Slocum and the Grizzly Flats Killers (9781101619216) (11 page)

Slocum felt invigorated outside. The air was clean and pure unlike that inside the saloon, but more than this, he was going to get real information from someone who'd been with Deputy Underhill's posse. If the old man wasn't lying.

Walking around the saloon, Slocum fetched the case of whiskey and hoisted it to his shoulder. He wobbled as he walked, the strain on his side more than he'd expected. Anticipation kept him walking steadily toward the edge of town, but he slowed and finally dropped the case when Marshal Willingham galloped past. Immediately behind him ran three men, struggling to match his pace while afoot.

“What's going on?” Slocum called to the one bringing up the rear.

The man huffed and puffed and bent over, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.

“Found Greer dead. Somebody done shot him smack in the middle of the forehead.”

“Greer?”

“Yeah, that old fool who hangs around braggin' on how busted up he is.”

Slocum let the man lead the way to a hovel about where the old man had told him to go. The marshal's horse stood a few yards away, a man holding the reins. Five others crowded close, peering into the doorway.

Slocum and his guide pushed through the small knot of men. All it took was a quick glance to verify what Slocum had feared. Greer and the man who had ridden with Deputy Underhill were one and the same. From a dim light flickering inside the house, he saw that Greer had taken a bullet to the middle of his face. Blood and busted bone made him almost unrecognizable, but the clothing was the same. And there was no disguising the way his arm and bent leg were thrust out at crazy angles.

“Go tell O'Dell he's got a new customer,” Willingham said to the onlooker nearest him. “Ain't no hurry. This one's gone cold already.”

An argument began over who ought to tell the undertaker. Willingham chased them away, closed the door, and mounted his horse. He didn't ride back toward his jailhouse but galloped away toward the hills to the west.

Slocum watched him ride off, then had an overpowering urge to find where the marshal was going in such a hurry. By the time he had saddled his horse and gotten on the road, he had lost the lawman.

11

Slocum cursed his bad luck. Willingham had ridden from town like his tail was on fire. Where did the marshal have to go in such a hurry this late at night?

The more Slocum thought on it, the stranger the lawman's behavior seemed. He hadn't been unduly upset over Greer's death. If anything, he was willing to let the body lie there all night long and deal with it tomorrow. The coincidence of Greer's death occurring when it did bothered Slocum even more. If the marshal didn't have anything to do with the old man's death, he knew more about the circumstances than he ought to.

He sat astride his horse, looking down the muddy road. The day had been clear and the bright autumn sun had dried up some of the mud. The temperature had been seasonal, but there wasn't any way he could track the marshal at night on the muddy road. Every hoofprint would slowly vanish as the mud collapsed under its own weight.

Looking into the night served no useful purpose. He turned and headed back toward the hotel, where Mirabelle waited. She was probably asleep by now, so he would risk waking her when he barged in. Taking his watch out, Slocum held it up and caught starlight against the face, reading the time.

Willingham had been gone fifteen minutes. Rather than return to the bed next to Mirabelle, Slocum remained on horseback, waiting in the cold. When he heard hoofbeats, he checked his watch. Almost a half hour had elapsed from the time Willingham had ridden from town.

And sure as sin, the marshal rode back into town. Slocum guessed that he had ridden out, palavered with someone for a few minutes, then turned around and come back to Grizzly Flats.

From deep shadows, Slocum watched Willingham ride past on his way to the jailhouse. When the marshal was out of sight, Slocum checked the watch, got the time, then put his heels to his horse's flanks and galloped off in the direction the marshal had originally ridden. The horse wasn't able to maintain the full gallop long, so Slocum eased back and kept the horse running as fast as it could in the dark along the road.

When the horse flagged, Slocum drew out his watch again. Ten minutes. He slowed the horse's headlong pace and began looking around. Dismounting, he bent over and looked at the road. No one had come this way since the marshal, and whatever hoofprints were visible ought to be his. Slocum slowly followed a track, then saw where it left the road. He studied the area where Willingham must have ridden and saw nothing.

He had an easier time following the fresh tracks once he left the road. By walking slowly, he undoubtedly added to his time compared with the marshal's ride. Then he found a spot where another horse had waited. A pile of dung was still warm. Slocum raised his eyes to the nearest mountain and eased down the slope to a canyon leading into the maze of rocky passages beyond.

He circled the area, reconstructing the meeting that had gone on here. Willingham came from town to the point he got his horse in a lather, talked with another rider for as much as ten minutes, then returned. The other rider went into the hills.

Slocum swung into the saddle. Willingham had nothing for him. Who had he come to speak to directly from a murder scene? He had no idea if Willingham's ride and Greer's murder were tied together, but there wasn't any disputing how little interest Willingham had shown. Grizzly Flats was hardly a hotbed of crime—until now, until Isaac Comstock's party had arrived. Since then, it had become a bloodbath nigh on as bad as Antietam.

He had difficulty keeping the hoofprints in view, but tracking in such a canyon hardly required him to see anything more than branching canyons. He doubted the rider would take a trail up the steep canyon walls. While there might be trails leading to the rim, Slocum doubted this mattered to anyone meeting the marshal. The canyon floor gave the best chance for finding the hidden gold.

As he rode, Slocum wondered how long the train robbers had wandered these canyons. Long enough to hide their ill-gotten gains, he was sure. He touched the coins in his vest pocket. But had they spent days or hours? If the latter, the hiding place was close to the main road leading to Grizzly Flats.

Not for the first time, he wished that he had delivered the whiskey to Greer and found what the former posse member knew. It might have been nothing more than a ploy to get liquor, but Slocum felt it was more. The old man had known something, but not enough to get him out into the hills to hunt for the gold himself. No matter what he claimed about his arm and leg, if he had known, known for certain sure, where the gold was hidden, he would have come out here. If he'd have to claw his way inch by inch up the canyons, he would come.

Slocum decided Greer had known something—but not enough.

With what Isaac Comstock had discovered, even a tiny hint might have been all it took to find the stolen gold shipment.

He drew rein and looked at the ground. He had a choice of two branching canyons. Even getting down close to the frozen mud availed him little. The tracks might lead in either direction. Making a quick choice, he went to his right, going deeper into the mountains. Before long he came to a small meadow, now cloaked with splotches of snow.

All night long Slocum followed his nose. and by daybreak had to admit he was completely lost. Lost and without real tracks to follow.

Aching and tired from riding all night, Slocum camped. He hesitated to build a fire, then decided if he attracted the attention of Willingham's mysterious partner, so be it. Having the man find him might be easier than Slocum hunting futilely for tracks. He had some jerky in his saddlebags and boiled oatmeal. Then he curled up and fell asleep until distant thunder woke him. He tried to figure out from the sun what time it was, then had to rely on his watch.

“Four,” he muttered. He had slept most of the day away, and for what? He had nothing to show for chasing around in the mountains, other than not knowing exactly where he was.

That didn't bother him. He could always follow his own trail back to the road and Grizzly Flats. But did he want to? Mirabelle's problems weren't his. And she had done a good enough job tracking down Eckerly, even if the murderer had died. Her blood lust wouldn't be sated easily, not until all the killers were six feet underground.

That wasn't his fight, even if she had given him the two coins. What ate away at him was being kidnapped and almost killed. The men responsible for beating on him and those who had killed Comstock, Terrence, and the others were likely one and the same. He tried to figure out if this crossing of paths was enough to make him go back to Mirabelle when they didn't even know how many outlaws needed leaden justice.

The rain pelted down harder. He rummaged about and found his slicker. The half-frozen drops splatted against the canvas and slowly slid off. Shivering, he pulled it closer around him and knew he had to find somewhere to take shelter before his horse froze to death.

He mounted and turned back on his own trail. Slocum tried to remember how long he had ridden, guess how many miles he had come. After crossing the meadow, he came to three canyons slanting off at different angles. By now the rain had erased his tracks.

There hadn't been any hint of the other two canyons in the dark. Slocum tried to reverse his course and figure out where he had come from—and couldn't. With the increasingly punishing rain, being trapped out in the storm would be worse than staying lost. He picked the canyon most likely to have been his conduit into the meadow and knew within minutes he had not ridden this way the night before.

Rather than retrace his path into the teeth of the storm, he kept moving forward and into another meadow, this one rockier and more barren than the one where he had camped. He saw a curious triple peak formation in the distance that he'd never noticed before.

“New territory,” he muttered. “Time for a break.”

He urged his horse into another canyon mouth and spotted several caves where he might take shelter. The rain fell more heavily and brought down white curtains in front of him. Slocum knew he couldn't take much more of the sleet and went directly to the nearest cave. At first, it seemed little more than a hollow in the wall, but it opened into a decent-sized area after he got past the entrance.

It took some doing to get his horse inside. Slocum took a deep whiff and knew why. Whether a bear still made this its den or had moved on was a problem. Sharing sleeping space with a grizzly was a good way to end up a midnight snack.

Leaving the skittish horse, he worked his way deeper into the cave, hand on his six-shooter. A Colt Navy against a bear was a mismatch he didn't want to have anything to do with, but he had to know about possible neighbors. A small crevice in the rocks showed where a coyote had made a den. Four tiny skeletons told of a poor litter.

After exploring to the back of the cave, he returned to where his horse still pawed at the dirt on the floor.

“Settle down. It's just you and me.” He patted the horse's neck and talked to it until its nervousness subsided. It might have been as spooked by the low ceiling and close walls as the old scents.

Slocum took off the saddle and dropped it, then fell to his knees and looked at where the horse had pawed the floor. Even in the dim light he saw a half-dozen golden disks in the dirt.

By the time he finished sifting through the dirt, he had recovered ten gold coins like the ones Mirabelle had given him.

Look as he might, he couldn't find any more—but he did find what had to be blood spatters on the cave wall at about where a man's heart would be.

12

The storm broke an hour before sunrise. Slocum finished what food he had brought, worrying about his horse. When the sun poked above the nearby mountain peak, he led the horse out and hunted until he found a patch of grass, still juicy, if sparse, that provided a decent meal. As the horse ate, Slocum scouted the area, found a notch in the hills behind him that opened onto the curious three peaks he had spotted from the meadow. Although tempted to make a nap, he simply stared at the countryside until he had memorized all the landmarks he could.

Then he walked in the opposite direction, fixing all this in his mind, too. By the time he had done what scouting he could without finding any other cave where the treasure might have been stashed, he mounted and rode toward the rising sun. Every canyon he came to, he chose the branch that kept the sun in his face. After noon, he rode so the sun warmed his back. Eventually he found a way out onto broad plains to the north of Grizzly Flats.

In the distance, from the town, rose lazy curls of smoke, attesting to the windless afternoon. He didn't have to urge the horse to speed. The animal recognized a chance for decent food, water, and a warm stall to spend the night.

Slocum touched the ten gold coins in his coat pocket and tried to figure out what had happened in the cave. A robber must have holed up there, gotten shot, dropped the coins, and then either been taken out or left on his own. The dropped gold had gone unnoticed.

The rest of the loot had to be around that area.

After putting his horse into the livery stable and giving orders for it to be fed and groomed, he paid the stableman with one of his gold coins. This caused raised eyebrows, and Slocum worried he should have bartered awhile longer. He didn't want it getting around town he had come into gold after wandering in the hills outside town.

By the time he reached his hotel, the sun was dipping behind the very mountains where he had wandered lost for a couple days. He started up the stairs when the clerk called out to him.

“Mr. Slocum, she's not up there.”

He looked at the clerk, saying nothing. The young man bubbled over with the need to talk.

“She . . . she went with the two men that came for her.”

“When was this?”

“Not an hour back. She didn't look happy, but I think she went of her own free will. She, uh, she
is
staying in your room, isn't she?”

“Where'd they go?”

The clerk gestured vaguely.

Slocum hurried on up the steep stairs, taking steps two at a time until he reached his room. The door stood ajar. He eased it open with his foot, though he doubted anyone had stayed to ambush him. Kicking the door shut behind him, he searched the room. Mirabelle's belongings were still in a bag under the bed. His own gear, such as it was, remained untouched in the wardrobe. The woman had been all the two men wanted.

Without more to go on, he doubted he would find Mirabelle easily. Going to Marshal Willingham didn't seem like a reasonable way of achieving anything but being thrown in the calaboose again. Madam Madeleine might help, but he wanted to steer clear of her as long as possible. Not only didn't he want her in danger, but he didn't want to be beholden to her. Finding a couple sneak thieves was likely the least of what she would think up for him as payment for more information.

But did he have any other choice?

Reluctantly he went to the door but froze with his hand on the knob when he heard scratching sounds from behind. He glanced to the mirror above the washstand and saw movement reflected from outside the window. The sun had gone down, erasing any details of the figure trying to open the window.

He stepped through the door into the hallway, drew his six-shooter, and then peered around the door, aiming straight at the window.

When he saw what was happening, he lowered his gun and ran to the window to heave it open. Mirabelle fell into his arms, staggering him. She was crying, shaking all over as he held her.

“I . . . they kidnapped me, John. I got away. They were going to torture me like they did the others.”

“You recognize them?”

“No, never seen them before. All I know is they wore masks and one smelled real bad. Beer. The stench was enough to make me gag. And he had a horrible laugh.”

He closed the window and shut out the night cold before turning to her. She huddled on the bed, her arms wrapped around herself and her knees drawn up tightly to her chest. Her clothing was plastered to her body so tightly that not even her shivering loosened it.

Whipping up the blanket from the bed and wrapping it around her, Slocum glanced back out the window into the street below.

“How'd you get on the roof?”

“C-Climbed. I got away from them before they could mount. They put me on a horse, then started to mount themselves but I bolted and the horse ran off and . . . and I jumped. I got onto a roof and let the horse run away while they chased after and—”

He held her close to soothe her. After a while the sobs stopped, and she sniffed and controlled herself.

“I didn't know what else to do so I came back here, but they'd find me if I hid in the room. I climbed the drainpipe to the roof and hid there.”

“In the rain?”

“Snow, too.” Mirabelle sniffed again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Then she looked aghast when she suddenly realized she had done something so crude.

“I'm not sure how they knew you were here,” he said. “I haven't been advertising that fact.”

Slocum realized that everyone likely knew he had a woman in his room. What Madam Madeleine knew, anyone could know—for a price. By the time noses were counted and tongues wagged long enough, the rumors would start that it had to be someone from out of town. The men who had killed her husband might likely want to ask after her, just to be sure they hadn't let anyone escape.

More likely, they knew she had escaped the killings and could give them another source of information as to the gold's hiding place.

“I've been so cooped up here, John. It's driving me crazy. But I'm glad I didn't go out, if—” Her eyes darted to the window as if expecting to see her abductors hovering there.

Slocum drew shut the thin curtains, then took off his gun belt, and put it on the washstand. He wrestled with how much to tell the woman about his jaunt into the hills.

“I had a man who was going to tell me what he knew about the train robbers, but he was murdered before I could talk to him.” His mind slipped a gear as he wondered if Beefsteak Malone had counted the cases of whiskey and knew one was missing. Anyone finding it where Slocum had dropped it wasn't likely to ever return it to the Damned Shame.

“So you're nowhere closer to finding Ike's killers?”

“I tried to follow the marshal when he rode out of town.”

“Marshal Willingham? Why? He's an unpleasant man but why would you track him down?”

Slocum didn't have a good answer for that, other than the urgency Willingham had shown to leave town when he had been confronted with a dead body. He had been in a powerful hurry. If not to tell someone hiding out in the mountains, then why ride hell-bent for leather the way he had? And then return after only a few minutes?

“He's acting mighty strange,” Slocum said. “Doesn't mean anything,” he said suddenly. “Forget I mentioned it. Tell me what you can about the men who grabbed you.”

“I heard steps out in the hallway, then nothing. I didn't think anything about it until a knock came.”

“You answered the door?”

“No. They burst in and grabbed me. The men were dressed like the killers. Dusters, hats pulled down, bandannas up over their faces. All I could see were their eyes. Horrible eyes! Killers' eyes!”

“Calm down,” Slocum said, sitting beside her on the bed and putting his arm around her quaking shoulders. He held her until she controlled herself again. When she spoke, her voice was tiny and tortured.

“They took me out the back way so the clerk wouldn't see they were kidnapping me. But he might have seen. I heard footsteps on the stairs from the lobby and thought I caught sight of him.”

“He didn't tell the marshal. He said he thought you were going with them willingly.”

“Th-They took me down the back stairs, and they had three horses there. Th-That's when I got away. I was mounted and rode and they weren't and—”

He settled her down again. She didn't have much more to add to the story. When she had stopped sobbing, he got up from the bed, strapped on his cross-draw holster, and said, “I'll look out back. Don't think I'll find much since it's been raining.”

Mirabelle smiled weakly as she said, “I know.” She tried to squeeze some of the rainwater from her hair but her hands shook too badly.

Slocum stepped into the hall, went out the back way, and looked at the ground. The rain hadn't hammered the ground flat, but it had come close. Knowing what Mirabelle had said helped him make out where three horses had stood. Boots and her shoes were mingled into a giant muck pit. Following the tracks from here was impossible. He went back up the stairs and paused outside the door to his room. Staying here wasn't safe anymore, but then nowhere else in Grizzly Flats was any better. He was sure the masked killers were locals, but without proof, he couldn't go around accusing every single last one. He figured Marshal Willingham was mixed up in the deaths.

With newfound certainty, he went into the room. Mirabelle jumped and pulled the blanket up in front of her, as if she could hide that way.

“Get your things. We're leaving town.”

“Where are we going?”

“I spent two days wandering around in the hills. I might have some idea where to hunt for the gold, but I got lost. I need your help returning to the spot where Ike gave you the coins. From there I might find . . . my way,” he finished lamely. He wasn't sure why he felt so hesitant about letting Mirabelle know he had discovered a few more coins.

“All right. I'll go anywhere with you, John. I feel real safe with you.”

He wished he had more confidence that he wasn't riding smack dab into the muzzles of the killers' rifles, but he hid that from the woman. She was shaken up enough from her afternoon of escaping from kidnappers and murderers.

*   *  *

“How you can see anything in the dark is beyond me,” Mirabelle Comstock said. “Without even starlight, we might as well have been riding into the belly of some horrible, huge beast.”

Slocum felt the same way but wasn't inclined to let her know he wasn't sure that he was doing the right thing. They had ridden slowly all night under heavy storm clouds threatening to open up at any instant. They had been lucky in that all they faced was the cutting wind blowing off the mountains.

“You up to showing me where you got the coins from Ike?”

“I told you. I can't see a thing, and I have no idea where we are.”

“It has to be up that canyon. It's the only one you could have come down into the camp.”

“Well, yes,” she said, brightening. “From there I turned left. So that means retracing, we go right. I might be able to do this after all.”

He let her take the lead as he watched both their back trail and the canyon rim. The last time he had come this way, the old miner had taken a shot at him. His partner was a mite touched in the head, so there was no telling what he might do if he strayed too far from his played-out mine.

“Yes, there,” she said, pointing. “Up there! And we walked for almost an hour. I went up to Ike, following his trail.”

“How'd you do that?” Slocum asked.

“Oh, John, I can't believe I didn't remember before. Ike left tiny bits of white cloth tied to bushes to mark his trail. He said he was tired of searching the same places over and over. It all looked the same to him, too.”

“Might be different in the summer, when there're patches of vegetation,” he allowed. “Can you find the trail?”

“Yes, look, there. There's a little bow.” Mirabelle lowered her head and turned away. Slocum thought she blushed. “Ike took the cloth from my petticoat. I let him.”

He guessed there had been more than tearing strips from her petticoat. He didn't ask. When she was smiling and didn't have that haunted look about her, Mirabelle wasn't a bad-looking woman.

“We're going so much faster than when I was on foot,” she said. “There, that canyon's the one where I met up with Ike. I had a picnic lunch with me, but he was so excited. He had found the coins.”

Slocum turned up his collar to an increasingly bitter wind. He inhaled deeply and caught the scent of a full-throated storm brewing.

“Let's find the cave fast,” he said. “We need to get out of the weather.” He brushed snowflakes from his watering eyes. The white specks blew almost parallel to the ground in the stiffening wind. Being caught outside in this would leave their bodies frozen to the spot they stopped.

“I don't know. I wasn't thinking too clearly when I met Ike.”

“The gold?”

“I wanted to see him again,” she said, her eyes downcast.

“There's a cave that looks big enough for us,” Slocum said, heading for a yawning dark opening.

He dismounted and led his horse in, Mirabelle following.

“You watch the horses,” he said once they were inside. The cave wasn't too deep, and it would get crowded unless he built a fire. Then they could use the horses to block the mouth of the cave with a fire between them.

He gathered wood and came back to find Mirabelle working to spread blankets. She had unsaddled the horses. The woman looked up and smiled a little.

“This is the cave where Ike found the coins.” She held out a small coin. “It was in the dust.”

“We can look for more later,” Slocum said, using a rock to dig a shallow fire pit. It took the better part of fifteen minutes to get the fire started because of the wind picking up and heavier snow blowing in.