Slocum and the Comely Corpse Read online

  In it was his money, a little over two hundred dollars worth of gold coins and folded greenbacks. He didn’t have time to count it, but it seemed all there.

  That was a help. Money was always a help. He went through his shirt pockets, pants pockets. They yielded the usual odds and ends: a waterproof box of matches, a folding knife, a few keepsakes, some loose change....

  He reached into the top of his right boot. On the inside of the boot was a flat sheathed throwing knife. He eased it out of the sheath, bringing it into light.

  It was twelve inches long and a quarter of an inch thick. A Mexican throwing knife, simple, straight, a length of triangle-pointed flat black metal.

  Good thing Dolores’s killer had missed that. It really would’ve cinched the case against Slocum. Even so, the noose was still plenty tight.

  Usually, the knife would have been a last resort, his ace in the hole. Now, it was his first resort. The steel felt good in his hand. He stuck the knife into his belt, pinning it at his side, in easy reach.

  With the pocketknife he cut the horse loose from the traces, trimming the reins to manageable length. In a space behind the back of the cart’s seat, he found a folded blanket which the owner had probably used as a kind of lap rug while traveling on cold nights.

  Slocum tossed the blanket across the horse’s back. That was how Southwestern Indians rode, not with a saddle under them but a blanket, in the style mistakenly described as “bareback” riding. He could’ve ridden with nothing between him and the horse, if he had to, but this way was a whole hell of a lot easier on both man and mount.

  He took hold of the horse’s mane with both hands and vaulted up on to its back. The horse was unused to being ridden and was balky, but it would take more than that to stop Slocum. He wasn’t going to walk!

  He showed the animal that he couldn’t be thrown, not that it was trying too hard. It was skittish, more than anything else. He gentled it down with soft words and pats. He burned to be off and away, but some things just couldn’t be rushed. The time spent now in gaining the horse’s confidence would pay off later, on the trail. Providing a posse didn’t happen along and shoot him before he made his getaway.

  When he sensed that he and the horse had reached an understanding, he headed it out of the covert. The road was empty in both directions.

  He rode west, into the foothills. He left the road as soon as he could, sticking to the back trails, then the game trails, weaving a tricky, snaky path.

  It was rough country, dry, sandy, with rocky spurs and deep ravines, no good for farming or ranching. Good for hunting, maybe, and, deeper into the hills, mining. But he didn’t plan on going that deep.

  Once or twice he saw distant isolated structures, shacks and cabins and the like. He kept well clear of them. He didn’t want to be seen so his whereabouts could be reported to trackers who might come later.

  He took the horse across long gentle slopes of smooth black-brown slickrock, leaving no trail. If his pursuers managed to come this far, when they reached the slickrock they would find that his tracks ceased to exist.

  The sun rose, burning off the dew, eating up the night chill. The sky was blue, cloudless. The air was fresh, crisp.

  Slocum worked his way north, then east. He kept below the ridges, not skylining. He stayed under cover of brush and rocks, venturing into the open only when necessary, and then as briefly as possible. He’d never been in these parts before, but he’d been in similar terrain. He was a hunter and outdoorsman, with a feel for the underlying patterns of this rugged New Mexico landscape.

  Periodically he’d dismount, tethering the horse in place while he bellied up to the ridgeline to scout the land below.

  Around mid-morning he came to a stream, narrow and swift. He had a monstrous headache and a raging thirst. He first watered the horse, not letting it drink too much. A water-bloated horse wouldn’t be much good escaping from a fast-riding posse.

  Slocum knelt at the water’s edge. The stream was fast and clean, with swirling side pools. There were no dead animals lying upstream to taint the water. He cupped his hands and took a few small sips. The water was cool, with a slight mineral tang.

  Slocum drank deep. He hadn’t realized how parched he was, until he started drinking. He had to force himself to stop, before he swelled up. Too much water was as bad for a man as a horse when they were both on the run.

  He splashed some water on his face and the back of his neck. It felt good. He lay prone on the bank and plunged his head into one of the side pools, immersing it. It helped clear away some of the cobwebs.

  He came up for air, gasping, dripping. He rubbed his face and head. When he touched the back of his head, he groaned.

  There was a lump there, a big one, raw and throbbing. His headache had gone down to a dull steady pounding, but now it came roaring back.

  He gingerly felt out the outline of the lump. It was a big one, a real goose egg. Somebody had clouted him a good one.

  He had a fleeting memory of something half-seen, a shape closing in on him, then—blackness.

  It was gone. Try as he might, he couldn’t call it to mind. The fugitive image hung just beyond his reach, formless, not seen but sensed. When he tried to grasp it, it turned to mist.

  It was important, though. He knew that. Prickly but elusive, it clung to the back of his mind.

  In the center of the lump was a raw, silver-dollar-sized wound, wide but shallow. It felt worse than it was. The skull seemed unbroken.

  “Lucky I got a hard head,” he said softly. Anything above a whisper made his head hurt worse.

  He must have been clipped when he’d gone into Dolores’s room. He’d been wearing a hat when he was slugged, cushioning the blow. Where was it now, still in the room?

  A red bandanna was knotted around his neck. He undid it, dipping the patterned cloth square into the water. He used it to clean the wound as best he could. When he was done, he was pale and shuddering.

  He found some tree moss, and took a coin-sized piece of it and pressed it to his head wound. It was an old-time remedy against infection and he knew that it worked. Back in the War Between States, two decades ago and more, farther back than he cared to remember, he’d ridden with Quantrill. They’d been hunted by Union troops, forced to hide in the woods and swamps for weeks at a time, and there hadn’t been any field hospitals, or doctors, or medicines. You had to use what was at hand, folk-medicine remedies made of bark and roots and bits of grasses and leaves. Surprisingly, some of those old cures worked. With those that didn’t, the afflicted got worse and died.

  That was a long time ago. He’d been little more than a kid then. Most of those he’d ridden with were dead, in the war or after. He’d lived longer than a gunman had a right to expect. He was now full-grown and in his prime, looking for that one big score that would let him retire rich. What he lacked in youthful strength and endurance, he made up for in speed and cunning. He was tougher than ever, but his days of knocking around the countryside and roughing it for the hell of it were long gone.

  And now here he was, without a hat or a gun, on the run for a crime that he didn’t commit.

  “There ain’t no justice,” he said. “Reckon I’ll go and make some....”

  He wet the bandanna, tying it over the top of his head. It would protect him against the sun’s rays burning down on his bare head, and hold the moss poultice in place.

  He mounted up and rode on. The brook wound downstream in a northeasterly direction. He followed it for a mile or two, until it spilled out of the broken lands, down to the flat, where it stretched east across rolling plains, grazing lands for some of the ranches north of town.

  Farther south were a couple of riders, moving away from him at a tangent, unhurried. They hadn’t seen him. Most likely they were cowboys tending their herd.

  Slocum turned north, keeping to the cover of the rough country, parallel to the flat. A few miles onward, he came to a lonely place, a kind of neglected no-man’s-land at the bounda
ry of two far-flung ranches.

  The ground was dry, cracked, and unpromising for livestock, with stony soil and thickets of thorny undergrowth. No human soul was in sight, as far as Slocum could tell.

  He came out of the rocks, down on the flat. A dry wash snaked eastward. He followed it. The tops of its banks were over his head. It was like riding through a winding, mazelike trench.

  It was warm at midday. The bandanna had dried, and the moss beneath it. When it had been moist, it tingled against the wound. Now, dry, it made his scalp itch. He left it in place.

  The land was more open than he liked, but even there on the flat there were enough nooks and crannies to hide a rider from plain sight.

  Once, he passed an adobe house. It sheltered under a hillock on the far side of a hollow. It was a single-room flat-roofed ’dobe shack. In front was a stone well, and on the sides were small square vegetable gardens, which had been harvested and picked clean.

  A child was there, playing with a stick. It was too far away to tell if it was a boy or a girl. The kid saw Slocum, dropped the stick, and ran inside the shack.

  After a pause, the door slammed shut from the inside. A bolt slid home with a dull but unmistakable thud. An adult hand reached out the window, pulling the wooden shutters closed. Not closed all the way—they were left open a crack so the occupants could see outside.

  Slocum passed by, watching the shack until it fell behind, dropping from sight. He’d tried to steer clear of human habitations, but the shack had just kind of sneaked up on him.

  Its occupants stayed inside, not wanting to contest his passage. It was a lonely site, far from help. In such places, if a stranger comes riding, let him pass and hope he keeps on going. No sense buying trouble.

  The sun slipped gradually from the zenith, stretching shadows eastward. Eventually, Slocum came to the railroad line, and crossed the tracks. He drifted south, keeping the railroad line on his right, about an eighth of a mile away.

  Nearing Bender, he heard shots.

  4

  No possemen crossed Slocum’s path on his way back to town—and no wonder! The law was too busy to go chasing after him, too busy cleaning up the rough element in Bender.

  Nothing like a shootout to occupy everybody’s attention, thought Slocum. He was north of Bender, east of the railroad tracks which made up the deadline separating the town proper from the collection of whorehouses, gambling halls, and saloon dives of the vice district. Every flyspeck town on the map, or off it, had such a zone. In some places it was called the Tenderloin, or Hell’s Half Acre. In Bender, it was called Whoretown.

  Even though it was daylight, Slocum was able to sneak up pretty close to Whoretown. He might not have risked coming so close if not for the shooting. That was better cover than nightfall.

  Now, he skulked at the edge of a patch of woods about a hundred yards behind the backs of the buildings fronting the north side of the main dirt road in Whoretown. The horse was deeper into the woods, hitched to a tree in a small clearing.

  Slocum was hunkered down just inside the wall of brush, peering out through spaces in the foliage. He was two houses west of the House of Seven Sisters, whose rear and east wall he could see at an angle. There was no sign of life at Maud’s house and the curtains were closed. It was the same as the other houses. They weren’t the scene of the action.

  The real action was at the Doghouse Saloon, which fronted south on the main road. Slocum could see it between two buildings on his side of the road.

  The Doghouse regulars were mostly drifters, layabouts, tinhorns, and small-time troublemakers. Town Marshal Norbert Hix had turned a blind eye to the goings-on there, but apparently his tolerance had reached an end.

  Now, the Doghouse was under siege by the minions of the law. Hix, his chief deputy Dick Wessel, and a dozen others had the saloon surrounded and under the gun.

  With Tweed dead and Stringfellow wounded, there weren’t many more badgemen to call on. Siding with the law were about a half-dozen townsmen, and about as many cowboys. The cowboys all were hands on the biggest ranch in the area, the Pierce ranch.

  Pierce was there too, a fierce-faced, eagle-beaked husky with a full head of thick white hair and a white walrus mustache. He and his foreman, Engels, were in Hix’s immediate group.

  The street was deserted, except for the marshal’s party, which was scattered in bunches of threes and fours around the saloon. A couple of bodies lay sprawled in the dirt. Everybody else was safely inside, watching the show from the corners of their windows.

  Directly opposite the saloon, on the other side of the road, stood a cheap two-story rooming house. The front porch was raised three feet above the ground. It projected a few feet past the front corners of the building on both sides, like wings, with twin sets of wooden stairs leading down to street level.

  Hix, Pierce, and Engels took cover behind the stairs on the east side of the building. They were three big men. The porch wing and stairs weren’t big enough to cover all three, but a rain barrel had been rolled from the side of the house to serve as a barricade.

  Hix was bearlike, with a battered cowboy hat, short iron-gray hair, no neck, and broad sloping shoulders. Pierce, the rancher, was dressed like a townman in a brown corduroy suit. Engels, his foreman, was fiftyish, with too-long lead-colored hair and a boarlike profile.

  Engels sheltered behind the rain barrel, which was more than half full. The other two crouched behind the porch wing.

  All three held six-guns, which they banged at the Doghouse from time to time.

  The rooming house stood so that its west side was closer to the saloon’s front than its east side. Behind the porch’s west wing was Dick Wessel, still armed with a double-barreled shotgun.

  On the roof of the rooming house, covering the street, was one of the marshal’s men, a rifleman.

  Across the street, on the other side of the road, under cover of the buildings flanking the Doghouse, were knots of townsmen and cowboys. Every now and then, they would pop out from behind cover to snap a few shots at the saloon, ducking back in time to avoid the return fire.

  The saloon’s front porch was littered with broken glass that had been knocked out of the windows by the defenders. Inside, tables had been overturned and pushed up against the bottom halves of the windows, barricades from behind which the besieged kept up the fight.

  From the volume of the firepower, Slocum guessed that there were about a half-dozen guns inside.

  On the front porch, a few feet short of the front door, lay a young cowboy in shabby, dirty clothes, one of the saloon bunch who had been shot down before he could get inside.

  In the middle of the road, facedown in the dirt, lay a well-dressed townsman, one of Hix’s crew.

  It was now late afternoon, with shadows slanting. A chill wind blew from the west, a foretaste of the cold night to come.

  Movement showed in the saloon’s left front window. Engels leaned around the curve of the rain barrel and squeezed off some shots. Wood chips flew inside the window frame, but it didn’t look like he’d hit anything.

  Some shots blasted at Engels from the right front window. He ducked behind the barrel. The barrel caught a slug, but not Engels. Water fountained from the bullet hole.

  More gunfire from the right front window, a fusillade pinning down Engels, Pierce, and Hix.

  Wessel loosed both barrels at once into the right front window. The thunderclap boomed on the street.

  Shooting from the left window. Too late. As soon as Wessel cut loose, he dropped below cover. Shots in his direction missed. He lay on his side, breaking the shotgun, reloading.

  A shriek sounded from somewhere behind the right front window, in the immediate aftermath of the shotgun blast. It gurgled and then was immediately choked off.

  Some of Hix’s men cornering in front of the building east of the saloon leaned out and opened fire. One of them, a cowboy, stepped into the road, angling for a better shot.

  A bullet from the saloon drilled him
, not fatally. He dropped, shouting.

  Inside the saloon, somebody cheered. The others were encouraged to finish off the downed man. Gunfire erupted from both windows, but the wounded man lay hunched on his side on the street, below their angle of fire. Plenty of lead was slung at him, but it all passed harmlessly overhead.

  A Doghouse gun, a big blue-jowled man dressed in black, leaned around the right side of the door frame, trying to draw a bead on the downed man.

  The other shot first, and straight. There was a thudding splat as the bullet struck flesh. The blue-jowled man fell forward, dropping to his hands and knees.

  He crouched on the floorboards, framed by the open doorway, below the bottom of the bat-wing doors. The cowboy fired, gun held a few inches above the ground.

  The blue-jowled man’s body jerked as he was hit. He hugged himself, then fell forward, crashing facedown.

  A shooter in the left window had the angle now. He put a bullet in the street, within a foot or two of the wounded cowboy. Cursing, the cowboy swung his gun to the left, working the trigger. A shot hit the wall right of the window, and then the gun clicked empty, hammer falling on spent chambers.

  A shot drilled the cowboy. He sprawled facedown, spasming, still holding his gun. He raised himself on his forearms, back bending, lifting his upper body from the dirt.

  In his back was a dark spreading stain. Another shot from the same gun added a second hole. The thud of that slug was even louder than the one that had tagged the blue-jowled man.

  The cowboy stretched his length in the road and ceased moving.

  Pierce, cursing, emptied his gun at the left window. He’d started to rise, but when the gun was empty, he was pulled back down below cover by Engels.

  The marshal’s men opened up full-blast on the saloon, laying down a concentrated volley of fire. Gunfire blistered up and down the road, most of it poured into the left window.

  Gun smoke filled the road, lanced by the blazing spear points of muzzle flares.