by Jake Logan
“You know him, don’t you, John? How?”
“We fought together in the war,” he said simply.
“There’s more, but I won’t press you on the matter. You will be back, won’t you?”
“I don’t lie,” Slocum said.
“I know. That’s one of the things I like so much about you.” She smiled even more and blushed delightfully, averting her wide brown eyes. “And it’s not even the best thing.”
Slocum felt a mite uncomfortable. He finished securing his supplies and climbed into the saddle. Looking down on Arlene brought back all his indecision. Maybe he ought to just ride away. He could return Edna’s money, or he could simply keep it. For all he had been through, he might consider it his due. She and Mayerling were not strangers. That didn’t take a whole lot of thinking to determine. But that wasn’t his way when doing business. Arlene had accused him once of being a Southern gentleman. Slocum thought of himself differently, but she saw the part of his upbringing that remained untarnished. He shook his head. He had thought all of it had been burned away by the war and what he had seen and done there. And since the war, he had hardly led a life that could be described as gentlemanly. There were too many WANTED posters with his likeness on them for him to lay claim to being a gentleman, much less one of Southern inclination.
He touched the brim of his hat in a silent farewell and wheeled his horse around, leaving town. He knew her eyes were fixed on him, but he didn’t look back. He had been paid a hundred dollars to find Rolf Berenson, and anything that got in the way of his hunt was wrong.
Slocum rode slowly, leaving the road and doubling back occasionally to be certain Mayerling and his henchmen weren’t on his trail. As far as he could see, up the road ahead of him and back toward Silver City, he was alone today. Considering how abrupt Mayerling had been before, Slocum wondered if the man would take the time to lay an ambush. More likely he and his posse claiming to be Texas deputies would simply ride up with guns blazing. Slocum had not seen any law in the area worth spit. Such a murder would go unnoticed, especially near a booming mining town like Silver City.
Still, Mayerling had been known as not too brave back during the war. He let others take the worst of the battle, then rode in and cleaned up, often shooting men already wounded and unable to fight further.
Every sense alert for danger, Slocum rode. He heard and saw and smelled nothing but the great wilderness wrapping itself around him. It made it easy to forget the town and the smells there and the crush of people. Pine, juniper, and fir trees closed in around the road as he gradually wound his way higher onto the mountain before descending into the canyons cut by the many rapidly flowing rivers in the area. Before the end of the day, when the sun rested just at the tops of the mountains around him, he reached a small tributary to the Gila River and decided to camp there.
Slocum had plenty of grub but wanted to save it since he had no idea how long he would be hunting Rolf Berenson. If the man was as loony as his wife made him out to be, it would only be a matter of time before he revealed himself. Humming as he made a fire, Slocum grew increasingly edgy. Someone watched him. He knew better than to ignore the sensation. It had kept him alive during and since the war.
He hefted his Winchester and went hunting for any incautious rabbit that might be down by the river drinking its fill. For all the deer and other tracks, he didn’t find any animal willing to pop into his sights. He turned his attention to the trees and found dinner. He bagged a squirrel with a single shot, and it was good enough for his meal. As he returned to camp, he circled wide and came up from an unexpected direction, hoping to catch his unseen spy. Slocum’s keen eye showed how his supplies had been rummaged through, but he saw nothing gone. Whoever had searched his gear had tried to replace it as it had been. Only Slocum would have noticed anything amiss.
Skinning the squirrel and roasting it over the fire was the work of only minutes for him. The savory smell caught on the early evening breeze and made its way through the forest. As he ate, he looked around without seeming to. Whoever spied on him was either gone or had become more adept. Slocum decided it was the former. The feel of another man’s presence was gone.
The stars began asserting themelsves in the sky, and Slocum pulled his hat down to cover his eyes. As he drifted to sleep, he strained to hear any sound of a man creeping up on him. Indians might be on the warpath. There might be highwaymen working the mountain roads. Or Mayerling might have caught up with him.
There was even the chance Rolf Berenson was watching, though Slocum doubted that. He wouldn’t find any trace of Berenson for days if the hermit was deep in the Gila Wilderness. Thoughts of Arlene mingled with vivid dreams of Edna Berenson as he slipped off to sleep.
He awoke before dawn, fixed coffee, and had a can of peaches. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to give him the energy to get on the trail. Slocum rode back along the route taken by Castle and his wagons, looking for the last spot where he had seen the lone man on the canyon rim. When he found it, Slocum began hunting for a trail up the sheer rock walls. There were a couple footpaths that might have been used by Apaches, but he wanted to keep his horse with him.
Finding what looked like the solitary trail wide enough to lead his horse on took the remainder of the day. Slocum wiped sweat from his forehead, wished he had remembered to buy another bandanna, then began trudging up the steep trail. In places it was hardly a yard wide, but it was better than the other footpaths. It took the better part of an hour of soothing his horse and moving it at a slow but steady pace to reach halfway. Then the world fell on him.
A single rock tumbled from above. Then two, followed by dozens. Slocum threw his arms around his horse’s neck and kept the horse from rearing. If it had, it would have tumbled halfway down the side of the mountain. When the rock fall kept coming, Slocum began to think it wasn’t caused by the clop-clop of his horse’s hooves or the vibrations of his own footsteps.
“Whoa, calm, don’t try to buck,” he whispered soothingly in the horse’s ear. White showed around the horse’s huge brown eyes, but its fear abated when it saw Slocum was not afraid. The last of the rocks slid past, tumbling to clatter two hundred feet below. Slocum did not immediately continue his climb. He considered retreating, but there was no spot wide enough for his horse to turn. The evidence that this trail had been used by other horsemen had lured him this far.
After his own nerves were steady again, he continued the climb. When he reached a widening another hundred feet up, he paused to let his horse rest and to examine what he found. An old campfire, banked and hidden from below. Dust churned up by both horse and human. The bones of a small bird. From the size and spacing of the teeth marks, the bird had been roasted on the fire and eaten by a human.
“Somebody’s been here recently,” Slocum said. In addition to the evidence of a campsite, he found where the last man there had assembled the pile of rocks that had been sent down on Slocum’s head. “No accident. Somebody’s got it in for us.” He patted the horse’s neck and got a nervous whinny in response. Craning his neck, Slocum looked up and saw they were within fifty feet of the rim straight above.
His hand flashed to the six-shooter in its holster when he saw the merest flash of a man’s hat nudged out over the rim. Slocum cocked his six-gun and waited for something else to happen. A better target would be good, since he was sure whoever prowled along the rim had also tried to kill him earlier. But the hat simply flopped about.
“Wind,” he said. “It’s being moved by the wind.” Slocum shoved his pistol back into its holster and covered the last hundred feet along the winding trail up the sheer cliff face in less than twenty minutes. Every step of the way he watched for another attack, but it never came.
Heaving a deep sigh of relief, he reached the rim and looked around the mesa. Slocum was winded from the climb but dared not rest. He touched the butt of his six-shooter but left it where it was when he saw he had been right. An old hat had been stuck on the end of a stick and
dangled out where he could see it.
He looked around for any trace of who had left this beguiling target. Whoever it was had wanted Slocum to shoot. To waste ammo? To prove he was an enemy willing to shoot first and not talk?
“Hello!” Slocum cupped his mouth and called again. “I want to talk.”
His words echoed away into the distance. Slocum waited for several minutes to see if his presence would cause any commotion. He was alone at the top of the world.
“I have your hat,” he called again. He plucked it off the stick and looked at it. He smiled wryly when he saw three bullet holes, two in the brim and one through the crown. From the way the holes had weathered differently, he could tell they had been shot separately through the hat over a week or even a month. The lure had been taken before by others. At least two others, Slocum guessed, and possibly a third gunman.
He tossed it back onto the stick and began a careful study of the rocky terrain all around. He found no trace to show anyone had walked here in the past month. Looking more closely, he thought he saw tiny scratches on a rock near the edge of the precipice. Following the line formed by the hat and the scratches, he went to a stand of pinyons. Here he was rewarded with a broken twig and crushed grass. The man he tracked had tried to hide his path but had made small mistakes that Slocum found.
Slocum returned to his horse and then got back on the trail. He did not know he was following Rolf Berenson, but how many men would be out here in the wilderness rigging tricks like the hat? There might be more than one crazy man in the Gila Wilderness, but Slocum had to start somewhere, and this was the area where he had seen the man watching Castle and his wagons.
After an hour, Slocum had gone only a few hundred yards.
“Are you that scared?” he wondered aloud about the man. Every inch of the way had been concealed, camouflaged, hidden. It had taken whoever he followed as long to hide the trail as it had taken Slocum to uncover the tiny traces left behind. Although such meticulous concealment meant more work for him, it also meant his quarry was not too far ahead.
As the thought crossed Slocum’s mind, he grew warier. He might be walking into an ambush. Rather than following the spoor directly, he began fanning out, going far to his left and working slowly right in an arc that covered more ground. It slowed his progress but made him more certain he kept to the trail and wasn’t being lured to his death.
For the better part of an hour, Slocum kept up the cautious advance, then went for his six-shooter when a man popped up from behind a rock a dozen yards ahead of him. He got a glimpse of a tall, scrawny man with blazing dark eyes and only wisps of gray hair circling his bald head like clouds on a mountaintop. The threadbare clothing the scarecrow wore left the man’s skin exposed in places. Elbows were jutting out of the sleeves and more than one tear in the front of the shirt told of long, hard wear. Slocum couldn’t get a good look at the man’s pants—or whether he wore a holster slung around his thin hips.
“Hold on!” Slocum called. He had half pulled his pistol free, then froze. “I want to talk. You scared me, pardner.”
The man let out a sound more like a hoot owl than anything human and disappeared behind the rock.
Slocum flipped his reins around a handy rabbit bush and lit out after the man. He had not seen any weapon. The man might be hiding a rifle or six-gun, but from the way his arms had flapped around as he ducked back, Slocum doubted it.
“I just want to talk. No gunplay. Agreed?” He slowed as he got to the rock and peered around it, half expecting to stare down the twin barrels of a shotgun. Nothing. He looked over toward another stand of trees and knew the scarecrow man had made a beeline for it. Any other path and Slocum would have spotted him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Slocum said, vaulting over low rocks and hitting the ground where the man had stood. Slocum slid to a halt, then knelt. The footprints in the dirt were about the biggest he had ever seen. If the man hadn’t had so much folded under, he would have been seven feet tall. Slocum marvelled at how the trail had been so cleverly disguised despite the man having feet this big.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Slocum shouted. He started into the trees, then reconsidered. Anyone chasing him would bring an immediate—deadly—response. “Come on out and we can palaver awhile.” He got up onto the rock and took out the fixings for a smoke. He kept one eye on the trees, looking for the glint of sunlight off a barrel, but he saw nothing. Working deliberately, Slocum rolled his cigarette, tucked the pouch away in his pocket, then dug around in a vest pocket for his tin of lucifers.
He struck the match, inhaled deeply as a coal formed at the tip of the cigarette, and let out a heartfelt sigh as smoke filled his lungs with soothing warmth.
“Surely is a good day for a smoke,” Slocum said in a conversational voice. He knew anyone in the copse could hear as well as if they were sitting beside him. Puffing contentedly, he watched for movement. What little he saw could be attributed to small animals scurrying about. Were they disturbed by his unseen watcher?
“I saw you earlier. When I was leading a wagon train through to Silver City,” Slocum said. “I was wondering what you found to be so interesting.” No sound. No movement. Nothing. “Want to share my tobacco? Out here you probably don’t get much.”
He wondered if the man stole from the wagon trains and travellers passing through the Gila Wilderness. Probably. If the man’s decrepit condition was any sign, he wasn’t eating too regularly. That might mean he didn’t have a gun, or didn’t have ammunition for it if he was armed.
Slocum considered how long he should bide his time, waiting for the man to decide he posed no threat. He rolled and smoked a second cigarette. The wind blew from Slocum’s back and carried the smoke to the woods. That ought to bring a reaction, or so Slocum thought. When it didn’t, he cinched up his gun belt and dropped to the ground. He knew the man might have lit out and kept running, but he didn’t think so. The sense of being watched had never left Slocum from the minute he rounded the rock.
Stepping deliberately to give the scarecrow of a man plenty of time to get used to the notion of sharing his mountain with someone else, Slocum walked toward the trees.
An earsplitting scream of utter pain rang out.
Without thinking, Slocum dug his toes into the dirt and rocketed into the trees. One instant, bright sunlight fell on his shoulders. The next he was in darkness. Another instant and his feet crushed down on fallen pine needles. And the next he felt his feet going out from under him as he sailed aloft, a rope snare securely looped about his right foot.
Slocum dangled upside down more than six feet off the ground. Worse than that, his Colt Navy had slid from its holster and lay on the forest floor, out of his reach. Straining his side with a move that threatened to reopen his wound, he made a mighty grab, hoping the rope would stretch and give him another inch or two.
As he swung by, his fingertips grazed the cold metal of his six-shooter. But it was out of reach and would stay there as long as he was dangling upside down.
He had been snared as easily as any jackrabbit. Slocum wondered if being spitted and skinned was next for him, as he slowly twisted in the wind.
7
From his inverted position, the world looked mighty different. Slocum saw the tops of a pair of battered, scuffed boots approaching. Only by craning his neck until sharp pain jolted down into his shoulders could he see the man standing a few yards away, staring at him.
“You caught me fair and square,” Slocum said as he turned, getting only occasional glimpses of the man. It was the scrawny galoot he had seen watching him earlier. “Now that you’ve had your fun, cut me down.”
“Nope,” the man said. His voice was rough and gravelly, as if he was not used to talking. “Can’t do that. You’d hurt me.”
“Won’t,” Slocum insisted. “I wanted to talk. I wanted to give you some tobacco. Care for a smoke?” He patted his vest pocket, being careful nothing fell out. He did not want to lose his watch. He co
uld see the razor-thin man swooping over and grabbing the fallen watch and then going off, cackling to himself like a crow with something bright and shiny for its nest.
“Let you die there. Then I can take everything,” the scrawny man said.
Slocum held down a flare of anger. He spun a little faster and caught the sunlight glinting off the man’s tan, bald head. The wisps of gray hair just above his ears looked like part of a fallen halo, but any man who would let another die of thirst and starvation to steal his belongings was no angel.
“Why were you watching a week back?”
“What?” This took the man by surprise. He curled his clawlike hands and held them up in front of his mouth. “You knew I watched?”
“I led a wagon train through the canyon yonder to Silver City. I saw you spying on us with field glasses. One of the women in the train waved, but you stepped back out of sight, like you didn’t want to be seen.”
“Spy on everyone,” the man said. “Have to. They all want to kill me. You want to kill me.”
“I only want what’s best for you. Want a square meal? You look mighty hungry.”
This tack didn’t work, either. The man circled Slocum, well out of reach. He muttered to himself and made strange gestures with his skeletal hands, as if warding off spirits or chasing away flies.
“Eat. That’s a good idea. I’ll eat your food. You won’t need it. You’re going to die.”
“Wait!” Slocum swung faster, getting dizzy. The man had vanished. Slocum wondered if he should have called him by name, or if that might have brought a torrent of rage that would have left him dangling dead like a side of beef on a slaughterhouse hook.
He tried to follow the man’s departure but failed. He was getting too dizzy from rotating with his foot all tangled up in the snare. Slocum bided his time and slowly stopped whirling around. Then only the breeze blowing across the mountain caused him to swing, back and forth like the pendulum in a Regulator clock. He mustered his strength and then began curling up. His belly muscles strained, and he thought he would rupture something as he pulled himself upward. He used his hands to hang on to his pants leg, then the edge of his trapped boot. Sheathed there was a knife. He grabbed it and hung on for dear life. If he dropped it now, he was a goner.
