Slocum and the Golden Girls Page 7

  Slocum took one last look at the tattered remnants of his bed. He walked over to the lamp and turned down the wick until it went out.

  He retrieved his rifle, saddlebags, and bedroll from under his bed and walked out of the room. He did not lock the door.

  He knew where he was going to sleep that night.

  And he was pretty sure he knew who had tried to murder him.

  Somebody in town was running scared.

  Come daylight, he vowed, he’d check those horse tracks and find out who the two bushwhackers were. One of them, he was sure, was the man they called Hutch.

  Anger boiled in him as he thought about Lonnie Taylor and the way he had died.

  Now they had come after him.

  Big mistake, he thought.

  This time, those killers had picked the wrong man.

  And like the fools they were, they had missed. They had only killed a bed.

  An empty one at that.

  12

  Slocum chased two men into a sun-ruddied canyon below monumental rock formations that identified the landscape as Arizona on a summer morn. Inside the towering walls of the canyon, the two men multiplied into a dozen, and before he reached the end, they had metamorphosed into a swarm of bees with gigantic stingers, furry bodies, and leather wings. He turned his horse, but it was too late. The bees came after him and smothered him, slashing his horse to ribbons and pushing hard on his chest.

  He awoke, wide-eyed, to see the lovely features of Abby inches from his sleep-clogged eyes. She had a pillow in her hands and was pressing down on his chest.

  He looked at the window. The drapes were pulled open and he saw twinkling stars fading against a pale blue horizon above the mountains. There was a rim of cream behind the peaks, and it rose and swallowed stars while the blue faded.

  “Huh?” he said.

  Abby laughed. “You said you wanted to get going before sunup,” she said, tossing the pillow against the headboard. “Well, it’s dawn and I’ve been up for hours.”

  “You have?” He sat up, ran fingers through his shock of unruly black hair.

  “Yes,” she said, “and I’ve been busy. I saw your room and I went to the livery and had Alvaro saddle your horse and leave it out in front of the hotel at the hitch rail.”

  “Thanks, Abby. I have to get cracking, then.”

  She jumped off the bed.

  He saw that she was wearing a riding skirt, boots, and a chambray blouse.

  “Do you want breakfast before you start tracking the men who shot into your room last night?”

  He threw the covers aside and started to dress.

  “No,” he said. “I never eat before I go hunting.”

  “Johnnie, I know you want to get those men, but I want to take you to Wally’s mine today.”

  “Once I find their tracks, that’s all I need for now. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Is your horse out front?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ll meet you there in a half hour or so.”

  Her face lit up as if a photographer had set off phosphorous in a tray.

  He dressed quickly and strapped on his gun belt.

  “We’ll be gone all day?” he asked her.

  “Most of it. We have to make sure none of Cordwainer’s men follow us, and Wally wants to show you his mine and tell you what’s at stake in Halcyon Valley.”

  “I’ll lug my saddlebags and rifle down to my horse and tie on my bedroll. It has a sawed-off shotgun wrapped inside.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on your horse. By the way, Alvaro told me his name, Ferro.”

  “Yeah,” Slocum said. “It means ‘iron’ in Spanish. He’s a long-distance horse, and sometimes I think he’s made of iron.”

  “I’ll walk downstairs with you,” she said. “And, Johnnie…”

  He turned at the door to look at her.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Slocum was in the alley behind the hotel. He crawled through the rail fence to his shattered window and studied the tracks that were now lit by the growing light from the sun.

  He was careful to step on bare ground where there were no boot prints. He saw the fresher tracks of two men. One of the tracks matched the earlier ones that had aged or were obliterated by the newer tracks. This one he studied very carefully because he surmised it belonged to the man he had identified as Hutch.

  Slocum was able to tell a great deal by studying those boot tracks. Hutch’s right sole had a nick in the edge, a cut mark of some sort, and his left heel was rounded on one edge as if he favored that leg. It appeared that he was slightly bowlegged.

  The other track revealed a man slightly lighter in weight than Hutch. His soles also bore distinctive marks. The toes of both boots appeared to be scuffed as if he had rubbed them on rocks or some metal material, such as a boot scraper. And both heels were starting to get round on the outside edges, suggesting that he was even more bowlegged than Hutch.

  Slocum filed this information in his memory and retraced the steps the men had taken after firing off two shotguns. He saw that they ran to the rail fence, crawled through, and then ran some yards up the alley, where he encountered a maze of hoof marks.

  With his practiced eye for tracking, Slocum could tell that the horses had been ground-tied in one spot. There were, as well, piles of horse dung scattered about, and places where the earth was pocked by streams of urine. He walked over slowly, bent down, and examined the maze, sorting out the tracks of both horses as they entered and exited the alley.

  He saw which horse Hutch had mounted by the boot tracks spaced close together and then, when the man had mounted, the right footprint was smeared slightly as his left foot stepped into the stirrup. There was more pressure on the ball of the right foot just before he had lifted himself into the saddle.

  Slocum studied the hoof marks of that horse, squatting down to look at a clear impression of first the left hind foot and then the other three. The iron shoes were showing signs of wear and these were distinctive.

  One hoof had a worn heel on the outside, and another bore tiny grooves where the horse had probably scraped a rocky patch of ground, or pawed at a small stone to overturn it.

  As for the other set of tracks, the shoes were worn, and one, the left hind shoe, dragged something along with it, perhaps a chunk of prickly pear cactus or a twig, so that it left a separate scraping track alongside the hoof. As for the other three hooves, they were worn at the heels and toes as if the rider had climbed some steep slopes often enough to wear down those portions of the shoe.

  Again, Slocum committed what he had seen to memory. He walked back onto the street and headed for the front of the hotel. He saw Abby and her dun standing alongside Ferro.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Yes. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I could track those two men in my sleep,” he said. “I could almost tell you how tall their horses are and what they had for supper.”

  Abby laughed.

  “Do you know who shot at your room? How many were there?”

  “Two men,” he said. “I know the name of one of them.”

  “Oh? What’s his name?”

  “Hutch,” he said.

  “Al Hutchins,” she said, and it seemed to Slocum that her eyes went cloudy for a second. “He works for Cordwainer.”

  “I suspect both men work for Cordwainer,” he said.

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  He unwrapped the reins from the hitch rail and started to step toward his left stirrup when Abby held up a hand to halt him. He stopped and looked at her as she rubbed the cheek of her horse.

  “Johnnie,” she said, “I just talked to Sammy, my day clerk. He was just coming on. He had some bad news.”

  “Oh?” Slocum’s eyebrows arched.

  “He said there was quite a commotion at the Hoot Owl last night. He could hear it from his cabin, so he walked over and saw a crowd outside.”

  S
omething prickled under Slocum’s scalp as if someone had sprinkled black pepper in his hair.

  “Well, what was going on?” Slocum asked, dreading Abby’s reply.

  “While he was there, a wagon pulled up and men all started talking at once. Some of them looked inside the bed and one or two of them vomited. So Sammy walked over to the wagon to see what was inside it. It made him sick, he said.”

  Slocum’s mind raced and he thought of the night before. He was supposed to go to the Hoot Owl himself and meet a man.

  “It was Caleb, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Abby jerked from the shock of the word.

  “Yes, it was Caleb Butterbean,” she said. “He was dead.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Well, the constable was there, drunk as usual. And so was Jess Cordwainer and some of his men. When people asked what had happened, Herb Mayfair started shooing them all away. He told one of the men that Caleb had probably gone bird hunting and fallen off his mule and shot himself.”

  “Bird hunting at night?”

  “That’s what Sammy thought. From what he could tell, Caleb’s body was riddled with buckshot. He had bloody holes in his face and neck, and his clothes were shredded and torn with holes. He thought Caleb had been shot more than once. There were just too many holes and too much blood.”

  “Damn,” Slocum said. “I should have been there. If I had gone to the Hoot Owl, Caleb would still be alive.”

  “Or both of you would have died. Johnnie, these are ruthless men. That’s why my brother sent for you. He can’t fight them alone, and he can’t hide from them much longer.”

  “Still, I blame myself. I should have met with Caleb. Maybe—”

  “Stop talking that way, Johnnie,” she said. “Come on. We’ve got a ways to ride and maybe we can avoid being followed this early in the day.”

  “All right.”

  “We can talk more about this along the way,” she said.

  “I’d like to see where Caleb was shot, study the tracks. Sometimes I can see things that an unpracticed eye would miss.”

  “Well, Sammy said that Caleb was killed at a fork in the road to his place. I can show you where it is. He said something else, too, which might help you find out who murdered poor Caleb.”

  “What’s that?” Slocum asked.

  “The men who shot Caleb killed his mule, too. It might still be there. Or if not, somebody may have dragged the animal off the road.”

  “If it’s out there, I can look for buzzards circling in the sky,” he said. “I ought to go out there right now.”

  “No, Johnnie, don’t,” she said. She pulled her reins over her horse’s neck and climbed into the saddle. “You can do that after you and Wally have talked.”

  “I guess that dead mule will be there for a few days,” he said.

  He climbed into the saddle and they pulled away from the hotel. He was not surprised that Abby headed for the fringe of trees beyond the town flat. She kept looking back to see if they were being followed. Slocum started doing the same, but he couldn’t get Caleb Butterbean out of his mind. One or two men had bushwhacked the poor old prospector in the dead of night. No man deserved to die like that. And certainly not Caleb.

  There was only one explanation he could come up with when he thought about it.

  Caleb had been slaughtered because the men who had burned Lonnie Taylor to a charred crisp down on Cactus Flat knew that Caleb had seen them. And that was probably why the same men were bent on killing Slocum. It was a dirty shame that Caleb had paid the price for being an innocent bystander, for seeing what he was not supposed to see.

  Well, Slocum thought, those men may have put Caleb six feet under, but they would pay with their own lives sure as hell was hot.

  As the surviving witness to the death of Lonnie Taylor, he was obligated to obtain justice for both men.

  Such crimes should not go unpunished, he said to himself.

  In the thin mountain air, his head was clear. He knew who he was going after, and if his hunch was right, there were more than two men involved in the murder of Caleb Butterbean.

  And one of them was surely Jess Cordwainer.

  13

  Slocum rode alongside Abby through thick timber and terrain dotted with massive boulders and rocky outcroppings. They rode around deadfalls and down into shallow ravines, up small hills and across game trails. They saw deer and heard the plaintive pipings of mountain quail. Slocum realized that they were not following any marked trails or paths, but were deliberately sticking to hard ground and thick brush.

  Although both looked over their shoulders frequently, they saw no one.

  Finally, they rode to the rim of the tabletop that was the edge of Halcyon Valley and over the lip into the slopes of the high desert. Slocum recognized it as Jackrabbit Valley. In the distance he could see the stage road, a faint beige ribbon that cut through cactus, Spanish bayonets, and sagebrush. It was, he thought, one of the most desolate regions he had ever encountered.

  Abby picked her way down into a gully thick with sagebrush and cactus. To Slocum’s surprise, there were horses hobbled there, and one end served as a natural corral, with poles to keep the horses from running off. There were watering troughs and hay feeders.

  Abby dismounted.

  “We’ll have to walk back up to the rim,” she said. “Another of Wally’s precautions.”

  Slocum swung out of the saddle. They walked to the corral fence. At the other end of the bowl was a natural limestone barrier that blocked off the gully. Some ancient flash flood had hollowed out a portion of the high desert and given shape to the depression. Slocum saw signs of rushing water on either side of the entrance, and a ditch that kept the flooding from entering the gully.

  They left their horses saddled and put them inside the makeshift corral.

  “You probably won’t need your rifle,” she said. “Wally gave a great deal of thought to this place and where he found his mine. You’ll see.”

  “I’m already impressed,” he said.

  The two hiked back up to the rim of the high valley. The ground was rough and rocky, and Abby held Slocum’s hand to keep from slipping or falling down when her boots overturned a stone or slid on gravel.

  She was breathing hard when they reached the top, and Slocum felt the change in his lungs. The air was thin at that altitude, which he judged to be about seven or eight thousand feet, and the temperature contrast was noticeable. It was slightly warmer in Jackrabbit Valley and cooler now that they were back amid the pines and spruce, the fir and juniper.

  “Follow me,” she said, and they began a long walk that must have been a mile or more, Slocum figured.

  Finally, she stopped between two pine trees. Strung between them was a wire with two empty soup cans hanging close together. She reached up and pulled the wire down. The cans were filled with small pebbles and they rattled.

  After that it was quiet for a few minutes as they waited.

  Then Slocum saw a man approaching from a thicket of brush and tall trees.

  Abby raised a hand and waved.

  The man, a Mexican, smiled at her.

  “Hola, Ruben,” she said.

  “That’s Ruben Vallejo,” she said to Slocum, her voice low. “He works for Wally in the mine.”

  Abby introduced the two men and Ruben shook Slocum’s hand.

  “Your brother, he is waiting for you, Abby,” Ruben said, and walked back in the direction from which he had come. “Watch out for the rattlesnakes,” Ruben said as they tramped through thick brush. “I have killed two this morning.”

  They walked in single file, with Slocum bringing up the rear. Ruben made a lot of noise, shaking the bushes on both sides of him as if to scare away any snakes that might be waiting along the path.

  They came into the open and Slocum saw a wide ravine that was deep and long. Pines grew atop the cliffs, and he thought the place would be difficult to find by anyone who did not know where it was.

  They ent
ered the ravine and walked some distance to where Wally and another Mexican were standing in front of a pile of debarked logs, leaning against a small ore car on tracks that went into a dark hole at the end of the ravine.

  Wally waved. Abby and Slocum waved back.

  Slocum noticed that there was a pit filled with shoring some distance away. The superstructure was rigged with ropes and pulleys.

  “John,” Wally said, a wide grin on his face, “I’m glad you could come. Hi, sis.”

  The Mexican watched the two men as they embraced in a manly hug.

  “John, this is Elisando Gonzalez. You’ve already met Ruben.”

  Slocum shook Elisando’s hand and the two men smiled at each other.

  “As you can see, John, I have two mines here. One going straight into the wall of this ravine, the other straight down into hard rock. That’s where I’m seeing the most color.”

  “This is all a mystery to me, Wally,” Slocum said. “I never could understand why men break their backs digging caves and breathing bad air underground.”

  Wally laughed.

  “It’s the gold,” he said. “When you see it in a pan or in a chunk of ugly rock, it lights up something inside your brain.”

  “I reckon so,” Slocum said.

  The two Mexicans walked away. They pushed the ore cart down the tracks and disappeared into the mine adit. Slocum could hear the sound of metal wheels singing along the twin rails.

  “It’s like a fever, I guess,” Wally said. “Maybe like a disease. Once you get gold fever, you lose track of everything else.”

  “Well, apparently you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest with your claim, Wally,” Slocum said. “Or so Abby tells me.”

  “It’s Cordwainer,” Wally said. “He’s a madman. He doesn’t have gold fever like the prospectors and miners up here. He just has plain old greed. He’d like to jump my claim, but I’ve managed to outfox him. So far.”

  “Wally,” Abby said, “I think some of Cordwainer’s men murdered Caleb Butterbean last night.”

  Wally’s face fell. His visage turned ashen as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

  “Damn,” he said. “What happened?”

  Abby told him what Sammy had told her.