “Yes, yes. She was a dear woman.”

  “Now there you go with that ‘was’ again.” Slocum put down his coffee cup. “Is she . . . she’s not dead, is she?”

  The old man set down his own cup and rested his forehead in his hands. “I truthfully do not know, sir. I just do not know the answer to that.” He looked up again. “She went away to help friends, and she has not come back since. That was three months ago?” He looked toward the girl for confirmation.

  She nodded, looked sadly at her plate, and pushed beans around in their congealing juices, but did not eat.

  “You see, as I mentioned, we were visited by some Indian friends. Crow, from the tribe across the border in Montana. It seems that members of their tribe were disappearing. They knew where, but their warriors were all dead or in white prisons. All that was left were old people like me, and mothers and their children.”

  “Where were they taken?” Slocum sipped his coffee. It was still hot enough to scald his tongue, so he blew across the surface.

  The old man smiled again.

  This is getting to be a habit, thought Slocum.

  “The Triple T Ranch.”

  “And that’s just where I was headed.”

  “I know, because you said you were going that way for work.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I had a good idea,” the old man tapped a gnarled finger to his temple.

  “Oh, Grandpapa. You are silly now.”

  “Call me what you like, Granddaughter, but I know what I know. Am I wrong, Mr. Slocum?”

  “No, no, you’re not. But enough of the suspense. If there’s something I should know about Indians disappearing, and Marybeth Meecher disappearing, and Lord knows what else, please tell me.”

  “In truth, Mr. Slocum, I don’t know all that much about it for certain, but I will tell you what I think I know. I think that the ranch where you hope to find employment is not much of a ranch anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The girl groaned and let her spoon clatter to her plate, her untouched beans glazing over as they cooled. “Don’t tell me you are that stupid, Mr. Slocum?”

  “Tita!”

  “No, Grandpapa. I can tell that this one is bad. He is going to go up there and tell them all he knows and then soon we, too, will be dragged away in the night and put to work in that slave camp.”

  Slocum stood up fast enough that the bench he sat on stuttered on the wood floor, then toppled backward. He didn’t care, except that he saw it pinched his hat. He balled up his napkin and tossed it on the table. “All right, what’s this about a slave camp? One of you had better give me a straight answer or I’m liable to—”

  “What?” she said, standing also. “What is it you will do, Mr. Slocum? Since you are a guest in this house and we have done nothing to harm you, I would like to know what a big, angry man like you will do.”

  He pointed a finger at her. “I’ll think of something. But if I can’t get a straight answer out of you, and there are people whose lives are in danger, and one of them is Marybeth Meecher, I can only assume that you both are happy to know that she’s gone.”

  The old man gasped and the girl for the first time lost her scowl. The old man stood up. “How dare you say such a thing and in our . . . that is to say, this house.”

  Slocum bent and straightened the bench. “About time I got a rise out of you. Now if you truly don’t tell me what I need to know, then we’re done here and I’m going to go off and find out for myself. And if I find that you’ve been playing Marybeth false, then I promise I will cause you both no end of trouble, mark my words.”

  The room was silent. The woman and her grandfather both sat looking down at their plates like scolded children. Slocum felt badly about his outburst, even knowing that his frustration with the pair of them was justified. They talked in circles, hinting at something nefarious but either not knowing enough to substantiate such claims or, worse, knowing more than they let on and teasing and taunting him with the information.

  “Grandfather is right,” said the girl, meeting his gaze. “We do not know much more than we have said, but we have strong suspicions that the Triple T Ranch to which you ride is run by a greedy man who has made much in the way of riches, but very little of it with cattle.”

  “Then what is he getting rich from? I was led to believe by a friend back in Dodge that it was a working cattle ranch. One of the biggest in Montana, he told
me.”

  “Ah, it used to be.” The old man smiled. “I remember those days. For years, there was more work than the owners could hire for. And so the men who did work there were well paid and well fed and given good mounts. This was not that long ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “The ranch was sold.”

  “It was stolen!” said the girl. “Stolen by that foul man Colonel Mulletson.”

  “That’s the man whose name I was given,” said Slocum.

  The old man nodded. “Yes, yes, he is the owner of the Triple T now. But it was not always the case. Since he took over, and brought his own men in, letting go good local wranglers and cowboys and stockmen, the ranch and its lands have become less and less used as the years have gone by.”

  The old man shook his head. When he raised it, his eyes were glistening. “Now the few cattle that are there are weak and diseased, ranging free and slowly getting picked off by the weather and bandits. At least the Crow are getting some use out of them, but that’s the only good thing.”

  “I just don’t understand what could possess a man to buy—or however he got the place—such a vast and valuable ranch, then let it go downhill like he has. And you say he still makes money?”

  “Not just money, Mr. Slocum,” said the girl, clearing the table. “But more money than you have ever seen.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Gold, of course,” said the old man. He spread his hands wide in explanation. “At least that is what we are told by the Indians. But they have been so driven apart by the white men—I mean no offense—that they are powerless to do much about it. And any complaints they make to the law have fallen on deaf ears.”

  “So he’s using the people who have disappeared as labor? Are they at least being paid?”

  “I don’t think they’re being paid at all, Mr. Slocum. Many go in and few ever are seen again.”

  “You can’t mean . . . but that’s slavery.” Slocum scratched his stubbled chin and walked to the dead fireplace. “Slave labor in a gold mine?”

  “Yes, that is what I suspect.”

  “What makes you think it’s a gold mine?”

  “I have no proof, of course,” said the old man, his hands held up, shoulders hunched. “But . . .”

  The girl went back to the stove, slammed the lid back down on the firebox, and tuned to face Slocum. “I know this for certain. I have the proof. I have seen it with my own two eyes.”

  “Tita! I thought we agreed, never again!” The old man’s eyes were wide.

  “I was there again! I rode out one night not long after Miss Meecher was taken away.”

  “Yes, yes, I know about that time.”

  “But I went again a month ago.”

  “But you did not tell me of this!” The old man slapped a hand flat on the tabletop. He was more animated than Slocum had seen him since they’d nearly traded gunshots earlier.

  Slocum held up his hand and shook his head. “I don’t mean to interrupt this touching family moment, but I need to know what you saw, Tita.”

  “Why? Do you really think you are going to do something about it? Do you think we are so stupid to believe you won’t just ride out of here and never look back?” She snorted, shook her head. “Ha, you will just turn us over to those pigs. I bet there’s good money in slaves, eh?”

  Slocum ground his teeth together, and chose not to respond to the rude young woman. The entire episode felt like a huge waste of his time and he wished he could have skipped stopping here. But the promise of seeing Marybeth again had been too much.

  Now that he had stopped, he had to know what had happened to Marybeth. If she had gone up there on her own, looking to help her friends, she probably ended up a slave herself. Or worse.

  3

  There was only one thing Slocum had wanted more than sleep that night, and that thing seemed entirely impossible now. The sultry Mexican girl, given her raised-lip demeanor, and her glaring ways, wanted nothing to do with him. He got the impression, from the first moments of their meeting, that she would like nothing more than to gut him with a dull spoon. So, he told himself, sleep is what you’ll have to be satisfied with, Slocum.

  And sleep is what he accepted as good enough for that night—the tail end of a very long day in the saddle. His thoughts drifted briefly to his horse, the Appaloosa, in the same stable, two stalls over. He imagined the big, muscled beast was feeling much the same way. The horse surely knew that tomorrow would bring more of the same, so no doubt, unlike dumb humans, he had long since worked his way through his bate of hay and had drifted into a long restorative slumber.

  Slocum’s eyelids pulled downward, felt leaden with the weight of the day. His years-long habit of checking the shadows, probing with his mind the last of the day’s half-lit corners, lost the battle to keep his eyes open and his mind awake.

  But the honed mind of a wanted man is never fully at rest, and Slocum’s last thought, as it had been on many of his nights on the vast, green earth, were of his plight as a roving soul. He was wanted for a crime for which he was innocent. The killing of that corrupt judge was a long time in the past, but it was still a millstone around his neck. The memory of it plagued him at least once a day, and usually at night, just as his mind wound down, finally at ease after another in an endless string of long days.

  But on this night, John Slocum’s razor-stropped senses, even in the final clutches of a fast-approaching and deep slumber, detected the faintest rustling of soft dry dirt underfoot. Not under a boot, though, softer and more muffled, as if under a bare foot.

  In the time it takes for a fly to change course or a thought to pass from curiosity to conviction, John Slocum’s mind turned on a dime. In that same instant his mind burst wide and fully awake, his Colt Navies palmed and cocked. His wire-taut body, tenser than spring steel, had whipped upright, his wool blanket dropping to his midsection. His bare chest expanded and lessened ever so faintly in the faintest glow of moonlight from the half-open stable door.

  A form had passed through the cracked door, of that he was sure, though he did not witness it. The air in the barn had somehow changed. It was a stinging thing pulsing with a bitter, palpable taste. His first instinct was to whisper, “Who’s there?”

  But his drifter’s curiosity overrode that silly instinct. He would wait them out. Somehow he knew it was a human, and not a prowling cougar or starved coyote. It was a human, and whoever it was wanted something bad enough to slink in the shadows.

  “Slocum? John Slocum?”

  It was the Mexican girl. He’d know that voice in a town of hundreds. Mostly because it seemed, for reasons unknown to him, every word she had said all night had been spoken in anger. Why is that, Slocum? he thought. What had he done to this foul-intentioned woman to provoke such hissing and sparking and clawing?

  “Here,” he said, but he did not like the way his voice sounded. It was hoarse, trembly, and weak.

  And then she appeared before him, skylined in the faint moonglow from the partially opened barn door. “I was hoping you would be awake.”

  “Why?” he said before he remembered he’d vowed to keep his mouth shut around her.

  “Because, you . . . you disgust me.” She moved closer. He could see her fully now, wearing what looked like a shapeless nightgown, but the moonglow behind her outlined her astounding shape. Hers was a working woman’s body, thin, lithe, muscular, bold, and strong. She wore nothing that he could see beneath the thin cotton gown.

  “You . . . you make me want to handle a gun. But that is something my grandfather has forbidden me. All because I am a woman. He seems to think that because I am female, he must protect me. Who does he think took care of me for the two years before he found me? I was alone on the streets of Tijuana, begging for scraps, licking the plates of the wealthy before their kitchen staff could see me when I wriggled through the windows. F
or such, I owe him my life, but . . .”

  As he listened, Slocum, pistol still drawn, considered his next move and decided it would be based on hers. He didn’t have long to wait.

  She strode to him purposefully, on bare feet, and slammed her belly into his. “You disgust me, John Slocum,” she hissed. She ground her waist and her hips into his, her tongue flicking like a serpent’s.

  Slocum’s eased off his pistols’ triggers, too surprised by the moment to holster them.

  “For an angry woman, and someone who really seems to dislike me, you sure have an odd way of showing it.”

  “Shut up and kiss me before I find something else to hate about you.”

  Slocum holstered his pistols, and unable to resist her hateful advances, he gripped her backside through the gauzy flannel. “I think I can find something that might please you.”

  And he matched her tongue’s ardent ministrations with his own, all the while thinking that he seriously doubted anything would put a smile on this little hellcat’s face. At that moment, he didn’t really care if she was smiling or not. Just that she kept on doing what she was doing.

  Before he knew what had happened, she had wriggled out of the thin nightgown, her kissing barely pausing even when the nightgown passed up and over her face.

  “I doubt that, gringo . . . and I am willing to try to prove you wrong.”

  The heat rising from her taut body, like a flat rock in the desert at midday, warmed his muscled belly. Her lips trailed down his ridged chest, pausing to tease and flick at his nipples, and his breath caught in his throat. This was not something he’d expected from this woman, this bold, seemingly spiteful woman. But there would be ample time for pondering over the whys behind this . . . later. Right now, he found it quite simple enough to concentrate on the task she seemed intent on performing.