Slocum 382

Slocum stirred and reached out. Audrey wasn’t beside him. He sat up and reached for his six-shooter, but there wasn’t any cause. She was hunkered down beside the fire. When Slocum had lit it, the fire was low with only a few twigs to fuel it. Audrey had found enough wood to stoke it up and dry her clothing.

“From walking through the rain,” she said. Audrey turned, brushed back tangled hair from her eyes, and said, “So how do we find the gold?”

“Jesse was on his way to Encantado,” he said. “He wouldn’t stash the gold in town, though. He told Zeke to put the symbols in the other cave to tell somebody else where the gold would be kept.”

“So Zeke didn’t know what the cipher meant?” Audrey nodded slowly as she thought on this. “But Jesse’s not riding around New Mexico with the gold.”

“This was a small amount of what he likely has. The real question is who is he giving directions to? Who’s going to decipher the code on that cave wall and find their way to the gold?”

“He’s recruiting men steadily now. I got a telegram from my editor in Kansas City saying some of Jesse’s cousins are on the way here. Or at least they’ve left Missouri and are riding west. Where else would they be going?”

“So he’s making sure his family knows where the gold is.” Slocum dressed slowly, aware of Audrey watching him closely. He strapped down his gun belt before he said anything more. “Is this like a last will and testament—his legacy?”

“He’s a shrewd man,” Audrey said. “He might want Frank or one of his cousins to continue the revolt if he’s killed.”

“Jesse thinks he’ll live forever,” Slocum said. It was possible that Jesse James had changed over the years since he had ridden with him, but Slocum doubted it. The gold was intended to pay off soldiers like Berglund and others throughout the territory. Jesse might give them the key to decipher the code so they could retrieve the gold and perform their duties to the Knights of the Golden Circle. He might even be leaving the precious metal for gunrunners as middlemen in the illicit trade of selling rifles to the Indians.

Slocum started to ask her about the stack of wanted posters she had shown to Sheriff Narvaiz, then reconsidered. He didn’t want to know the answer. She might have shot Zeke to protect her investment in Slocum. Zeke was a newcomer to the outlaw trail and didn’t have a price on his head. For all Slocum knew, the wanted poster Audrey had only paid for John Slocum being delivered alive and kicking—so he could kick his last at the end of a rope.

“I can be many things to many men, can’t I?” Audrey flounced around, kicking at the fire and looking out into the bright, clear spring day. “My editor ought to be waiting for a new story from me anytime now.”

“You’d steal what’s already been stolen?” The thought amused Slocum because that was the way he considered the gold. It didn’t rightly belong to Jesse because he had stolen it, so stealing from a thief made it all right to keep the gold for himself.

“I was on my way there when I came across you at the wrong end of a shotgun. If I can decipher the location, I—we—can wait for Jesse to leave it unguarded and then take it for ourselves.”

Slocum only nodded. Jesse wouldn’t post a guard on it. Why go to the trouble of hiding it if you kept sentries looking over it? What Slocum worried about more was Audrey claiming she wasn’t able to figure out the message, then going to retrieve the gold herself.

Slocum kicked out the fire, took the hobbles off the horses, and led them outside into the bright morning sunlight. The day was about perfect for riding and it took them almost no time to return to the cave where the encrypted message had been left. Slocum noted how Audrey made a point of lifting her chin and pretending not to see what the coyotes had done to Zeke as they rode past the outlaw’s body. In another day there wouldn’t be any flesh remaining on his bones. In a month, even the bones would be scattered and Zeke would be returned to the earth.

It was more fitting a burial than he deserved. Slocum still pictured the huge bores of the shotgun pointed at him. He touched the scab forming on the side of his head where the single pellet had almost killed him. Zeke’s ambition had far outstripped his friendship.

“Abandoned,” Slocum told her. He dismounted and looked around. The heavy rain had scrubbed the ground clean. No one had entered the cave since the rain had stopped sometime around dawn.

“We should be careful about leaving our footprints,” Audrey said. “Is there any way we can get in and out without signaling that we’ve been here?”

“We can walk along the rocks almost to the cave mouth. If you jump, you can miss the dirt right in front of the cave and then inside there’s nothing but rocky floor.”

“Well, all right,” Audrey said, dubious of the scheme. She watched Slocum traverse the rocks, then gather his legs under him and launch through the air. He missed the rocky part by inches and left a deep heel print in the mud.

“Wait a minute,” he said, kneeling and using a flat rock to move mud around and smooth over the depression he’d made. It took only a few seconds but if they had tromped into the cave and then out, even stepping in their own tracks as they retreated, it would have been the work of an hour to erase the prints. Even worse, the effort would be obvious to anyone noticing how the mud had formed in ridges and ripples from the wind. The careful work he did on the heel print would be apparent, too, if someone looked but they’d have to go over the ground far more carefully to find his handiwork.

“Are you ready, John?” Audrey stood on the same rock and chewed her lower lip as she concentrated on the jump. “Here I come!”

She arced through the air but would have come down short of the rocky cave floor where Slocum stood if he hadn’t reached out, caught her around her trim waist, and swung her about to lightly set her down.

“That was quite the experience,” she said, trying to pat her hair into place and failing. She smoothed her skirt and then went directly to the message written on the wall.

Slocum saw how water had seeped into the cave and tiny rivulets had blurred part of the coded message. He stood back, lit a lucifer, and looked at the entire wall, trying to decipher what Zeke had written. He finally gave up. Audrey muttered to herself, ran her fingers over some of the more indistinct symbols, and finally turned to him, a smile on her lips.

“I’ve figured it out. Many of the symbols are common to other Knights of the Golden Circle caches. The only spot where I had to work at all hard to figure it out was here.” She tapped the spot were many of the symbols were smudged from the rainwater dripping over them. “This gives the location.”

“I was right about Jesse not keeping the gold with him. He’s not the kind to spend the night on the trail in a downpour. He’d want a roof over his head and a bottle of tequila in his hand.”

“So you’re worried about my safety? How sweet.” Audrey went to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You don’t have to. After all, I saved your life.”

Slocum wasn’t sure what she was saving it for. She might need him to fight off Jesse’s gunmen so she could get to the gold, or she might be saving him for the sheriff. He couldn’t discount the possibility that Audrey planned both. Find the gold, then turn him in to the sheriff so she could both collect the reward on his head and take the gold for herself.

“We know the trail,” he said. “The hardest part will be leaving the cave so nobody’ll know we were here.” And he was right. Scrambling up the rocks left signs he couldn’t hope to erase, but they were in such places that only someone looking for them would notice.

The ride back across the hills went fast, but Slocum had miscalculated how long it would be for Zeke’s bones to vanish. As they rode past the spot where the outlaw had died, no trace remained. Some larger predator had dragged off the body. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .

By late afternoon they approached a low hill that seemed to just pop out of the ground. It was covered with lush grass and more than a few trees, mostly piñon and juniper. It didn’t look like the sort of place where a cave might just open up, and it wasn’t.

“Buried,” Audrey said in disgust. “That must be what they’ve done with it. But it’ll be easier to find since the turned dirt will be fresh.”

“Not that easy after last night’s rain,” Slocum pointed out. “But they might not have buried it in the way you think.” He pointed to a dilapidated windmill.

“That’s about the right spot for the gold,” Audrey said. “But why would Jesse leave anything at such an obvious spot?”

Slocum dismounted and let his horse work on eating as much of the juicy grass as possible while he went to the windmill. He looked up and saw that several rungs nailed to one leg were broken off.

“Up there?” Audrey followed his gaze skyward. “That seems crazy, but the rungs were broken off recently. See how the exposed wood on the leg isn’t as weathered as spots above and below?”

Slocum tested the structure. It was rickety but strong enough to hold his weight. Working his way up the wooden leg, taking advantage of the strongest rungs and avoiding putting his weight on those likely to give way, he finally reached the splintery platform next to the windmill blades. The gears were broken and the assembly wouldn’t turn to track the wind, but he saw how the long shaft down to the well was bent.

Slocum looked at the broken boards and saw no place for gold to be hidden, yet someone had crawled up here recently. He stood and looked around. From here he could see the outskirts of Encantado. Maybe Jesse had sent one of his men up here to act as lookout while the gold was hidden elsewhere. Hanging on to the blades, Slocum looked down to where Audrey shielded her eyes to peer up at him.

Slocum lowered his gaze from the horizon to the area around the base of the windmill, near the spot where the shaft had gone into the ground to pump up water from the well below.

He watched as Audrey hastily began moving the rocks he had spotted. The dirt around the stones had been cut up not too long back. From ground level it wasn’t as obvious, but from up here he saw the difference in color of the soil immediately. Leaning farther out, he saw Audrey take the final rock from the cairn. Her shoulders slumped as she sat back on her heels.

Slocum worked his way down the leg and dropped the final few feet. He pulled a few splinters from his callused hands as he went to the hole in the ground where Audrey had returned to paw around in the mud at the bottom. She found something and held it up.

“So fast? There wasn’t time for anyone to see what Zeke had scrawled. We would have seen evidence! We would have passed them.”

“Might be that’s only one place telling where to find the gold. Jesse might be advertising this particular place all over.”

“Could be,” Audrey said morosely, turning the coin over and over in her hand. She wiped off the mud and stared at the shining coin. “You want it?”

“Things are likely to move pretty quick,” Slocum said. “If we wait, we’ll be in the middle of it.” He was afraid he was all too right about that. Jesse knew that he had to move fast once he began his rebellion. The longer he waited, the sooner the Army would send troops in from the rest of the country to crush his uprising. The more territory he controlled, the less likely the U.S. government was to try to pry him loose. If he commanded a significant number of troopers from Fort Union, that made his seizure of New Mexico Territory all the more dangerous.

“You’ll end up dead,” Slocum told her. “He’s got a body-guard around him all the time. I doubt Frank leaves his side, and tangling with Charlie Dennison is a damned sight more dangerous than dealing with a tenderfoot like Zeke.”

Slocum considered what he could do and finally said, “A few hours after you. If I can find Jesse, I’ll settle scores with him.”

“I know, but a snake without a head isn’t quite as dangerous. Frank James is a clever outlaw but he’s not as devious as Jesse—he doesn’t have the skill getting men to follow him on crazy missions like this.”

“You don’t get yourself killed, John.” She kissed him quickly, then mounted and headed back over the pass through the hills on her way to Las Vegas.

Slocum watched her go, worrying that she might run into some of the gang. Then he decided whatever was going on right now would command all of Jesse’s attention. If Jesse was involved, the rest of his gang was, too. He poked about in the hole hunting for more dropped coins but found nothing. Replacing the stones over the hole gave him time to think. When he’d finished, he knew what he had to do and where to go.

He rode south to Encantado, entering the town like his head was on a spring. He tried to look everywhere at the same time, worrying about snipers shooting him out of the saddle. The cantina Jesse had used as a headquarters looked empty. For all that, the entire town was eerily quiet. He dismounted and poked his head inside. Cigar smoke and stale beer made his mouth water. He needed a drink and he needed a smoke, but he called out to the barkeep seated at the back of the long, narrow room.

“Where’d they go?” Slocum saw no amount of questioning was going to pry the answer from the bartender. It might well be that he didn’t know since Jesse had no reason to share such information with a man who did nothing more than pour liquor and draw warm beer.

He went outside and caught sight of a couple people sneaking a look at him from behind curtains. Slocum swung into the saddle and rode south another mile before he found the road curving up from Santa Fe. Here he looked in the direction of that town and then twisted around and tried to make out the tracks in the road. The rain had done too good a job of wiping away any old tracks and the new were indistinct.

Having to choose between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, he decided upon Las Vegas, wondering if Audrey being there had anything to do with his decision. He hoped not. She was still a burr under his saddle and would be until he figured out if she was intent on turning him in to Sheriff Narvaiz for any reward on his head.

He rode slowly, letting his horse pick its way past mud puddles and deeper potholes in the road. After a couple miles he urged his horse to greater speed because he saw more evidence that a large number of riders had passed this way recently. Jesse was making his bid. Slocum knew it.

When he came within a half mile of the outskirts of Las Vegas, he heard gunfire. He galloped forward and saw buildings on fire. Then came a curtain of gunshots that took him back to the war and all-out battles.