Slocum and the High-Country Manhunt Read online

  “You lost or something?” Whiskey Pete looked at him over the rim of his cup. It seemed he was going to keep it close by his mouth and nose for the entire time there was liquid in it.

  “I don’t believe so. That is to say, I don’t exactly know where I’m headed, and I don’t know where I am. I have a rough idea I’m in Canada and I know those peaks yonder”—he nodded westward—“are the Rockies.”

  The old man was too polite, Slocum noted, to ask just what it was that brought him all the way out there.

  “’Bout the only thing I can tell you is yes, you’re right—them are the Rockies. I been trailin’ up and down ’em, one side or t’other, most of my adult life. And that’s quite a spell. But whether we’re in Canada or the States, I don’t know, and I guess I don’t rightly care much either way. Long as I’m aboveground and I still got my hair.”

  With that, he lifted his fur cap and revealed a gleaming dome of skin with nothing but a few wiry strands spiraling out of it here and there. He was smiling. “I’m all set.”

  “Sounds like a decent way to live. Mind if I ask how you get by?”

  “Ask away. Nothing I like better than talking. And if it’s talk about myself, then I like that even better!” He sipped his coffee again and said, “I trap, carve trinkets, trade goods with a Cree tribe up northwest of here.” He half turned and waved a gnarled hand in the direction of snowy peaks far in the distance. “They winter and summer up there, in a pretty little valley alongside a river. Ain’t been told to move yet by any whites, so I reckon they’re still there. I’m considering heading that way before too long, maybe come spring. I got a sack full of carvings I figure might could get me some Indian food. I’m partial to the pemmican they make. Can’t make it to save my ass, but them squaws, by God, they can make tasty pemmican.”

  “You don’t recall seeing a stranger come through here recently, do you?”

  With that the old man stiffened, his eyes lost their mirth, and he set the coffee cup down. “What makes you ask that?”

  Tread lightly, Slocum told himself. He had obviously touched on a nerve, so he decided to go for broke. “I’m tracking a man. He’s believed to be a killer.”

  The old man once again positioned his arms such that it looked like he might let fly, even from his sitting position, with a tomahawk or knife—or both. “You the law?”

  “Nope,” said Slocum, shaking his head, careful to keep his hands in sight, on his coffee cup. “I am working privately for a family who were wronged by this man. I hired on to find him and bring him to justice.”

  “What’s he look like, this stranger of yourn?”

  “Truth be told, I’ve never seen him. But going by other people’s descriptions, he’s about my height, has blond hair and a waxed mustache—of which he is mighty impressed. He also dresses like a town man, a dandy gambler. I have reason to believe he’s also not accustomed to travel on the trail, that he might be ill equipped.”

  The old man relaxed. “Well, I wish you was the law.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because that’s the weasel bastard who cheated me out of my poke.”

  “What? Are you sure?” Slocum leaned forward, set down his cup.

  The old man scratched his chin again. “Yep, yep,” he said, nodding. “I may be old and spend too much time talking to my mule, but I’d say that’s the very man. Course, except for the bit about being unaccustomed, as you say, to horse travel and trail life, I’d say he’s the man. This fella was a dandy, sported finery such as you’ll not see on the trail. And that mustache of his, well, he looked like one of them fellas who’d fall into a sty and come up smelling of rosewater. If you get my meaning.”

  Slocum nodded. “But you say he seemed trail hardened?”

  “Yep,” said the old man, helping himself to more coffee.

  It was possible, of course, that Delbert had become accustomed to life on horseback in the time Slocum had been following him. But from what he’d been told, Calkins was a city man who’d left Bismarck needing supplies. “Which way was he headed, Pete?”

  “Yonder, toward the mountains.” His voice had taken on that dark tone again.

  Clearly the stranger, if it had been Delbert Calkins, had wronged him mightily. To know he was still on the man’s trail after all this time was a damn good feeling.

  In the days after the mess at the trading post, he’d all but decided to head south along the mountains and send Miss Garfield the remainder of her money, tell her the trail had grown cold. But he knew her reaction—she’d take off after the man herself, and he couldn’t let her come to such an end as that would surely bring.

  “Can I ask how he cheated you?” Slocum knew this might be a sensitive topic, but he wanted whatever information he could gather.

  “I invited him into my camp, much like I done with you—but you have the look of honesty about you. I guess I’d talked with Ethel a mite too long at that point—about a week past—and well, he pulled out a bottle of whiskey. And since we neither of us had coffee, and as it was colder than a gravedigger’s backside, I allowed as how a drop or three of the stuff might help keep me from seizing up.” He shook his head at the memory.

  “Well, before I knew it, I was playing a shell game with him, right on that there blanket of mine.” He nodded toward a worn striped Indian blanket rolled off to the side of the little camp. “Woke up to an empty poke.”

  He slipped a buckskin pouch out from under his shirt and danced it on his fingers. He wore it about his neck, but even without feeling it, Slocum could see that it was empty. “Not so much the few coins and nuggets I had that I minded losing, but there was a pretty blue rock in there give to me by a Navajo woman a long time past. I’ll take it out of an evening and hold it and think of her.” His rheumy eyes stared into the fire. “Good times, they was.”

  Slocum held his peace for a few moments, then said, “Did you lose all that playing the game of chance with him, or did he just take it from you?”

  “That’s the thing, see . . . I don’t know quite what happened. I told you that when me and whiskey meet up, one of us goes home with a sore head and a black eye. And it ain’t never been any one of the two of us but me. Every time. So I guess I’ll be man about it and say that I lost my goodies fair and square, gambling them away like that.” He fell to musing again, staring at the flames. “All for a few swallows of popskull.”

  Slocum stood and stretched his back. “Well, I’ll tell you, I have no interest in filching from you. But I am interested in anything else you might remember about the man. Like why he headed to the mountains. You said that Cree tribe winters there. I wonder what he’d want with them.”

  “Maybe nothing,” said Pete, draining the pot as he poured himself another cup of coffee. He smiled. “That’s the one good thing I can say come out of meeting up with that man. I never did get to tell him it seemed like he was headed the wrong way. Now that was a man who must have been lost.”

  Whiskey Pete had flecks of coffee grounds in his smoke-stained beard and in his teeth, but he looked to Slocum as if he was really enjoying every swallow of the thick stuff.

  “Them Crees are hunters mostly,” said the old man. “Far as I know they ain’t got much that any white man—least what civilized whites I’ve met—would want. Me, I’m white as the day is long, but I tell you they got it all figured out, them Indians.”

  “How so?” said Slocum.

  “Don’t seem to want for anything, even when they don’t have much. As long as they can fill their bellies, they seem to be happy. I envy that.”

  “Do they have Arbuckle’s?”

  Whiskey Pete leaned back, scratched his chin again. “Now you may have a point there. I reckon they are missing out on a little something.” He yawned, saw Slocum was headed for his horse. “You ain’t leaving just yet, are you?”

  “No. That is, if you don
’t mind sharing your camp for the night. I’ll be heading out first light.”

  “I’d welcome the company. I got some antelope steaks just right for a feed.”

  Slocum began unstrapping the packhorse’s load, pulled free a sack of supplies, and brought it over to the old man. “That sounds perfect. In that bag you’ll find flour, salt, beans—all manner of things that might help us come up with a first-class supper. I’ll help you as soon as I strip the saddles and loads here. My horses are tuckered out.”

  But the old man probably didn’t hear him—he was busy rummaging in the sack. With each item he pulled out, he licked his lips and grunted in approval. Then he looked over at Slocum. “You got enough to be sharing? I don’t want to cut you short on your trip’s supplies.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” said Slocum. “I have plenty. And I’m grateful for the company. Now what say we make some biscuits to go with those steaks?”

  “And maybe another pot of coffee?” The old man looked sheepish, but couldn’t seem to stop himself from asking.

  Slocum laughed. “Why not? Who needs sleep anyway?”

  “Ha! Man after my own heart. Why, I remember the time . . .” The old man busied himself setting up the provisions and preparing the campfire, yammering the entire time about something that had happened to him years before. But Slocum was only half listening. His mind was on the route Delbert Calkins had taken. Why would he be heading toward the mountains? Could be he had gotten turned around somehow and truly was lost, as Whiskey Pete had guessed. But was Calkins really more knowledgeable about life on the trail than Slocum had thought? He doubted it.

  Hours later, after a delicious steak, biscuits, and beans supper, followed up with dried fruit and coffee spiked with just a splash of whiskey—Pete figured Slocum wasn’t trying to pull over anything on him by then—the men prepared their respective bedrolls along opposite sides of the fire. Slocum arranged his weapons close at hand and the old man said, “You always arm yourself to the teeth, fella? I ain’t fixing to rob you in your sleep.”

  “I know that, but I do like to be prepared for anything that might try to surprise me.”

  “I hear that, Slocum. But I’m too blamed old to concern myself with such things anymore. If someone’s going to rob me, what in the hell do they think they’re going to get out of it? I got a mule who’s ornerier than two wives, a suit of buckskins that never needs washing, and a poke that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  Slocum tilted his hat over his eyes, relieved that he was about to fall asleep at last. It had been a long few days on the trail.

  “Course, that don’t apply where the Devil Woman of the Rockies is concerned.”

  Slocum tilted his hat back on his head, propped himself up on an elbow. “You can’t just say something like and not follow up with an explanation, Pete. What did you mean by ‘Devil Woman of the Rockies’? You’ll pardon me, but I’ve never heard of her.”

  Whiskey Pete said nothing, just arranged a rope around the perimeter of his bedroll, making sure it was a smooth, even distance all around.

  “I thought that was for rattlesnakes,” said Slocum.

  “Who says it ain’t?”

  Slocum smiled and lay back down. He let a minute of silence go by, then said, “So who’s this ‘Devil Woman’ anyway?”

  “By God, but you don’t give up on a thing, do you?” Pete sighed a long, drawn-out sound as if what he was about to reveal might cost him a lot of money. “Okay, then, but don’t come whining to me when you can’t sleep for the next two weeks!”

  “So?”

  Another sigh, then: “She’s a witchy thing, got hair clear down to her feet, horn nubs have been spotted sticking up from it, and her skin’s like a snake’s—all scales and scars.” Pete sat up, leaned on an elbow, and didn’t seem to notice that he was warming to his topic. Slocum tried to keep a straight face.

  “They say she don’t like people snoopin’ around her mountains, that she’ll kill a man and drain his blood like you or me might . . .”

  “Drain a cup of coffee?”

  “Okay, mister. You go ahead and mock me, but I’m telling you—this ain’t no laughing matter. She never leaves people alive.”

  “Then how do you know so much about her?”

  “Well . . . people I know have seen her.”

  “So they lived through an encounter with her, eh?”

  The old man wagged a finger at Slocum in the firelight. “I know what you’re driving at, you wiseacre. And I’m here to tell you that she’s as real as you or me. The Cree don’t much like her. Call her taboo, say she’s tainted and crazy and evil and all manner of things ain’t fit for civilized ears to hear. Now you just keep a sharp eye when you go up into them mountains.”

  “I will, Whiskey Pete. You bet I will. Say, the Rockies is a pretty big range for one Devil Woman, isn’t it?”

  “Aw.” The old man tossed a stick at Slocum. “Get to sleep. I ain’t telling you no more cautionary tales. Figured it was my duty. Didn’t want to know I’d sent you on your way without fair warning. I couldn’t bear to be with myself, now could I?”

  Slocum realized he’d been gently poking fun at the old man when Pete was genuinely concerned for his safety in the face of this “Devil Woman.”

  “I appreciate it, Pete. I really do. And I promise you I’ll keep a sharp eye out for her.”

  “Well, see that you do.” And within a minute, the old man was sawing logs like the practice would soon go out of fashion.

  Slocum lay awake for some time, wondering not much about the Devil Woman of the Rockies, but quite a bit about the conundrum Delbert Calkins was rapidly becoming. Was he or wasn’t he an experienced trailsman? Where was he headed? Did he have any gear? Slocum’s mind chewed on these thoughts as he drifted off to sleep, despite the old man’s rattling snores.

  9

  After a hearty breakfast in which Slocum had offered up more of his supplies for the two of them to enjoy, the old man kicked back for what looked to Slocum like a nap.

  He busied himself with cleaning up the rest of his gear, packing it onto the horses, and when he was about ready to hit the trail, he tossed a sack of Arbuckle’s on the man’s belly. The old coot erupted in a yowl and had his knife and tomahawk half shucked from his belt when he saw Slocum grinning down at him.

  “What’s this all about, then?”

  “Coffee for you. I figured that with your hospitality and those fine steaks, it was the least I could do.”

  “I can’t take such a fine gift,” said Pete, but his bony hands were caressing the sack as if he’d been given a poke brimming with gold.

  “Yes, you can. And now I have to light on out.”

  “You make it back this way, you look me up. I’m right fond of this spot. Might stay for a while. Got me a wind break, Ethel’s got a bit of browse, and the game trail yonder keeps me in fresh meat. What more could a man want?”

  “Coffee!” said Slocum, mounting up.

  “Exactly. And if you wait long enough, even that comes to you.” Whiskey Pete grinned and ambled over to Slocum, the sack of coffee tucked under one bony wing. He reached up and shook Slocum’s hand. “You take care now, and mind what I said.”

  “I will. And if I catch up with that fella I’m after, I’ll make gentle inquiries about your poke.”

  “Just the stone, Slocum. He’s welcome to the rest. I would like my pretty blue stone back.”

  “I’ll do my best, Pete.” He touched his hat brim and headed on out toward the mountains. After a few yards, he said, “I’ll give the Devil Woman your regards!”

  “Confound it, you numbskull! It ain’t no laughin’ matter!” But even Pete had to chuckle as Slocum rode off.

  A few miles up the trail, Slocum reached into his coat pocket for his makings and felt a bulge in his breast pocket that wasn’t familiar. He quick
ly reached in and tweezered out the odd item with his fingers. It was a small carved wolf. The detail was remarkable. He admired the palm-sized carving for a few minutes, then carefully stowed it back in his pocket. “Whiskey Pete,” he said, rolling a quirley and squinting at the far-off peaks.

  It felt good to be in higher country, and within sight of ever-bigger mountains again. His work during much of the preceding six months had taken him through some pretty flat country, and while it had is own charms, he missed the mountains. The sight of them made him feel confident somehow that he would succeed on this almost wild-goose chase. The only thing he found annoying about mountains was that once they were in sight, it seemed to take years to reach them.

  He rode, head bent to his right in an effort to deflect the steady south-headed wind from his face. He rode for another four hours and it felt as if they were still the same distance away, though he knew better. Then there would be a point when he’d look up and they’d suddenly appear, as if conjured closer than ever.

  And that point was almost on him. Try as he might, there were no decent tracks on the plains and into the foothills. Nothing to let him know that a man on horseback had passed this way some days before. But he had—that much Slocum knew. He hadn’t seen any sign of tracks cutting north or south. However, the wind here could be tremendous at times and they had had fresh snows, at least three in the past week. Pete was clear about that.

  Slocum hoped he’d have better luck at locating tracks once he got deeper into the foothills. It had been a long time since he’d been this far north, but it struck him again, as it always did when he fell to musing about man-made divisions, just how borders like that between the United States and Canada became decided.

  He knew all about war and staking claims and surveying, but who really decided such things? And once people settled in an area, what made them take on such a pride of place? People proudly claimed they were from some place, a state or territory, when really it was all just one big ol’ landscape.

  He shook his head and smiled at his folly. “The things I get to thinking about when I’m on the trail,” he said aloud to his horse. As they climbed between two sizable swells that led into high timber country, he glanced down to make sure they weren’t heading into a rocky draw. And that’s when he saw the tracks.