Slocum 297: Holding Down the Ranch

Five days after Tate McMahon sent out the telegrams, Drug Cassidy rode into Indian Springs.

Cassidy was a middle-sized man both in height and girth, plain-faced, middle-aged, and all around average. This had always stood him in good stead.

When he had a drink in the saloon or doffed his hat to a lady on the street, nobody ever suspected that such an ordinary fellow could be the famous Drugman Cassidy, fresh in from Colorado Springs, and casting an eye about for the man—or men—he’d been hired to kill. Or, more often these days, the range war he’d been hired to break up.

It was a living, he told himself. And after all, he wasn’t getting any younger. There were other problems, too.

McMahon hadn’t been very specific in his wire. The only part with any substance to it had been the part that offered five hundred dollars. A number like that carried a lot of weight with Drugman Cassidy. Especially since it didn’t sound like much work. He just had to pry one pesky fellow out of the way.

Of course, it seemed a little queer that McMahon couldn’t just hire somebody local to get rid of this pest. Either that, or pay him off. McMahon was the big fish in this part of the pond: At least, he was by the look of the signs on the storefronts that Cassidy passed.

He wandered slowly down the street, taking his time, picking his teeth, taking it all in, until he had ambled north all the way up Main Street, and then back south to the other end. What few side streets there were just seemed to have private houses on them, a few with feeble and struggling gardens, but most with nothing but unkept cactus and weeds.

There weren’t many folks on the street, but they all had a vaguely furtive look. Sort of haunted, but without their knowing it.

He’d been in enough towns—and seen enough people—like this to recognize it, even if the citizens didn’t. It was a town on the verge of being enclosed in a stranglehold, and he had a pretty good idea he was working for the man who was planning on doing the strangling.

He turned around and walked slowly back up to what he figured was Tate McMahon’s office, which was situated on the east side of the street. MCMAHON ENTERPRISES, read the sign.

The first thing he saw was Teddy LeGrande, and Cassidy nearly drew his weapon. What stopped him was the fact that there was a second man in the room, sitting behind the desk with his boots up on it, who said, “Mr. Cassidy, I presume?”

Cassidy flicked the tie-down off his gun, but didn’t draw it. Even though Teddy LeGrande surely deserved killing after that trick he’d pulled back in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Cassidy put a lid on it. He figured to reconnoiter the situation first.

Teddy LeGrande had roughly the same reaction as Cassidy. He was a big man, about six-feet-two, and lean and wiry as a whip. He was also stupid, something Cassidy figured anybody with a brain could tell just by looking at that big, dumb farmer face and those weak, dull, little eyes.

Pig eyes, he’d once heard his daddy call eyes like that. They looked more like two piss holes in the snow to Drug Cassidy.

Aside from those two beady black eyes, the rest of Teddy LeGrande was practically all white, or off-white. He had real pale skin, like a banker or a woman, and pale yellow hair. It was his affectation to dress all in white, too, which he thought made him look more fearsome.

Tate McMahon seemed to have fallen for all LeGrande’s window dressing, though, because he looked right disappointed when Cassidy, who knew he appeared as common as a mud fence, said, “Yeah, I’m Cassidy. You McMahon?”

After a split second, though, McMahon recovered. He took his damned boots off his desk and stood up, extending his hand. Cassidy took it, but only because his daddy had taught him to be polite to people who were going to pay him five hundred dollars.

“This feller you want,” said LeGrande. “Why’s he so big he needs two guns to take him out?”

It was the exact question Cassidy would have asked, had LeGrande not beaten him to it. Damn him, anyhow. And he’d taken to wearing a white leather jacket with long fringe on the sleeves, Cassidy realized.

Of all the goddamned stupid things! Didn’t it get in the way of his gun hand? Mayhap he just hadn’t noticed it yet.

Be a real shame if he was to find it out in the middle of a gunfight, Cassidy thought, and almost smiled.

“The gentleman in question—and I use the term with quite a bit of charity—has been through here before,” McMahon replied. “Cleaned out this town about three years back, before I got here. ’Course, that only opened it up for me.”

The boots went back up on the desk. This fellow sure thought highly of himself, didn’t he? There weren’t that many men who’d relax in the company of Teddy LeGrande.

But this fellow was cocky. Cassidy supposed that owning a town could make you that way. But owning a town couldn’t make you slick, the way Tate McMahon was. No, you had to have been born that way. McMahon was lean and of medium height, gray at the temples, with a short, neat haircut—he practically still had talc on his neck—and pale, pale blue eyes, like ice.

He was a nice-looking man. He could have walked right out of a hair tonic ad, in fact. But there was still just a hint of larceny around his eyes and a touch of deceit around his mouth. And Cassidy figured the man to be in a real good mood right now, what with both his hired guns turning up on the same day.

Those were the kind of eyes and mouth that could smile up a storm while the brain behind them was plotting to kill you.

All this, Drug Cassidy thought in the fraction of a second it took McMahon to raise his boots again and thump them down on the desk top.

However, he pushed all that aside, and concentrated on the job at hand. After all, five hundred bucks was five hundred bucks.

Cassidy said, “Get to the point, McMahon. Who’s this saddle bum you want shed of?”

McMahon laced his fingers behind his neck and grinned. “You boys ever hear of some sonofabitch, calls himself Slocum?”

During those five days, Slocum had been busy, too. He’d ridden out to the distant corner of the ranch where Jack Jamison had been bushwhacked and murdered, and gone over all the ground for a good hundred and fifty yards in every direction.

He turned up nothing but a couple of rifle shell casings and a piece of treated deer hide caught on a thorn. He stuck these in his pocket.

The casings were unusual, because they were engraved with a curious design, the origin of which Slocum didn’t recognize. They were a sort of panther’s head, crudely tapped in and not quite matching from one casing to the other. Somebody was marking his casings after he bought the ammunition, because it sure wasn’t a factory stamp.

He hadn’t expected to find anything more. He hadn’t even expected to find those shell casings. Jack Jamison had been shot from a distance, Becky had told him.

And, from what he had seen, by a man who had been lurking up in the rocks.

He’d been a sniper, Slocum decided, and a good one at that. He’d picked his spot well, and probably lain there quietly for Jack Jamison to ride into range. Slocum had been an assassin himself back during the war, trained to shoot from the boughs of faraway trees at solitary victims.

He hadn’t had much taste for it, although he was good. He was the best.

Of course, rifles back then didn’t have special scopes the way they did nowadays, but Slocum was a good enough shot himself to see that whoever had killed Jack Jamison had to be a contract man, brought in just for that job.

It wasn’t the sort of thing an ordinary man, even an ordinary hired killer, could pull off. The sniper was probably long gone by now. He’d probably left the second he got paid.

All he’d left behind was that little chunk of leather and two empty casings.

Becky had said that she hadn’t loved Jack. At least, not in the flowery poetry and pounding hearts kind of way.

She said he’d been good to her, which Slocum figured meant that at least he didn’t beat her or make her sleep in the barn.

No, Becky said she hadn’t loved him, but Slocum didn’t think that was entirely true. He didn’t see a gal like Becky marrying for something so common as her economic betterment.

Besides, she’d inherited the Bar S from her daddy. It was why she’d come to the Territory in the first place. She hadn’t needed the money and she hadn’t needed a white knight. At least, once Slocum had got rid of Roy Wheeler for her. And for the whole town of Indian Springs, as a matter of fact.

No, she’d had to have some sort of love for Jack Jamison in order to marry him.

Slocum couldn’t decide how he felt about that. Why, sometimes he got so pure jealous of that dead man that if Jamison had still been walking, Slocum could have killed him all over again! Or at least punched him in the jaw.

Sometimes he went mushy as a hound dog pup with gratitude, thinking about how his Becky had been taken care of after he left. Those episodes didn’t last too long, though.

And it wasn’t as if he wouldn’t leave again, once he got this thing figured out.

He’d talked with Becky at length, and he’d talked with the hands, who he learned had just come back from moving the herd down to the south, to the winter grazing lands. Then, with Becky, he’d ridden down to the old Bar S, read that chicken-eating cowhand the riot act, and quite literally kicked him out of the house.

The cowhand had been in his long johns at the time. Slocum had enjoyed that part.

She had showed him her goats, all fifty-plus of them. He’d shaken hands with all the help, from the men who tended the flock to the men who milked the goats and made the cheese in the long, adobe building out back of the house. They were all new since his time, and he hadn’t recognized a one of them.

Becky took him down to see the aging room they had cut out of the hard desert floor. And there, fifteen feet below the ground, amid hundreds of small, fragrant cheeses wrapped in gauze and hanging from the ceiling beams, he’d made love to her.

But today he was going to take a ride into town and have a look around. He wanted to figure out just what Tate McMahon had up his sleeve for the next time. He knew it wouldn’t be a forced marriage again. At least, not right away. McMahon would have to get rid of him first.

Slocum figured that there should be a few folks in town who remembered him fondly—or at least who wouldn’t shoot him on sight, he thought with a quick grin. He wanted to know about anybody who was new in town.

Any further information he could dig up on Tate McMahon would be a bonus, too.

He saddled up Concho, pausing to admire the gelding once more. Damn, he was a nice piece of horseflesh, especially when you hadn’t really seen him for a spell. Slocum hadn’t seen him that much, aside for occasional rides here and there. Most of his time had been taken up with Becky: with touching her, with making love to her, with just plain looking at her.

“Well, I reckon that’s important, too,” he said with a grin, and mounted up. “You understand, don’t you, old son?”

There was Pete, leading his horse, tacked up and ready to go, out of the barn.

“I’m comin’ with you,” Pete announced, and swung up into the saddle.

“No, you’re not,” Slocum said. They’d been through this before. Pete was a hell of a man, even though he’d acted a little on the addled side that first day Slocum had ridden into the S Bar J. He was honest, for one thing, and he was a good hand with stock. And a gun.

“I’m comin’,” Pete said again, and reined his mount over to where Slocum sat Concho. “Miss Becky says go, and I’m goin’.” He whoaed his bay up, shoulder to shoulder with Concho.

Slocum sighed. He hated to do it, but he would. He said, “You ain’t gonna take no for an answer, are you?”

“Sorry, ol’ buddy,” said Slocum, and suddenly swung an arm over the space between them to punch Pete in the side of the jaw.

Like he figured, Pete went right off his horse. There were some things you just couldn’t help but remember about a fellow, and a glass jaw was one of them.

“Dammit, Slocum!” The screen door banged and he heard Becky yelling at him.

He didn’t look back, although he knew she was running toward him with those pretty hands balled into fists and her mouth set into a line.

Instead, he tipped his hat to the unconscious Pete, whose horse was nuzzling him as he lay on the ground, and rode out, heading for the crossroad that would take him to town.