Slocum and the Grizzly Flats Killers (9781101619216) (5 page)

5

“Are you all right, John?” Mirabelle asked.

“Still stiff,” he said, trying to twist and feeling a twinge where she had bandaged his ribs.

“Oh, really?” She looked at his crotch.

“Not there.”

She laughed for the first time since he had met her, and he liked the sound.

“Can be,” she said, her smile broadening.

“Later. I want to go over the campsite where your husband and the others were murdered.” Slocum regretted saying that since the woman's smile melted like snow in the morning sun. The good mood had been crushed by the memory of the deaths, but Slocum wanted to study the area for clues as to how many killers had taken part in the murders and rapes before the weather wiped out all trace.

“It's a ways,” she said, not looking at him now. She stared out across Grizzly Flats and to the edge of town. “I walked it before. Not sure I'm up to that again.”

“I've got money enough to rent a buggy,” he said, though not wanting to spend either of the two twenty-dollar gold pieces she'd paid him. Better to use what coins he had won in the poker game first. Slocum preferred riding, but the jostling in the saddle might hurt him too much. He was still on the mend and wanted to be in fighting shape when he ran those bastards to ground.

“I don't want to put you out. I can give you directions.”

He knew she tried to find reasons not to torment herself with the site that had changed her life so drastically. Although he hated to force her, he needed her to go over every move and show him every spot where the killers had stood, how they had set up the attack, the direction they had taken when they left. Even if she gave him exact directions to the campsite, none of the other information so necessary to learning what the outlaws had done would be available to him without her showing him.

They rented the buggy from the stable owner for a dollar. Slocum hitched up his horse, helped Mirabelle into the buggy, then settled himself and snapped the reins. The horse preferred a rider on its back, and Slocum commiserated. This was necessary, as was torturing Mirabelle with the crime scene once more.

The trip along the muddy road passed in silence. For Slocum's part, he didn't need anything more than occasional stabs of Mirabelle's finger, pointing the proper route. Trying to remember everything about the attack that had laid him up proved futile. He'd as soon chew off his own leg than admit he couldn't identify the men he had promised to kill.

If he'd had only slight interest in bringing them to justice because of what they had done to Isaac Comstock and the others, it had sharpened after the men waylaid him. Although the gang ambushing him might be a different one from those who had killed the Comstock party, he doubted it. Rupert Eckerly was the bridge between the attacks. Mirabelle identified the dead man as one of her assailants. It would be too much of a coincidence if Eckerly had been part of two gangs.

“Up there,” she said in a small voice. “We camped just inside the mouth of that canyon. Spring Canyon, Terrence called it.”

Slocum worked the buggy up the trail as close as he could to where Mirabelle had indicated the camp, but the slope was too great and the rocks too large to get closer than a hundred yards. He set the brake, made sure the horse was tethered and close to dry clumps of grass, then helped the woman to the camp.

The closer they got, the more Mirabelle shook. She cried openly when they came to the site of the massacre.

Slocum had seen savagery during the war—and had taken part in more than his share—but the bodies showed how brutal the outlaws' questioning had been.

Animals had dined on the corpses, but there was no mistaking how one man had been skinned. From what Mirabelle had heard that night, the torture had occurred to make the man talk. He didn't find enough left of the women's bodies but had no doubt they had been raped because of the way their clothing had been ripped. Coyotes wouldn't care. Indeed, some pieces had been carried off by scavengers. Arms and even legs were missing, but that didn't take away from how Slocum reconstructed the scene before him.

*   *  *

Coyotes were animals operating on a simple instinct to stay alive. The men responsible for the deaths were cold-blooded and calculating in their actions.

“Could any of them have known where the gold was hidden?”

“No, no,” Mirabelle said in a choked voice. “I don't even know where Ike found those coins, but he thought they were part of the treasure.”

“How'd you get the information this was the place to search?”

Slocum paced slowly around the site of the killings, trying to decipher what was left of the tracks. Animals had obliterated much of the spoor, and the rain and light snow had added to the problem of finding how many had attacked the camp. Once, he dropped to his knees and brushed away a drift of unsullied snow. He was rewarded with a pair of boot prints.

“Did you find anything, John?”

“Still looking,” he said. “Who told you about the gold?”

“Somebody in Sacramento told Terrence. He hung out with lowlifes. I don't rightly know what Ike saw in him, but they was good friends.”

“Ike knew him before he met you?” When there wasn't an answer, he turned to see Mirabelle fighting to keep from crying. He was at the end of getting answers about the source of the clues regarding the gold.

He usually scoffed at treasure maps, lost mines, and hidden gold because the men selling such information were swindlers out to make a quick dollar from the gullible. There were different ways of selling the worthless. Soapy Smith in Denver made a fortune selling bars of soap. A few confederates in the audience where he made his spiel unwrapped the soap he sold and found ten-dollar bills. Another would find a fifty. By the time Smith had sold crates of the cheap soap, he had gathered his partners and taken back the money he had used to “salt” the bars. Very few paying exorbitant prices for the bars found anything but lye soap.

Slocum had always thought they got what they deserved. Most of the men probably had never used a bar of soap in years. That was a harmless swindle. Selling maps to hidden mines in remote mountains put the trusting buyers in danger from Indians, starvation, and even bad weather. He had no idea what would have happened to Mirabelle's party if they had been caught in one of the early snows. From what she said, they had sent one of the party into Grizzly Flats to buy what supplies they could afford and ended up with damned little.

He left her sitting on a rock to one side of the camp and began a spiral search, slowly going farther from the center until he found where the killers had left their horses before attacking. The ground proved too muddy for him to find the number of horses, but the limbs of scrub oaks showed signs of bridles being secured. He counted twice, being sure he was right. Returning to camp, he caught Mirabelle dabbing at her eyes.

She looked up, her brown eyes wide and bloodshot.

“What did you find?”

“The men in camp didn't have a chance. There were five, maybe six who came in.”

“I didn't see any but the three.”

“Don't know where the other three were. My guess is they were up in the rocks to shoot down into camp, if the need arose. Terrence and the others were caught in a trap and didn't have a chance to escape. There wasn't a blamed thing they could have done.”

Slocum wasn't sure he believed that. Terrence or whoever fancied himself to be in charge should have posted a sentry. That was common sense, no matter what the reason they were out here. He doubted Sennick would have agreed, and the other man in camp, Garrison, probably had his hands full doing two men's work. Terrence wouldn't have lowered himself to watch for intruders.

He shrugged off the lack of caution. No one out hunting for gold thought they were in danger. They hadn't found anything yet.

“Why'd they attack when they did?” he wondered aloud.

“What's that?” Mirabelle came over, her shoes making crunching sounds in the thin blanket of snow.

“The killers didn't come from Sacramento. Whoever told Terrence about the stolen gold wasn't going to follow, then attack before you found anything.”

“But Ike thought he had!”

“He hadn't told anyone in camp. The owlhoots were here before you came back with the coins.”

“I never thought of that. Maybe they didn't know we was hunting for gold. Maybe they was just outlaws.”

Slocum knew that wasn't true. She had heard the killers demanding to know where the gold was.

“Tell me about Sennick.” He continued rummaging through the debris left by the scavengers as Mirabelle related random observations about her onetime partner. Nothing hit him until she spoke of sending Sennick into town.

“He wouldn't do chores around the camp. Said that was women's work, but he wouldn't do any of the chores the men would either. Ike was always angry about him. That's why we sent him to town to get our supplies.”

“And he got drunk,” Slocum said, standing on a rock to get a better look around the camp. “Who do you think he'd tell about you hunting for the gold?”

“We swore him to secrecy,” Mirabelle said, but her voice told the truth. She believed he had shot off his mouth and caused the killers to come hunting for the gold.

“He probably was so drunk, whoever he told thought you'd found the gold. Or maybe he was boasting. A lie about easy gold is as likely to be believed. Grizzly Flats isn't prosperous.”

“The lure of gold would be too much,” she said. “It surely was for us. Until Ike found them coins, I hardly believed there was anything out here.”

Slocum jumped down and braced himself for what he had to say to her.

“It's not right leaving them out where the coyotes can finish dining on them,” he said. “If you were hunting for gold, somebody must have a shovel.”

“We all did.” She walked as if her feet were stuck in water buckets, rummaged through a pile of material, and brought Slocum a shovel. “This was Ike's. Ours.”

“The ground isn't frozen yet, and as muddy as it is, digging won't be too hard,” he said. “Why don't you take what you need from the stores?” He wanted to keep her mind off the mass grave he intended to dig. Individual graves would take too long.

“All right, John, I'll do that.” She took two steps and, still facing away from him, said, “Could you bury Ike separate from the others? He
was
my husband.”

He silently began digging a large pit and moved the bodies of the two women and three men into it. From the way Mirabelle hovered over the corpse at the edge of camp, he knew that had to be Ike. His back and side ached horribly by the time he'd finished the chore. Digging was easy enough, but every shovelful was heavier than he'd expected since he lifted mud rather than just earth.

He carefully searched each body before filling in the dirt. The outlaws had been thorough, robbing everyone. Watches, rings, any money—all gone. Slocum tamped the final shovel worth of mud over the mass grave, then went to where Mirabelle sat on a rock, staring at her husband's corpse.

Slocum moved to cut off her view as he rolled the body over. Varmints had eaten away the man's face. He worked quickly to dig the grave but soon ran into rock. Rather than waste time finding another spot, he continued, moved Isaac Comstock into the two-foot-deep grave, and filled it back in. He did take the time to pile rocks on the grave. It wouldn't deter a hungry coyote but might slow the better-fed ones.

“You want to say words over his grave?”

Mirabelle stood beside him. She had tied two sticks together into a cross.

“He wasn't like that. When we got married, he didn't even want a minister. He found a judge to marry us.” Mirabelle sniffed a little. “Ike paid him with a pint of whiskey. This will have to do.” She shoved the cross into the soft dirt, then used rocks to prop it upright.

The first winter storm that blew down the canyon would steal away the marker. It might even open the grave, but Slocum doubted Mirabelle was going to make a pilgrimage back here once they left.

“The best thing to do is go back to Grizzly Flats and find who Sennick was spilling his drunken guts to,” he said.

“I have a few things. My clothes, the ones that weren't too ripped up. Some other things. No call to take anything belonging to Ike. The killers done stole ever'thing off his body.”

Slocum touched the coins in his pocket. If Ike hadn't given them to Mirabelle, the outlaws would have discovered them—and tortured him until he revealed the place where he'd found them.

She looked up at him, her expression neutral.

“I want to find the gold. Let's go into the canyon, and I'll show you where Ike found the coins.”

Slocum started to point out they didn't have any supplies and would either have to go on foot or ride double on his horse. A small sound, hardly audible to anyone without his sharp senses, came from deeper in the canyon Mirabelle had indicated.

“You gather what you can for us,” he said. “I want to take one more look around to be sure there were only five. Chances are there might have been one more than that.”

“But you—” Mirabelle stared at him when she realized he wanted her to be a decoy while he scouted. “All right, John. I'll do that.” Her words carried since she spoke louder than necessary. She reached out and gripped his arm, then released him and began moving about the camp aimlessly.

Slocum wished he had his rifle, but he had left it with his saddle and other gear in town. Moving like a ghost, he went to a tower of rocks overlooking the camp. This was where Terrence should have posted a lookout.

Making his way up the rock, finding footholds and ripping his fingers on the sharp edges, he finally reached the summit. Keeping flat on his belly, he slithered around. He stopped when he looked down. Not six inches from his nose was a shiny spent brass cartridge. At least one of the killers had been posted here and had fired into the unsuspecting treasure hunters below.