Slocum #396 : Slocum and the Scavenger Trail (9781101554371) (12 page)

Melissa was gone. Getting her back as fast as he could was all that mattered.

“I go with you, Slocum. You owe us, but she’s my sister.”

“She accused you of being a drunk, and you called her a trollop.”

“So? We’re always chewing on each other like a dog does on an old, familiar shoe. We’re siblings. Calling each other names is something we’ve done all our lives.”

Some families were like that, but Slocum’s hadn’t been that way at all. His older brother had taught him to hunt and shoot, and his pa had shown him every trick a farmer needed to bring in a decent crop, no matter what the conditions. His ma had been a good cook and was respected at the church meetings. She had taught Slocum and his brother how to read and write. There had been some arguments among them, but his pa had always set them straight.

Most of all, Slocum and his brother were inseparable, standing up for each other against all comers.

He touched the pocket watch and missed Robert anew. He had died during the senseless Pickett’s Charge and had
never lived to see much beyond the Slocum farm that wasn’t battlefield.

“I’ll see what mules are in the corral. There’s only the one merchant selling them.”

“I’ll come along,” Stephen said, showing as much hardheadedness as any mule.

Rather than argue the point, Slocum went to the merchant’s corral and checked the swaybacked beasts of burden penned there. He expected to find the mule that had once belonged to Clem Baransky and which he had bought a second time, but none of these miserable creatures was close to it in appearance.

“They might not have gotten back yet,” Stephen said. Then he muttered, “Sorry, not thinking. They were ahead of us on the trail and riding, unless they kept on going. How are we going to find Melissa?”

Slocum didn’t want to believe that the scavengers hadn’t returned to this town with the stolen mules and supplies, but it didn’t seem so. That meant they had gone directly to Trueheart’s hideout. He hadn’t shared that knowledge with Stephen because he didn’t want to deal with the young man insisting on an all-out attack to rescue his sister. Getting into the town would require using the plugged silver dollar again. It wouldn’t be hard to fix one for Stephen, but Slocum didn’t want to worry about what he might do once in Trueheart’s stronghold.

And what he said might be right. The prospectors might have pushed on up the trail with Melissa as their prisoner. They could sell her in the goldfields for as much as they could get grubbing in the dirt for gold nuggets.

He didn’t share this notion with Stephen either.

“We should look around town for her,” Slocum said. “You want to start at the far end and work toward the center and I’ll do the same from the west side?”

“Splitting up will cut the time finding her in half,” Stephen said, nodding. “How do you let me know if you find her?”

“There might be gunplay.” Slocum eyed the way Stephen pressed his hand into a pocket. He might have a hideout gun there. “We need to keep a low profile, or we will all get put into early graves.”

“I won’t let those sons of bitches keep her one second longer than necessary.”

“Then we need to start hunting for her.”

Slocum spoke to thin air. Stephen was already off to hunt building by building for his sister. After an instant of apprehension at what the young man might do, Slocum heaved a sigh of relief at getting rid of him. His gut said that the scavengers—and Melissa—had not returned here. To rescue her he had to get to the center of Trueheart’s outlaw empire.

He considered taking one of the mules and riding out, but he needed supplies. All that was locked up in the merchant’s store. He started for the back door when he heard two men arguing.

Slocum stepped into shadow and pressed against the store wall as two men passed him less than ten feet away. They never noticed him spying on them.

“Got to get back right away. Going to be a big shipment soon.”

“Ah, Mackley, Trueheart’s been sayin’ that fer a month.”

“This time it’s for real. Ever since he got that new guy, production’s up.”

“Why do you think he’s gonna cut us in on this? We been with him for six months. You see how he treats everybody.”

“That’s why we got to stay close.”

Slocum edged along the wall and got a view of the two men beside the corral. The man with his back to him was a stranger, but Mackley’s ugly face was identifiable in the dim starlight now that he had heard the man named.

“You ain’t sayin’ we ought to double-cross him, are you? Remember what happened to—”

“You’d prefer him to double-cross
you
? Wise up. If shipments
start going out along the new road, there’ll be some problems. All I’m sayin’ is that we take advantage of them.”

“I don’t follow. What are you sayin’?”

Mackley let out a hiss that sounded like steam from a locomotive.

“What if a wagon went over the edge of the road?”

“Like that first bend?”

“I was thinking farther down the road, the sharp turn not a mile from the bottom. That’s better because we wouldn’t have to move the shipment—or what we take out of it—very far.”

“You always were a thinker, Mackley.”

“With Hersh gone, we need to find somebody else who can get us a wagon. Ain’t nobody here in this damned town who can do it.”

The two descended into a discussion of whom to trust and whom to double-cross. Slocum waited patiently until the two men led the mules from the corral and disappeared westward.

He had a decision to make. It wasn’t hard. Slocum set off after the pair of scavengers, hand resting on the butt of his six-shooter.

Slocum hesitated trailing Mackley and his henchman when he heard a gunshot from the main street. When he looked back, Mackley had disappeared. He was torn between going after Mackley and maybe not finding him and sticking like flypaper to the scavenger he still saw. More gunshots spooked the outlaw. He swung onto the back of the decrepit mule and put his heels to its bony flanks. It shot off like a rocket, but Slocum knew it wouldn’t keep up that pace long.

He dashed after the departing man and saw him going eastward along the main road into town. As he had thought, the road Trueheart had built to his hidden mountain town came down the far side of the mountain away from Almost There and the trail up to Desolation Pass. Mackley would be going back soon, too, because the shipments were to begin soon. What those might be, Slocum didn’t know for certain but had a good idea.

He slowed and finally stopped at the edge of town. Stephen prowled about in the town hunting for his sister. Slocum ought to let him know he was leaving town, but that would create a new row. He had pacified the young man a
little by allowing him to begin a search, but Melissa Baransky wasn’t in this town.

She was up on the mountainside in Trueheart’s. If she was alive at all.

More gunshots sounded, convincing Slocum he shouldn’t return and get embroiled in the squabble. Prospectors were like cowboys when it came to letting off steam. They’d fight hugely, drink even more grandly, and then fight again. Afterward, they’d pick up their battered carcasses and return to their backbreaking work. In the case of the prospectors, they were convincing themselves it was worth the danger to crawl over Desolation Pass into a certified gold strike.

Stride long, Slocum started after the man on the mule. The clouds promised more rain. Worse, they kept the night plunged into almost total darkness, but Slocum didn’t track by sight alone. At night it was easy to miss visual clues that would be immediately obvious in the light of day. Instead, he kept sniffing the air and listening hard for sounds ahead. The only one on the road at this time of night would be his quarry.

For a half hour he walked at a pace that had to match, if not surpass, that of the scrawny mule. But it was his keen hearing that alerted him to rocks tumbling and the mule wheezing somewhere off the road to his left. Backtracking, he moved slowly until he found a spot where more than a mule or two had left the main road.

Wagons had come this way, cutting into the embankment. The heavy rain had wiped out all wagon wheel imprints, but this worked in his favor now. He found fresh tracks in the mud leading up into the hills on the eastern slope of Desolation Mountain.

Within a hundred yards of hiking uphill, he found himself on a roadbed in better condition than the main road into town. It sloped upward, was broad, and best of all, carried one set of tracks about right if left by a mule.

He doubted the rider ahead could leave the road—there
was nowhere to go other than up. The trail on the western slope of the mountain showed many branches because of the prospectors hunting spots for an easier climb and even because of the scavengers coming from Trueheart’s stronghold in such numbers. But here? There was one road and one alone.

Slocum puffed and panted when the road turned even steeper. He wondered how a loaded wagon could ever make it up this grade, even with a team of six or eight mules pulling.

“Oxen,” he gasped out as he kept walking. “Might be the teams are oxen.”

He hadn’t seen any of the animals in Trueheart’s town but there hadn’t been that much time to look around, and he certainly hadn’t been looking for oxen.

A sudden bend in the road made him stop and look over the verge. A slow smile came to his lips. This had to be the place where Mackley intended to dump the contents of a shipment, then pick and choose what to leave to be stolen from Trueheart later. It was a good spot. The sharp bend in the road provided a reason for a spill. Let a driver misjudge by an inch and over the wagon would go. With the grade this steep, brakes had to be applied constantly. An inexperienced freighter might be hard-pressed to brake, keep control of his team, and have the wheels remain on the road.

A braying caught his attention. The sound came from above where the road switched back at a sharp angle. The outlaw wasn’t too far ahead of him.

Feet hurting from too much walking, Slocum decided he could ride the rest of the way, if not in style then on a swaybacked mule. He gritted his teeth and plunged ahead along the road, found the cutback, and saw the mule and its rider ahead. The mule had balked at an even steeper grade and the rider thought to get it to move by whipping it.

This made the mule dig in its hooves and rock back on its rump, causing the man to slide back.

“You damned bag of bones. Get to your feet. I—”

He got no farther. Slocum didn’t try to hide his advance. The rattle of stones under his boot soles alerted the rider.

“It’s me—Mackley,” Slocum called out. In the dark it was impossible to make out details.

“You ain’t Mackley. You’d—”

The man went for his six-shooter too late. Slocum fired first. He knew he hadn’t made a killing shot and didn’t want to. He needed information he could never get from a corpse.

“You son of a—” The scavenger stepped back, twisted about, and fired into the air. Slocum started to add a second slug to the first one but he no longer had a target. The man had disappeared over the edge of the road.

Cautiously advancing, Slocum peered over the edge and saw the man’s body smashed onto rocks below. From the crazy bend to his body, he wasn’t likely to have survived the fall.

Slocum slid his six-gun back into his holster, feeling cheated. He could have gotten information from the man about not only Trueheart’s mysterious shipment but the town and probably even Melissa Baransky. The road was new and led to the back of Trueheart’s town. Did it require a different ticket to enter? Slocum touched the plugged silver dollar and figured this was still good to get him past the guards.

And now he could ride in style.

It took a few minutes of coaxing, but he convinced the mule to stand and then take his weight. Because he wasn’t in a hurry and let the mule pick its own way, travel went smoothly if not quickly. Several hours later, after the sun had popped above the horizon and was immediately eaten by heavy clouds, he saw another steep drop-off at the edge of the road. This had to be the other spot considered for tipping over Trueheart’s wagon. Slocum had to admire Mackley’s skill in planning. The other turn in the road gave better access to whatever cargo was allowed to remain on the ground.

The mule diligently walked, and Slocum did nothing to
hurry it along. He constantly looked down at the road, expecting to see Mackley making his way up, but the road remained deserted. From what he could tell, the dead outlaw’s body wasn’t likely to be seen by a rider coming from the lower elevations. Even a rider descending would have to know where to look to see it. This gave Slocum some hope he could escape detection.

After sundown he saw a signal fire burning ahead. He had considered stopping for the night, but the mule seemed content to keep walking and time crushed down on top of him. Melissa had been taken three days earlier. How long she would survive as Trueheart’s prisoner—if she had even been taken to him—gave a concern that wore down on Slocum.

The fire neared and finally Slocum stopped a few yards away. Two guards with rifles carried easily in the crooks of their arms came out from under a lean‑to. They expected no trouble, and Slocum intended to give them none if they let him pass.

He took out the silver dollar with the hole through it, held it to his eye, and watched the pair approach.

“Mind if I see it?”

Slocum flipped the coin to the guard, who caught it and deftly slipped it between thumb and forefinger. He held it high, scrutinized it, then tossed it back.

“Yup, right year and everything.”

Slocum caught his breath. He had never considered that only specific years as noted by the mint mark would be acceptable. He thanked his lucky stars that he hadn’t allowed Stephen to bull his way along and try to pass a silver dollar with the wrong year stamped onto it. Trueheart was sneakier than he had thought.

“Go on in. There’s a new singer at the saloon. Heard tell she’s quite a looker … and she don’t wear nuthin’ under her skirt!”

The men laughed. Slocum joined in, but his heart almost
stopped beating. It felt as if cold fingers had closed around its throbbing life.