Slocum and the Lone Star Feud Page 5

  “Like he did about the murders?”

  “If he don’t do something, then we go for other help.”

  “Other help?” She blinked at him in disbelief.

  “Yes, there’s other help.”

  “It’s a waste of time going to Black City.” She shook her head in disapproval, and then looked off to the line of brown hills studded with cedars with her arms folded across her ample chest.

  “Ray, go hitch up a team for that buckboard,” Slocum said. “The rest of you can finish out the day shoeing horses with Teo. He’s just getting a good start on that chore.”

  “Gracias,” Lopez said, and gave him a two-finger salute.

  “No, we’re grateful to have such good men working on this ranch,” Slocum said after them.

  The men beamed at his words and rode for the pens.

  8

  The fresh team wanted to run, so Slocum let them. Seated with her firm hip tight against his on the spring seat, the wind in their faces, he glanced over and noticed how her deep tanned complexion glowed in the brilliant sunshine. Her green eyes sparkled as he slid the rear wheels in a tight turn and sent up a head-high spray of dust as the rims cut into the road dirt. His boots heels stomped the dash as he leaned back and drew in the lines. Straightened out at last, he flicked the reins at the matched sorrels. They weren’t through running, and the long grade of the double tracks through the dried grass, mesquite, and low brush looked to be without another curve for a quarter mile. He figured to let them run out some of their stored-up energy. “Hee Yah!”

  On the next rise, he drew them down to a trot and let them blow. They danced along in step with one another, clinking the snaffle bits in their mouths and snorting as they bobbed their heads and lathered necks.

  “Good horses,” he said, keeping them in check.

  “Luther got them to go after supplies.”

  “You and him ever get serious?” he asked, watching a blue-buck deer flash off into the head-high mesquites that choked the dry wash beside them.

  “No.”

  He glanced over at her. She was looking a long ways off at something too far away to see. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about things like that.

  “You don’t like men much,” he said over the ring of the iron rims on the gravely ground.

  “I sure as hell don’t. Oh, well, I guess I might as well tell you.” She ran the sharp edge of her even front teeth over her lower lip, as if she was concentrating on how to phrase her thoughts for him.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “I know that. But before all this started, something happened, something that has kind of been—damn, I don’t know.” She ruefully shook her head.

  He flicked the horses to keep them trotting, and looked at the outline of the hills in the south to give her some time. If she felt ready to talk some, he sure didn’t want to spook her out of telling him anything that would add to his knowledge of this whole business.

  “One afternoon... it was hot as hell and I’d figured I was all alone up on the north end of this place. So I shucked off my clothes and jumped in the water. I’d done it many times. Alone, who cared? It was our tank on our place, but damn, I wasn’t in the water a second when he rode up like he had been spying on me the whole time. Yeah, Dayton Taylor caught me up to my neck in the water and in the altogether at the Seven Springs Tank. A real man would have had some respect.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  “He didn’t have any?”

  “No, he rode right up. And I ducked down treading water up to my chin. My face must have been beet red. But back then, we’d had some rain and that tank was full of water. About six foot deep, so he couldn’t see much.” She shrugged and avoided looking at Slocum. “I asked him to leave so I could get out and get dressed.”

  “He didn’t leave?”

  “No. Instead he simply got off, tied up his horse, and then began taking off his chaps. Damn, I knew what he was going to try next—I saw it in his eyes. Men telegraph the likes at you.” She shook her head as if in hopelessness. Then she drew a deep breath.

  “I told him to leave... it did no good, of course. Like talking to a damn fence post. He shucked his clothes out there, and I turned my back trying to figure out how to get out of the tank and get dressed before he tried to force himself on me. Next thing, I heard him say he had something for me. I knew what that was—I’ve been around studs, bulls, and boar hogs all my life. When he said that, I realized what he meant to do to me.”

  “And?” Slocum asked to keep her talking.

  “He jumped in the water like a great white fish, and I met him face on. He might have thought he was a stud hoss, but this mare damn sure wasn’t in heat.

  “God,” she swore in disbelief. “He was a lot stronger than I was. Lot stronger. Kinda foolish on my part to think I could have outfought him. But I fought him hard until he nearly drowned me. Finally, I had swallowed so much tank water that my belly ached and I was about to puke. Coughing and crying, I was so damn mad at him pawing and feeling my breasts. Then he tried to stick it into me from behind.”

  “Did he?”

  “No.” She shook her head to dismiss the idea. “Hell, he wasn’t even half hard, and I might have been near drowned, but I wasn’t about to give up that easy.”

  “What happened next?”

  “He really tried to drown me after that. And he got furious, I guess ’cause he couldn’t get his limp rod in me. He finally drug me out of the tank by my hair, threw me on the ground, and spread my legs.

  “I was choking and gagging on all the water in my lungs. Oh, it was so bad that I couldn’t even fight him off.

  He kept trying to jam that damn soft thing into me and it wouldn’t go. I thought he’d break me in two. Then he took his fist, sliding it up and down his shaft, and he jacked off kneeling between my sore legs until he came all over me in a disgusting stream of foam. Ugh.” She made a face and shook her head to try and escape the vision of it.

  “So what happened next?”

  “He finally rode off. For days I considered killing him.” Tight-lipped, she looked at the heat waves straight ahead that made the road tracks seem out of focus.

  “Did you try to?”

  “No. Guess I lost my nerve. But that lying son of a bitch told Troy Martin that I really liked doing it with him and for Troy to come over and use me. Hell, he’d never even got close to getting it in me.”

  “Troy—he’s the one accidentally got shot the day after your Uncle Duncan was killed by those rustlers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did Troy do?”

  “Well, I thought I had eyes in the back of my head after that day. No more swimming naked out in the cow tanks for me. No more laying around on some warm rocks up on the rim absorbing the sun and watching red-tail hawks glide by.

  “One afternoon, Troy and two young punchers caught me out checking cows. They must have figured where I’d cross this dry wash, and they rode out of the mesquites and they hemmed me in close—three of them on horseback around my pony, not much I could do. I tried for the Colt in my saddlebags, but one of them grabbed it away. Then Troy, he caught me and kissed me like I was some damn cheap whore down at Lizzie’s place. Man, did he taste like whiskey... whew!” Her shoulders gave a shudder of contempt. “I began to realize these men were drunk enough to be dangerous.”

  Slocum reined the lathered team down to a walk. By his calculation they were close to topping out and seeing Black City ahead. The jingle of harness and the ring of the iron rims were all he could hear above the clop of the ponies’ hooves in the dust. Sam took a deep breath, then exhaled out of her nose as if uncertain about telling him more. Cold drops of perspiration from Slocum’s armpits ran down his ribs as he looked over at her.

  “They weren’t there for no tea party?” he asked.

  “No tea party. They held me down and stripped off my clothes. Oh, I cussed them and I swore and I kicked them in the private parts every chan
ce I got. But two of them punchers held me down and Troy, well, he had no trouble nailing me.” She gave a shudder of her shoulders. “You ever been held down with that much force? I mean they had their knees set in my shoulders. It hurt and I guess I cried—I ain’t cried before and I ain’t cried since that day, but I cried, I think, because I couldn’t stop him.”

  “Tough way to have it happen.”

  “Then they got in a big argument after he got through. Troy must have thought better of what he’d done when he got off me. He had blood all over him. My blood—they thought he’d wounded me or something. He went to looking at the blood all over his thing and shaking his head. Then he began cussing that lying Dayton Taylor and asked me if I’d been a virgin. I nodded.

  “Them two punchers got pale as a sheet and looked at each other like they’d seen a ghost. They got on their horses and rode out and I have never seen them again. Never seen them again, and even Troy, he left out of here for a year, I guess.”

  “But then, when he came back, you weren’t mad enough to kill him?”

  “That’s right. I never told anyone else about that. But you and Luther—I told him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “You should have killed them,” she said in a man’s gruff voice.

  “Sounds like him. You never told your father or uncle?”

  “Naw. I went to Doc’s in town the next day. Dad and my uncle, they thought I’d split myself apart horseback riding. They didn’t know nothing about a woman. Honest to Pete, for a once-married man, my father had no idea whatsoever about a woman’s plumbing.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Doc? Aw, he said I’d be sore for a week or so. And if I was pregnant, I’d know soon enough. He said that I should bring charges against the man or men that did it. I told him no, thanks—next time, I’d kill the son of a bitch that tried it.”

  “That the town?” he asked as they viewed the smattering of buildings along the cottonwood-lined creek ahead.

  “Yeah, but it’s a waste of time coming in here. Knotts won’t listen to you or do a damn thing about those rustlers.”

  “We’ll see, all right?”

  “Fine,” she said as she sat back and crossed her arms over her ample bosom.

  9

  The sheriff had crossed his dusty boots on top of the rolltop desk. He was leaning back in the swivel chair, busy cutting a half-inch slice off the side of a plug of chewing tobacco with a rusty Barlow knife, when they came through his door. He blinked his eyes in disbelief at the sight of the two of them. His gaze dropped to his tobacco, then shifted to Sam and Slocum, and then back to his plug. With some effort, he dropped his boots to the gritty floor and sat upright, at the same time feeding the slab off the tobacco into his mouth in a swift motion. His wary gaze never left them in the process.

  “What brings you to town, Miss Cottrel?” He hesitated, then slowly leaned over and spat in the cuspidor beside his desk.

  “Rustlers. They’re blotting out my brands.” She stood with her boots set apart like a man challenging him. “And they’re doing it a helluva lot.”

  “Who’s doing it?” he asked, frowning at both of them as he worked the tobacco to the right side of his mouth between words.

  “How should I know? That’s why we came to tell you! You’re suppose to be the law.”

  “Hold your horses, Sam. I don’t have but a handful of deputies to keep the peace, and by the way, Ira Martin was by here a while ago and signed a protest to your starting roundup in this heat and drought.”

  “Too damn bad,” she said. “Tell him to get off his lazy ass or send a rep up there. I aim to start roundup in five days.”

  “What in hell’s name is a protest?” Slocum asked, short on patience over the lawman’s lack of concern for the matter at hand. A pesky fly droned around his head in the sweltering-hot spittoon-stinking office as he waited for an answer.

  “Oh, sort of a way to register a complaint is all. Don’t reckon I know you.”

  “Slocum.”

  “Knotts my name. Lester Knotts.”

  “He’s my foreman,” Sam said. “Lester, I want you or one of your deputies up there in the morning and looking at those cows with blotted brands.”

  “Now Sammie, it’s hot as hell out there right now, and beside, Paul’s gone to Fort Griffin to get a prisoner and I can’t spare—”

  “Do you know Captain Bryan Spencer of the Texas Rangers?” Slocum asked.

  “You know him?” Knotts asked. Lines furrowed his forehead as if he was puzzled by Slocum’s question.

  “I intend to telegraph him in ten minutes to come up here and straighten this mess out.”

  “Up here folks handle their own matters, mister. No need for the Rangers. Sammie, I understand you hired some gunhands?” he said, as if to evade Slocum’s insistence that he take action.

  “Killers,” she said forcefully enough that Slocum almost laughed at her defiance of the man. “Mad-dog killers—every one of them are that. Ask them boys that came shooting up my place this morning and tried to steal my remuda. They damn sure took tail when my guards went to shooting at them. Lucky they got out alive.”

  “Listen, this is a peaceful country,” Knotts said. “We don’t need gunhands and Rangers up here.” He held out his hands as if to ward them off. “Them riders was probably only some boys funning you. I doubt they was out to steal your horses in plain daylight.”

  “I don’t care what you think about those no-accounts. What are you going to do about them brand-blotters?” she demanded. She had her hands on her hips, and her green eyes sparkled with anger.

  “I’ll ride up there in a day or two and check out things. Meanwhile, you put off this silly roundup business and take it easy. Too hot for that right now.”

  “I’m not doing anything of the kind. Are you ready to go, Slocum?” she demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I told you it was no damn good to come talk to him.”

  Slocum never looked back when he hit the bright hot sun outside. The sheriff’s words of protest and shouting after them fell on deaf ears; Slocum knew how to handle things. He headed straight for where the telegraph wires were attached to a building. She caught up with him in the street.

  “I told you so,” she said.

  “We tried.”

  “You know this captain?” she asked, having to half run to keep up with his long strides.

  “Yes, ma’am. We served in the war together.”

  “Will he do something?”

  “That’s why they’ve got Rangers in this state.”

  “I guess so,” she said as he opened the door for her and they went inside the shop.

  “Telegraph up?” he asked the small man with the visor.

  The man looked up mildly, smiled at her, and nodded as if Slocum wasn’t present. “Why, yes, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

  “Slocum here wants to send a wire.”

  “Oh, yes. If you can write, put it down, or I’ll do it for you.” He shoved the paper and lead pencil toward Slocum.

  Slocum took the pad and wrote:CAPTAIN BRYAN SPENCER AUSTIN TEXAS STOP CATTLE RUSTLING OUT OF HAND IN GREEN HOPPER COUNTY STOP SEND RANGERS STOP JOHN SLOCUM CTX RANCH BLACK CITY TEXAS

  The man read it with some effort and then laid it down. “Cost six bits.”

  Slocum drew the money out. He didn’t trust this man to send the message as he counted out the change. At the moment, he couldn’t put his finger on why, but he intended to settle the matter before he left there if he had to send it himself.

  “There’s your money. Now send it,” he said sharply, laying the coins on the counter.

  “Wire’s busy.” The man re-read the paper Slocum had written on.

  “You got two seconds to send that or you’ll be dead on the spot.” Slocum laid his Colt on the countertop.

  “What’s the matter with you?” The man blinked in disbelief at him.

  “Slocum, trouble’s coming
from across the street the way I see it,” Sam said, pulling on his sleeve.

  “Send the message or I’ll do it,” Slocum ordered. “I know Morse code.” He leveled the pistol at the telegrapher who had moved as far as he could from the counter and huddled against the wall with his hands half raised.

  “Get to that key and now!”

  “I will. I will.” He scrambled to the key and cowered like a cur dog waiting for his instructions.

  “Slocum, it’s Dayton and his bunch,” Sam said.

  “You go out the back way,” Slocum told her.

  “No,” she protested.

  “I can handle that bunch out there, but not with you in here. Go!” He turned his ear and listened as the operator tried to get a line. The gang in the street was only ten yards away from the front door. “Get the hell out of here!” he shouted at her.

  “I am.” With that she rushed out the back door of the office. Relieved, Slocum glanced at the approaching three-some outside, and then turned back to the operator.

  “You make that key sing!” Slocum cocked the hammer back on his Colt.

  “I am. I am.” The man was visibly shaking as he sat at his desk and tapped the black key. “I can’t do it! Can’t get a line. It’s gone dead.”

  Damn! They were about to come inside.

  “Let go of me!” Sam shouted, and appeared inside the back door with a gunman pushing her from behind.

  “I’ve got her covered,” her captor said. “Drop yours.” Slocum let out his breath in a loud exhale of surrender. There was nothing else he could do. He dropped his Colt.

  “Ah, see that you got the drop on this big killer,” Taylor said as he came in the front door followed by two more gun-toting rannies to back his play.

  “Well, stranger,” Taylor said. “We meet again. I thought you were only riding through here, not taking up residence with her.”

  “Watch your tongue, Taylor,” Slocum warned.

  “He was sending a telegram to the Rangers,” the clerk said.

  “Good thing we got here, wasn’t it? Usage of the telegraph by armed force is a serious crime in the Lone Star State. I think we better take you over to the sheriff and have him lock you up.”