Slocum #304: Slocum and the Lady Reporter

The sound of hoofbeats caused Slocum to stir. He groaned, touched the side of his head and his fingers came away sticky with his own blood. Growling like a mountain lion, Slocum turned the best he could in the tight space where he was wedged and pulled out his Colt Navy. Thumb shaking a mite, he drew back the hammer and lay still, collecting his wits as riders approached.

Slocum had no idea how long he had been unconscious, but it couldn’t have been too long. It was dark but not appreciably more. If he had to guess, he had been out for the length of time it took two bushwhackers to ride from the top of the cliff to where he lay, supposedly dead.

Those two backshooters would get a surprise. Slocum felt strength returning to arms and legs and his head stopped feeling like a rotted melon and only ached. He had worried about not having clear vision. Now all he worried about was being certain to cut down both of the men who had tried to kill him.

It was good advice that his partner didn’t take. He rode up boldly. Slocum got his knees under him, rose, pointed the pistol directly at the man’s face and pulled the trigger. The awkward position kept him from making a killing shot. The bushwhacker reared back as Slocum came into view, causing the bullet to miss his head and instead crash into his shoulder.

From the way the man jerked about and almost fell from his horse, Slocum reckoned he had shot him through the shoulder joint. Even if he got away, he wouldn’t be using that arm for anything—ever again.

Knowing what was likely to be happening on the other side of the wagon, Slocum slithered like a snake over the side of the driver’s box and fell heavily to the ground. He saw Zeke’s horse pawing nervously at the ground. Without seeing the rider, Slocum knew what was happening. Zeke was going for his six-shooter.

Slocum fired three times, nicking the horse’s back leg with his last bullet. The horse stumbled and almost threw its rider. Slocum didn’t waste time cursing his bad luck. If Zeke had hit the ground, he would have been a sitting duck. Slocum was riled and in no mood to ask why the pair had wanted to bushwhack him.

They had. They should be punished for their crime. More than that, they had to be shown how deadly it was crossing John Slocum.

The mules in the team brayed noisily and tried to pull the wagon along. Slocum slid beneath the bed and saw how the heavy printing press caused the wood to bow. Arnot’s wagon wouldn’t be worth more than kindling by the time it got back to Nirvana.

“Feels like lead?” Slocum muttered to himself. “Taste lead!” He rolled out from under the wagon and came to his feet. Both men were ten yards off, obscured in darkness. Shooting their horses from under them would have been easy but Slocum knew he had only two rounds left. He squeezed off one and hit the silhouetted rider to the right. Swinging his Colt in a smooth arc, he got off his last round.

From the yelp of pain, he knew this shot had found a fleshy target. He wasn’t certain if he had shot the one called the Kid twice or if he had winged both him and Zeke once each.

He was out of ammo and had to wait to see what the bushwhackers would do. If they had been counting rounds, he would have a real fight on his hands. But Slocum was ready. He was still chewing nails and spitting tacks, he was so angry. Reaching behind, he whipped out the thick-bladed knife he kept sheathed at the small of his back.

Slocum thrust his blade back into its sheath, then took time to reload his Colt Navy. Only then did he tend to the shallow crease across his temple. He winced in pain but the wound was messier than it was serious. A fraction of an inch to the right and his brains would have splattered out across the desert sand. As it was, the hunk of lead had ignited more than pain in him.

He climbed into the driver’s box again, let a moment of vertigo pass, then “Gee-hawed!” the mules into pulling. Slocum couldn’t follow the tracks exactly because of the darkness, so he let the mules find their own way. He bounced around and had a crushing headache by the time he reached the main road into Nirvana, but anger kept him going.

The wagon creaked and protested every inch of the trip into town but Slocum pulled up in front of the Bugle a little after midnight. He frowned when he saw Joe Arnot in the office, working diligently to turn out yet another special edition.

“Good God Almighty, what happened to you!” exclaimed the editor. “I thought you were takin’ your sweet time. I never thought you were hurt!”

“I can get someone to unload it. You should go to the doc and get patched up. You want me to come with you?”

“I’m all right,” Slocum insisted. “You keep on with your paper.” He hesitated, then asked Arnot, “Don’t you ever sleep?”

Arnot grinned crookedly. “Not if there’s news to be gathered and sold. I want the full story on what happened to you. That’s goin’ to sell papers for a week!”

“You want to report this to Marshal Williams?” The editor laughed harshly. “You might as well go find the town drunk and let him know.”

“Hip pocket? Might be the marshal’s diggin’ around somewhere else in Jones’s pants, but you got it pegged. Williams is his man.”

Slocum left and found the marshal’s office easily enough. To his surprise, the kerosene lamp inside still shone brightly. He went in, even more surprised to see the lawman working at his desk, pawing through a stack of wanted posters. Slocum saw on the wall where Williams had taken down a few and was hunting for new ones to tack up.

He usually worried that an old poster bearing his likeness would surface, but this was a boomtown and any wanted posters would be recent. Slocum hadn’t been in Nevada Territory long enough to be on the lam.

“You look like you been pulled through a knothole backwards,” the marshal said. “Pull up a chair, take some weight off and tell me about it.”

Slocum hadn’t expected the marshal to even listen to him, much less invite a recitation of the story. Lawmen in mining towns tended to look at anything requiring their attention—or possibly putting their precious lives in jeopardy—with a jaundiced eye.

“I might recognize the one called Kid,” Slocum said. “I wasn’t ten feet from him when I fired. He’s likely to be wearing his arm in a sling for the rest of his life, too. But the leader, Zeke, I never got a good look at him.”

“That’s my job. Now, I ain’t supposed to have authority beyond the town limits, but I’ll see to these owlhoots and find them, no matter how far they run.”

Marshal Williams blinked, then smiled just a little. “I don’t intend to be a town marshal all my life. There’s a federal marshal’s job opening up in Carson City. Might be they promote a deputy, but that’d mean they’ll need to replace him.”

“A man’s got to have ambitions or he’s nuthin’,” Williams said. Slocum heard more to it. Williams followed J. Henry Jones around like a puppy dog for a reason. Jones must want Williams to be higher placed in the law enforcement ranks in Nevada for a reason. Could be, Jones had big plans and needed a sympathetic peace officer to help him along.

“Might be better to go to where you shot them,” Williams said. Slocum cursed himself for not thinking clearly. The marshal was right. Follow the bushwhackers’ blood trail from where Slocum had shot them.

“I’ll get my horse,” Slocum said. His gelding was rested up by now, after carrying him, Elizabeth and Gerald into town and could stay on the trail for a week, if need be.

“I don’t track in the dark. Unless you got cat blood, you don’t, either. Rest up for a couple hours. We leave just ’fore dawn, reach the spot where you winged the bastards and the sun will be just right for findin’ their tracks.”

“Thanks, Marshal,” Slocum said, leaving quickly. He wondered if he had misjudged the man. Maybe ambition did burn bright beneath the lawman’s tin badge. He went to the toolshed where he had spent the prior night and lay down, but sleep didn’t come.

An hour later, after tossing and turning and feeling his fury turn to smoldering embers, Slocum got up, saddled his horse and fetched supplies for the trail. He had no idea how long he would be gone since he wasn’t returning to Nirvana until the two road agents were dead and buried. And maybe he wouldn’t return then.

He felt gossamer chains beginning to bind that he didn’t like. Elizabeth and her son were better off without him, although he wondered if the woman intended to return to Boston. She had worked her way into the Bugle quickly enough, making Joe Arnot beholden to her for both printing press and reporting.

Slocum saw that the editor had finally gone to bed. Lights in the office were extinguished. He stopped for a moment, wondering if he ought to go to the back room and bid Elizabeth good-bye.

He mounted and rode slowly down the almost deserted street to stop in front of the marshal’s office. Again Williams surprised him. The lawman had saddled his horse, slung a bag of supplies over the rump and was ready for the trail.

Slocum said nothing to the marshal as he turned his gelding’s face and rode from Nirvana, going directly to the spot in the ravine where he had shot it out with the two bushwhackers. By the time he found the ruts in the softer ground along the way, the sun was lighting the ground just enough to make tracking possible.

“Yep, here’s where you winged one of them,” Williams said, pacing back and forth, studying the ground intently.

“Not out here. You said as much. I don’t rightly know where the sheriff of this country hangs his hat, but it’s not in Nirvana. A town marshal willing to go the extra mile is a rarity.”

“Slocum, you got a suspicious mind. It’s like I said. I’ve got a hankerin’ to be a federal marshal. Nirvana’s not much right now, but there’s more silver out in the ground nobody’s found yet. When they do, this’ll be the biggest town in all Nevada. I want to keep good order. I want to be noticed and I want to be a federal marshal so bad I can taste it.”

“I don’t make no secret of it. I count Mr. Jones as a good friend and strong supporter and I do what I can for him. He’ll make a good mayor.”

“Tom Calderon’s got other folks in mind to be marshal. Now let’s drop this. I read the signs as them owlhoots lightin’ out that way, back toward the cliff face.”

Slocum nodded once. He had reached the same conclusion. They rode in silence, both keeping their eyes peeled for any trace of the outlaws. Slocum wondered how any man could leak so much blood and why the pair of road agents seemed to meander all over the place. They finally got back to the road and worked their way up the steep hill but the men they trailed didn’t keep on along the road. Instead, they took a path overgrown with sage that Slocum had missed entirely when he had helped Benteen earlier. The narrow, rocky trail led deeper into the mountains.

“That, too, from the look of it.” Williams pointed to a spot just off the road. A pair of bare feet stuck out from behind a large boulder.

While the marshal examined the body of some feckless traveler who had fallen prey to outlaws, Slocum kept riding along the narrow trail. It opened into another valley. The presence of a dozen or more mines, tailings tumbling down the side of the slopes, told him how active this area was.

“You track them to one of the mines?” asked Williams, coming up behind. He saw Slocum’s expression. “That corpse was a miner I’d seen in Nirvana a time or two. Don’t rightly recollect the name. Done had his boots stolen, along with any money or dust he might have had with him.”

“Couldn’t tell, and it don’t much matter. I doubt the two what shot at you had anything to do with that crime. The miner looked to have been dead for a couple days.”

Slocum shrugged it off. This was dangerous country. He urged his gelding on, trying to pick out tracks amid the jumble of others along this trail. The wounded horse provided a steady trail of blood leading to the Argosy Mine, or so read a crudely lettered sign at the base of the dirt path going straight up to the yawning mouth of the mine.

The marshal shook his head. “Looks to be abandoned for quite a spell. That might make a good hideout for an entire gang. I shoulda had you see if you could identify either the Kid or this Zeke from posters. That’d give me some idea if they ran with a bigger crowd.”

The sharp scent of garbage mingled with giant powder reached Slocum’s nostrils as they made their way up the hill. He was alert but saw no sign of either outlaw. By the time he reached the mine shack, though, he was certain they were on the right trail.

“There. Out back,” Slocum said, pointing. He pulled his Winchester from the saddle sheath and cocked it. The horse trying to gnaw at the tough sage favored its right rear leg.

“Can’t blame me for wanting to see my name in all the newspapers,” Williams said, not taking offense. He drew his rifle and slid to the ground. The lawman motioned for Slocum to cover him as he went to the door, hesitated, then kicked it in. The marshal spun around the doorjamb as the door fell to the cabin floor.

Slocum already knew the man wasn’t going to find anything. He had spotted a fresh set of boot prints leading from the cabin, going directly to the mine.

“We might have our man cornered,” Slocum said. He hesitated at the mouth of the mine, an uneasy feeling beginning to gnaw at his guts.

Slocum considered this for a moment, then agreed. The Kid might have bandaged his shoulder wound enough not to leak blood. They had trailed Zeke’s horse and the steady trickle of blood from its injured hock. The horse had carried its rider this far, but Slocum believed it would have to be put down. There was no way the gunshot would heal if the horse kept walking on the leg.

Slocum checked the signs again, then went into the mine. The sun was warm on his back now but the heat vanished within a few feet as he made his way deeper into the side of the mountain.

“Light a candle or two,” Slocum said, taking several down from a shelf at eye level. “We can’t blunder along in the dark.”

“We might wait for the varmint to come out. What’s he doin’ comin’ in here? Maybe he’s so bad wounded he’s fixin’ to die. Animals go to a dark place to die.”

“I didn’t hit him,” Slocum said, but he wasn’t sure. Had he wounded the Kid twice and missed Zeke entirely, or was Zeke critically wounded? That could explain why the Kid had left his partner.

“That makes him doubly dangerous,” Williams said. The edge to his voice told Slocum the marshal’s courage was rapidly draining.

Slocum had to admire Williams’s courage, if not his good sense. No one in his right mind blundered along in a dark mine after a killer. No one without a real grudge.

Gripping his rifle stock a little tighter, Slocum began his descent into the darkness. Behind, the marshal held aloft a guttering candle that barely cast enough light for Slocum to be sure he wasn’t stepping into a deep shaft.

After a few minutes, they came to a branch. One part of the shaft curled off to the left while the main tunnel drove straight as an arrow into the mountain.

“Don’t see much trace the dust here’s been walked on, either,” the marshal said, grumbling under his breath.

Slocum started to point out a definite boot print, then dropped and called to the marshal to bring the candle closer.

“He walked in, then backed out, trying to keep his footprints in the ones he made going in. See how this one’s blurry, like it’s doubled at the edge?”