Slocum and the Canyon Courtesans Read online

  “Miss Warren?” he said as she stumbled toward him. She glanced at the body of Jeremy Slater, then turned quickly away, where her gaze rested on Slocum’s face.

  “I’m Melissa Warren,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m John Slocum. Can you tell me anything about what happened here and where you and the three other women were headed?”

  She looked around at all the clothing, carpetbags, purses, hats, and she shivered.

  “We were going to a place called Quitaque,” she said. “Four of us from Duluth.”

  “Minnesota?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The coldest place on earth. Or at least in the United States.”

  “What was in Quitaque?”

  “Husbands,” she said meekly, and hung her head as if she were ashamed.

  “You gals were mail-order brides?”

  “I—I guess that’s what we were, or thought we were. Then this happened.”

  “I’ve got some burying to do,” he said. “You might want to change clothes or find your things. We’ll ride double, so you can’t pack much.”

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “I lost four good horses to those Kiowa and you lost three friends. I’m going after those redskins.”

  “There were at least six of them,” she said. “What can you do against so many?”

  He tapped the butt of his Colt.

  “They have guns, too, mister.”

  “Single-shot carbines.”

  “You live by the gun, Mr. Slocum?”

  “I keep mine handy. It’s a tool, like any other.”

  “A tool?”

  “Like a hammer. Only mine comes with its own nails.”

  She brushed dirt and sand from her blouse and tried to smooth her skirt.

  “I won’t change,” she said, “but I’d like to carry some clothes in a carpetbag if you don’t mind.”

  “We can tie the bag in back of my saddle,” he said.

  She began to gather a few items of clothing and place them in a small carpetbag. Slocum found a shovel lashed to the side of the overturned wagon and dug two shallow graves. He went through the pockets of the dead men, but found only a few silver dollars and a double eagle, which he pocketed. Neither man wore a sidearm, and if there had been a scattergun or rifle in the wagon, the Kiowa had taken it. The man in the wagon seat appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties. He was balding and had salt-and-pepper sideburns. Slocum put both men in the ground, covered them with dirt, and then placed rocks atop the mounds.

  He stood there at the head of the two graves and took off his hat.

  “Lord,” he intoned, “I ask that you take these two souls and put them in your care. Amen.”

  “Are you a religious man, Mr. Slocum?” Melissa asked as Slocum placed his hat back on his head.

  “Not particularly. But they might have been.”

  “But you said a prayer for them.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” he said.

  She gave him a baleful glance and picked up her carpetbag. She handed it to him and he tied it in back of his saddle, behind the bedroll already there.

  “I’ll mount up first, then you step into the stirrup and I’ll pull you up. You ride behind me. You can straddle on that carpetbag.”

  She nodded and watched him pick up his reins and climb into the saddle.

  “This is a tall horse,” she said.

  “Yes’m. His name’s Ferro.”

  “Ferro? That’s an odd name.”

  “It means ‘iron’ in Spanish. Sometimes I think he’s made of it. He’s a right strong horse.”

  He pulled her up and she slid in behind the cantle, sat on the carpetbag, which mashed down and made for a comfortable seat. Her arms hung at her sides.

  “You might want to hold on to my gun belt or put your arms around my waist,” he said. “Otherwise, you might fall off and get trampled.”

  “I’ve never ridden a horse before,” she said.

  “A good time to learn,” he said.

  She put her arms around his waist. Slocum ticked Ferro’s flanks with his blunt spurs and they climbed out of the canyon, rode back to the place where he had left the four horses the Kiowa had stolen. He rode south, following the tracks.

  Melissa tightened her grip around his waist as Slocum put the horse into a trot.

  “There’s something I forgot to tell you, Mr. Slocum,” she said.

  “You can call me John, miss.”

  “Well, then, you can call me Mel, or Melissa.”

  “Which do you prefer?” he said, tilting his head so that she could hear him. The tracks were plain on the dry ground—four shod horses, three unshod ponies. Smaller tracks for the ponies and not as distinct as those made by the iron shoes.

  “Melissa, I guess. That’s what my ma called me. My pa and my brothers called me Mel, and some of the people I’ve met want to shorten my name. But Mel is a man’s name, I reckon.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’d take it for a man’s name. Melissa, it is. Now, what is it you wanted to tell me?”

  “I thought it odd, but I was so scared, I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought the Injuns were going to kill us all after they shot those two men off the wagon seat. But one of the men who rode down on us wasn’t an Injun.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Slocum slowed the horse and turned his head to glimpse part of Melissa’s face.

  “I mean that there was a white man with those Injuns. White as you or me. He didn’t have paint on his face, and he wore a big old hat with a funny band around it. Looked like snakeskin.”

  Slocum reined up and turned in the saddle to look directly at Melissa.

  “Did you ever see the man before?” he asked. “Did you hear his name?”

  “I never saw him before,” she said. “But one of the Injuns he spoke to called him Scud. At least it sounded like ‘Scud’ to me.”

  “Scud? Funny name,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought. At first I thought the Injun was saying ‘Spud,’ but another one said his name and I’m pretty sure it was ‘Scud.’”

  “That’s good to know,” he said, and turned back to look down at the tracks. He rode on, thinking about what she had told him.

  Strange, he thought. What was a white man doing with a bunch of renegade Indians? And what did he want with three or four single women?

  Nothing good, he surmised.

  The tracks showed him that the horses were no longer running. The Kiowa had slowed them to a walk a mile or two from where the horses had been rustled. The sun beat down on him, and he felt a wetness under his shirt where Melissa’s hands were holding on to him.

  The tracks headed south, parallel to Palo Duro Canyon.

  They headed south to God knew where.

  3

  Melissa nestled her head against Slocum’s back. She looked at the bleak landscape passing by and licked her dry lips. She was thirsty and tired. And, she thought, she was entirely at the mercy of this tall man whom she did not know at all.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. “To Quitaque?”

  “Those Kiowa stole four horses I was taking to the Goodnight ranch,” he said. “I aim to get them back.”

  “Horses? We’re following horses?”

  “And three Kiowa braves who stole them,” he said.

  “What about my friends who were kidnapped? Aren’t they a lot more important than horses?”

  “Your friends are heading the same way as my horses,” he said. “If you look down at the ground, you’ll see a lot more tracks than when we started.”

  Melissa looked down at the ground. It was a maze of horse tracks. Her eyes blurred as she tried to separate them. The
re were dozens of hoof marks in the dry earth, and they were all heading in the same direction. Some tracks were deeper than others, some more distinct.

  “How can you make any sense out of such a jumble of horse tracks?” she asked.

  “It takes some practice,” he said. “And a lot of experience.”

  “I wouldn’t know one track from another,” she said.

  “Well, here and now, all these tracks are important, Melissa. I figure two of the women are riding on the two horses that pulled that wagon. Actually, I think one of those horses is packing double. Three Kiowa are pulling my horses behind theirs.”

  “You can tell all that just from those tracks? I can’t see much difference between one horse or another.”

  “The Kiowa are riding unshod ponies. The white man you said was named Scud is riding a shod horse. The two horses that pulled the wagon are wearing new iron shoes. The depth of the hoof marks tells me that one of those is carrying more weight than the other. The horses are all packed close together, with the two horses carrying the women in a box surrounded by Kiowa. The man called Scud is in the lead.”

  “You make it sound like reading a book,” she said.

  “Tracks can tell a pretty clear story,” he said. “You just have to know how to read them.”

  “I’m amazed.”

  “When I was a boy back in Calhoun County in Georgia, my pa made me look at all kinds of animal tracks. Once, he set me on a patch of ground, made me lie down and watch the ants and bugs for half a day. He took me on walks through the woods and told me how to tell the age of a deer track by the amount of moisture in it and whether the earth at the top was starting to crumble. He did that with quail, turkey, squirrels, raccoons, and possums.”

  “Did you enjoy doing all that?” she asked, her voice jiggling as they rode over a patch of rough ground.

  “Yes. I learned a lot and maybe I thought I was reading the minds of the game animals. I could look at a quail wallow and see where they dusted their bodies and wings and then follow their tracks and find a covey to flush and shoot. Meat for the table.”

  “It sounds almost like you were one of the animals.”

  Slocum laughed.

  “Sometimes, I probably was. All animals hunt for food. They might hunt berries or sweet grass, but some of them hunt meat. Everything wild hunts something else.”

  “Is that how you feel now, John?”

  He let out a breath, a deep sigh.

  “I’m hunting, all right,” he said.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking all these questions,” she said.

  “I don’t mind, but best you keep quiet from now on. Those Kiowa can be mighty sneaky and I have to keep my wits about me.”

  “Seems to me you have a tight grip on your wits, John,” she said.

  “Well, the Kiowa have a habit of watching their back trail, and one or two of them could be lying behind a bush or a rock ready to shoot me out of the saddle.”

  “I’ll keep quiet,” she said.

  She scooted closer and pressed against him, holding on with both arms wrapped tightly around his chest. He could feel the soft pressure of her breasts mashed against his back. She was a beautiful young woman with sleek black hair, a perky uptilted nose, and bright blue eyes. She was a few inches over five feet, and, even with that long dress on, he could tell that she had slim legs and pretty ankles. Although she smelled of jasmine perfume, there was the earthy allure of her sweat beneath the fragrance.

  They rode on through the blistering hot afternoon. Slocum scanned both sides of the trail and stopped when he saw a change in the tracks. Two of the Indian ponies had left the trail and ridden off toward the canyon. That was ominous enough because they could wait in ambush anywhere along the snaking fissure in the earth and pick him off like a turtle on a log.

  He said nothing to Melissa, and continued to follow the main body of horse tracks. To his surprise, after another three miles or so, the tracks also began edging toward Palo Duro Canyon as the sun dipped to a few degrees above the horizon in the west. He turned Ferro to follow the tracks, but his gut clenched as he realized how dangerous it would be to follow the Kiowa and the white man through the canyon.

  Slocum did not ride down into the canyon but stayed atop the rim. He could see the tracks on the canyon floor and then they just vanished. He backtracked without speaking to Melissa, and saw where someone had cut branches from a small bush and then begun brushing out the tracks behind the other horses.

  The sun hovered over the horizon, a blazing disk of fire that painted the dust and seemed to shimmer like a god’s eye over an empty land where nothing moved and their breathing was the only sound.

  “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?” Melissa said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “I don’t know. A couple of those braves are brushing out the tracks. They must know that I’m following them.”

  “What do we do now?” she asked, and there was a faint tremor in her voice.

  “We’re not going down into that canyon, that’s for sure,” he said.

  “So, we might not be able to follow them.”

  “When that sun goes down,” he said, “these long shadows will disappear and it will be dark as a coal pit until moonrise. I don’t know if they’ll ride in the dark or pitch camp down in that canyon. But we’d better scout out a place to spend the night.”

  She looked around and saw nothing but emptiness. A soft breeze sprang up just then and the air was warm against her face.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “We have maybe fifteen minutes to a half hour to find a safe place to camp for the night.”

  “In the canyon, then? It’s the only place that will offer us any protection from the wind.”

  “You know about the wind here in West Texas, then,” he said.

  “I sure do. The first day out I thought the wagon was going to blow away. I asked Ruddy Dover, the driver, about it. I said, ‘Is it always this windy out here?’ And he said, ‘No, ma’am, sometimes the wind blows real hard.’”

  Slocum chuckled.

  “He was right. The wind out here can blow a whole town away.”

  As if to underline his words, the wind began to pick up and their faces stung with blown sand. They ducked and rode on. The dust filled the air with a rosy hue and it was difficult to see.

  Just as the sun fell beneath the horizon with only its angry red rim showing in a cloudless sky, Slocum spotted something ahead of them. He rode toward it as the rim of the sun vanished over the horizon.

  There, in the middle of that desolate landscape, was a broken-down adobe. Its roof had caved in and the bricks were weatherworn and crumbling, but it still had three walls and some rafters heaped inside.

  “What is that?” Melissa asked as they rode up and Slocum circled the abandoned hut.

  “An old adobe house gone to ruin,” he said.

  She shuddered.

  “It’s probably full of rats and snakes,” she said.

  “Well, they’ll likely run off once we tromp around in there.”

  “We’re going to stay here tonight?”

  “It’s like a gift from on high,” he said with a taunting smile on his face.

  “I’ll sleep outside, under the stars,” she said.

  “Suit yourself, Melissa,” he replied and smiled again.

  He ground-tied Ferro while Melissa wandered off to answer nature’s call. He saw signs that told him travelers had camped there before. There were empty tins that once contained coffee, peaches, and other foods, the metal completely rusted, the labels long since eaten or washed away by rain. The rafters made a kind of tent, though, and he scraped his soles across hard-packed dirt where bedrolls had hardened the ground. He carried two canteens, his bedroll, and Melissa’s carpet
bag inside. He set the bag and canteens in a corner and laid out his blanket. He went back outside, unsaddled Ferro after slipping his Winchester out of its scabbard, and carried his saddle and gun inside.

  The wind blew hard and hot, sending waves of sand across the darkening landscape when Melissa returned, her face slightly flushed from the stinging sand. She squinted her eyes and looked at the bedroll all laid out and glanced at her carpetbag in the corner.

  “You’re welcome to share my makeshift bunk for the night, Melissa,” he said, his tone congenial and without any trace of the lust he was beginning to feel.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “It’s hardly big enough for you. And I’m scared of snakes and rats.”

  She picked up her carpetbag and started to walk outside.

  “It can get mighty cold out here at night,” he said. “And snakes sniff out warm bodies when it gets like that. I don’t see any rat droppings in here. Nothing for them to eat. Might be a termite or two.”

  “I’m sleeping outside,” she said.

  Slocum pulled a cheroot from his pocket, lit it with a wooden match he struck on the sole of his boot. He stared out at the sky as the blue faded and the sun glowed in a gray and purple haze far to the west. He listened as he turned his head to pick up any alien sound.

  He would not sleep that night, but hold to the adobe shadows with his rifle.

  There were Kiowa braves out there, with war paint on their faces.

  And he did not know where any of them were.

  4

  As the darkness deepened, the sky around the adobe was streaked by bullbats, their quarter-sized wing emblems flashing as they darted and twisted in their pursuit of flying insects.

  “There must be a creek or a spring somewhere around here,” Slocum mused.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “Two things. Mosquitoes need standing water to breed and hatch, and whoever built this adobe had to have water.”

  “It all looks pretty dry to me,” she said.

  “I’ve seen signs of flash floods, so either there’s a water hole around here, or a creek. I’ll look for it in the morning.”