Slocum 329

Miranda pried Abel’s corpse off and slithered out from under him and off the bed. She was filled with conflicting emotions, among them rage, hurt, sorrow, umbrage, and horror. But most of all, rage.

She ran to her own room to grab a robe, then ran to the kitchen and out to the cold-keep porch. Carmelita sat on the floor, bound hand and foot, trying to saw through her ropes—without much luck—with a corner of a shelf filled with jelly jars.

And then she took in Miranda’s hastily donned robe, and the torn dress sticking out from beneath it. “Madre de Dios,” Carmelita wept as Miranda cut the ropes from her hands and feet. “What did he do? What has happened? I heard a shot!”

Instinctively, Miranda channeled her own burgeoning hysteria into something useful—getting Carmelita calmed down.

She helped the older woman to her feet, saying, “It’s all right now, Carmelita. It could have been really bad, but it’s all right. I took care of it.”

She took Carmelita out through the kitchen to the parlor, and sat next to her on the couch, enfolding the older woman’s shoulders in her arms.

“But what happen?” Carmelita continued, her head twisting like a nervous hen’s. “Where is your uncle? What was that shot? I hope he was not shooting in the house again! The last time, he murdered my best figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe!”

Miranda opened her mouth to explain, but just then someone started banging on the front door. “Come in!” she shouted.

Miranda recognized the voice. It was Berto Rodriguez, one of the Bar C’s older hands. She called, “Just a minute, Berto,” and stood up, patting Carmelita’s shoulder. “I’ll be right back,” she whispered.

“Sorry, Miss Miranda, ma’am,” he said while he regained his balance. “We thought we heard a shot, out at the bunkhouse, I mean. Just wanted to make sure everything was all right . . .”

His eyes slid down to her chest, and Miranda pulled her robe tighter. However, the thin garment couldn’t disguise the bunched and ripped fabric beneath.

“Berto,” she said, getting him to focus on her face again, “I’m afraid I’ve killed Uncle Abel. The body’s down the hall, in my papa’s old room.”

She offered no further information, just sat down next to Carmelita once more, and comforted her.

“B-but, Miss Miranda!” Berto stammered. “What the hell happened? I mean heck. Jesus Christ! Abel’s dead?”

Berto was getting himself worked up into quite a state, and Miranda finally shouted, “Alberto!” When he quieted, she went on, “Berto, it’s all right, now. He tried to . . . force himself on me, and I had no recourse but to shoot him.”

“Es verdad,” added Carmelita shakily. “He come in the house and tie me up like he knew what he was going to do to Miss Miranda. He had the face of el Diablo himself! I never see him look like that before!” She crossed herself, bowed her head, and began to mumble a prayer in Spanish.

“You shot him dead, Miss Miranda?” asked Berto, who apparently couldn’t quite grasp the situation. “All the way dead? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Berto,” she said, weary of the whole ordeal, and growing a little dulled to it, too. “He’s as dead as a hammer, I’m afraid. Go and take a look.”

At last he stomped down the hall. Miranda listened to his bootsteps as he turned into her father’s room, and then heard Berto’s exclamation of “¡Madre de Dios! Right between the eyes!”

She felt Carmelita’s arm come round her shoulders, and realized that the dynamics of the situation had changed.

Carmelita hugged her and whispered, “You are very brave, so very brave. He was the pig, el puerco! My poor, poor baby. I bring you a brandy, yes?”

As Carmelita stood up, Miranda said, “Get one for yourself, too, Carmelita.”

Slocum moved slowly, taking advantage of the infrequent break in the cover of clouds to speed up, but mostly he let Cougar just plod along at his own pace.

The bad thing was that Abel would come back to the Bar C in the morning, and they’d have to stall him again about Miranda. But the good thing, he thought, smiling to himself, was that she was waiting for him back at the ranch.

When the clouds finally moved past the moon again, he nearly broke into song. He nudged Cougar into a soft jog, and the gelding leapt at the chance to speed up a little. Slocum rounded a bend—and ran right into Marcus and Foley’s camp.

Both of them brought their guns up directly, and Slocum was so downright surprised to find them there that he reined in Cougar and just sat in the saddle, speechless.

But he recovered himself in a moment, and said, “You boys draw on everybody who rides up on you, or is this special, just for me?”

Foley smirked, but holstered his gun. Marcus, Slocum noted, was a little slower to respond. But he holstered his gun, just the same.

Slocum said, “Mind if I step down and have a cupa coffee?” There was a pot sitting on the edge of their small fire.

“Only if you got your own cup,” snarled Marcus. “We don’t carry no tea sets for company.”

Slocum forced himself to keep a straight face, and said, “Yeah, I got my own.”

He swung down and dug through his saddlebag for his tin cup, then knelt beside the fire and poured himself a mugful.

It was all Slocum could do to keep from laughing out loud. Foley had missed his true calling—he really ought to go on the stage.

Slocum sat on his heels and sipped at the brew. It was pretty bad, but better than nothing for a man who’d been wandering in the dark for a few hours and had given the last of his water to his horse.

“It’s liquid horseshit and you know it,” remarked Marcus. “Foley never could make decent coffee. Or anything else, for that matter.”

Slocum had just noticed something decidedly odd about Foley’s shirt, and asked, “What’d you tussle with, Foley? Looks like you tore your sleeve up good.”

Foley didn’t answer, but Marcus barked out a laugh and said, “He tangled with a badger! Damn near took his arm off, too. Would have, if I hadn’t shot it.”

Now, how in the world a badger had managed to get from the ground and clear up on Foley’s arm—while Foley was probably on horseback, to boot—was a puzzlement.

Slocum said, “You boys got flyin’ badgers around here? Anything I should be worried about?”

Foley snapped, “Don’t be a fool, Slocum! It done attacked me on the ground!”

“He had his arm up the den at the time,” Marcus said, and laughed again.

Foley with his arm up a badger den? This time, Slocum couldn’t hold back his laughter.

“What the hell were you doin’ that for?” he asked, once he caught his breath. “You were just askin’ for it, Foley.”

He watched as a warning look flickered over Marcus’s face, directed at Foley, and then Foley’s expression changed.

Foley turned to Slocum and said, “Just cause you laughed, I ain’t a-gonna tell you. So there.” He looked back at Marcus, who sent him a nod, as if he’d done the right thing.

Slocum tossed back the last of his bad coffee, then stood up. “As appealin’ as you make it sound, Marcus, I believe I’ll be off before we turn this into a slumber party. Appreciate the coffee, though.”

With that, he stepped back up on Cougar, tucked his mug down into his saddlebag again, and reined away from the fire.

Actually, he half-expected a slug in his back, but it appeared that these boys weren’t going to be so bold at the moment. Slocum figured that there weren’t any trees for them to hide behind, and chuckled softly.

The moon had come out again, and looked like it was going to remain free of cloud cover for a good time, so Slocum had no qualms about setting Cougar off in a jog. He could see pretty well, and the ground was flat.

He couldn’t help but wonder, though, how in the heck Foley had managed to get his arm clear up a badger’s den—and why! He could think of a thousand other things he’d rather do for sport.

He also wondered why he hadn’t run across Abel, or any sign of him. Frankly, when he’d first stumbled into Marcus and Foley’s camp, he’d half-expected Abel Cassidy to stand up from the shadows with his rifle raised.

But then thoughts of Miranda wiped the badger’s den—and Abel—from his mind.

Berto had fetched Dilly, another trusted hand, and swearing an oath not to tell a living soul, the two of them had moved Uncle Abel’s body to his own room until the morning, when they would bury him.

But Miranda still had to go back to the scene of her ordeal—and his death. There were the papers to retrieve, and the bag, and the little pipestone pieces to be gathered up.

The papers had Uncle Abel’s blood on them, and she set them aside on her nightstand to dry. And hopefully, the blood would magically vanish. She could dream, couldn’t she?

She sat down on her bed and spread out the pipestone pieces, but couldn’t make heads or tails of them. The bag she pulled onto her lap and opened.

She didn’t move for quite a while. She couldn’t take her eyes off its contents.

Finally, gingerly, lest it evaporate as she was wishing Abel’s blood would, she reached inside.

She began to count it out, her eyes twinkling while a smile danced around the corners of her mouth.

Marcus was filling the coffeepot this time. He could put up with a lot from Foley, but one pot of his stinking coffee was all he could stand.

He set the pot on the fire, then leaned back. Things weren’t going very well. First, they’d had to kill Jefferson, then Crone—well that had been an accident, sort of—and now it looked like they’d have to take out Slocum, too.

He didn’t know that he was up to plugging Slocum, not unless they caught him out in the open with his back turned again.

Back in the old days, Slocum had been nothing but solid speed with a gun, and if a man listened to the stories going around, he had only gotten faster with the passage of years.

Marcus sure knew that Foley couldn’t do it. Not a prayer of it from close up and certainly not from the distance Marcus planned. There was no way either of them would face off with Slocum!

Plus, they were going to have to stop killing horses pretty soon. Abel was making some awful strong sounds about it.

Well, to be honest, threats. When they’d killed that good roping horse of his, he’d nearly busted a blood vessel.

Well, how was Marcus to know it was a good horse? It looked just like all the others out there on the range.

And they were no closer to the stash than they’d been when they arrived at the Bar C. Foley was getting so desperate that early this evening, he’d stuck his arm clear up to the elbow into a hole he thought might be a hiding place. He yanked that arm out fast, though, when he touched hair instead of gold, and that badger came ripping out right along with him.

But Marcus had shot it, saving both Foley’s arm and gaining them supper at the same time.

He started to chuckle again, thinking about the look on Foley’s face. Pure terror. And then surprise and anger, as Marcus waited to shoot the damned thing until it had raked its way clear up to Foley’s shoulder and was closing in on his ear.

“Nothin’,” replied Marcus. “Either go to sleep or check to see if that coffee’s ready yet. I got no time to talk. I’m thinkin’.”

“Fine by me,” Foley said, sitting up. “Don’t want to talk to you neither, you coward.”

“Watch what you say, there, Foley,” Marcus barked. “What call do you have to call me a coward, anyway?”

Foley’s eyes narrowed. “He was sittin’ right there! Right there, Marcus! You coulda plugged him easy. I’m getting tired of this shooting from the trees shit! Makes me feel all crawly in my skin, you know? Like I’m yeller, too!”

Actually Marcus knew exactly how Foley felt, but he wasn’t about to admit it.

“You heard me. I’ll take care of Slocum in my own damn time. If you don’t wanna wait for it, then get goin’. Conversation closed.”

Foley stared at him for a long minute, his face torn—as was usual in these moments of confrontation between them—between anger and fear.

And then, instead of answering, Foley simply lay down in his blanket and rolled away, his back to the fire.