Slocum and the Gila River Hermit

by Jake Logan

  The horses drank their fill, and Slocum dipped his canteen into the stream to replace all he had drunk on the trip from Mesilla.

  “Fill your canteen,” he called to Rolf. When he didn’t get a response, Slocum dropped his canteen and drew his six-shooter. Climbing the steep embankment, he reached the meadow and looked around. Rolf Berenson had disappeared like a puff of smoke on the wind.

  Slocum cursed. He started to find the man, then remembered the horses. He descended to the bottom of the ravine again and led them from the water. It took a few minutes for him to hobble the horses and get their bridles off so they could graze on the juicy grass growing along the stream. Then he clambered back up and hunted for Rolf’s spoor.

  He found footprints easily enough, then stopped. Why bother finding the lunatic? He had brought him back to the Gila to let him go. Leave the man’s horse and simply ride on. That had been his intention ever since jumping off the train outside Mesilla. He wouldn’t even have to leave the Arabian. Rolf had gotten along without one, and a second horse would let Slocum ride farther and faster by switching when one tired.

  As he turned, he caught sight of movement out of the corner of his eye. Slocum continued to turn but flopped belly down rather than simply sliding back to the ravine bottom. From the trees came a solitary rider.

  “Deutsch,” he muttered. How had the man tracked them through the forest? Slocum would have bet not even an Apache could have stayed on the trail. The man must be part bloodhound to sniff out their tracks.

  Slocum remained on his belly, watching. Deutsch rode in a tight circle, then went back into the woods, still searching. Slocum had taken special care to hide their hoofprints when they had left the stand of trees. That much had worked. But he could no longer let Rolf Berenson go running free. Deutsch was close and dangerous.

  A dozen possibilities ran through Slocum’s head. Am-bushing Deutsch was high on the list, but getting Rolf back to his cliff dwellings took care of a lot of problems. Slocum had gotten lucky trapping Rolf the way he had. The man might be crazy but he wasn’t stupid; no one would ever catch him like that again, not even Deutsch.

  Riding into a different stretch of the wilderness was another possibility. Get Rolf where he could run free, and he was likely to simply vanish. Slocum remembered how hard it had been to follow him. Slocum cursed again. Both Deutsch and Rolf Berenson were better trailsmen than he was. It was bitter medicine to swallow, but it was the truth. Slocum had seen men who lied to themselves about how good they were. They usually ended up dead.

  Deutsch might be better at tracking, but Slocum was willing to admit it and find a way to make it work against him.

  Spinning around, Slocum stayed low and followed Rolf’s tracks into the woods on the far side of the clearing. Once hidden by the trees, he stood and looked around.

  “He’s better at hiding his trail than I am at finding it,” Slocum said softly to himself. “How do I outsmart him?”

  He prowled the woods for a few minutes, then got his bearings and swung away from the game trail Rolf had likely followed. Working his way between the trail and the Gila River brought him success in only an hour.

  Rolf Berenson had moved slowly to hide his trail. Slocum had figured where the madman was likely heading and had taken a straight path. Sure enough, Rolf was at the bank of the Gila River, looking for a way across so he could return to his cave. Slocum did not doubt the trail was cleverly hidden; he had simply gotten ahead of the man.

  “He’s almost on top of us,” Slocum said. Rolf Berenson jumped a foot, twisted in the air, and landed on all fours. Slocum had seen startled cats perform the same aerial turn. “If we don’t cooperate, you and me, Deutsch will catch up. And he doesn’t want me.”

  “Deutsch,” the hermit said. Slocum tried to decipher the man’s tone and failed. There was a hint of fear, but recognition that Deutsch was a better tracker carried more weight.

  “You can go on over to the cliff dwellings, but he knows you live there. He used Arlene Castle—the young woman you kept up in the cave—to lure you before.” Slocum wondered what had happened when Deutsch used Arlene as bait. It was as if Rolf had taken the bait and then Deutsch had lost interest. Or had something else happened? Slocum had never heard the complete story from Arlene, but she had not been fearful. If anything, she had sounded content to remain in Rolf’s cave.

  “You want to shoot him?”

  Slocum mulled on that. Then he shook his head.

  “He’s hard to kill,” said the hermit.

  “I just want him to let you go.”

  “Texas is nice,” Rolf said. He began whispering to himself, asking questions and then answering in a different voice. Slocum knew the man was drifting off into insanity again. If only he had remained lucid a little longer, it might have been possible to lure Deutsch out and catch him. Slocum had found over the years that using the techniques men used themselves was one of the best ways of defeating them.

  Deutsch had used Arlene as bait. If Slocum used Rolf in the same way, Deutsch was likely to fall for the trap. But with Rolf meandering off into his own private hell, Slocum could not be sure any trap he laid now would work.

  “Do you know a good spot to cross the river?” Slocum looked upstream and down for a shallower ford. The Gila River raged with such fury a man would be swept away trying to cross. Slocum rubbed his head and smiled ruefully. He had found that out firsthand.

  Rolf Berenson began spinning like a top and came to a sudden stop, pointing upstream.

  “Get across there,” Slocum said. “Hurry.” He had the feeling Deutsch was close. He could take care of him and let Berenson go on his way at the same time. Slocum checked his six-shooter, then shooed Rolf away.

  He followed at a distance, then found the spot for his ambush. Slocum almost broke from his cover when he saw how Rolf struggled in the rapidly flowing Gila River, then realized that the old man knew the river as well as he did the surrounding country. Once he reached the midpoint, Rolf angled toward the far back and plodded wetly ashore.

  The sound of an approaching horse caused Slocum to shift his attention to the woods. Not ten feet from where he crouched came Deutsch. The man stayed astride his horse, watching as Rolf cavorted about and judging his chances at crossing the Gila.

  “Reach for your gun and I’ll drop you on the spot,” Slocum said. The truth carried in his words. Deutsch lifted his hands, carefully hanging on to the reins in his left hand.

  “Get down.”

  “What are you going to do? Shoot me in the back?”

  “I don’t do that,” Slocum said. “If you try to turn and draw, though, I won’t have much problem ventilating you.”

  “What’re you doing, Slocum? I tracked you all the way from Mesilla. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were bringing him back to let him go free.”

  “That’s what I’m doing,” Slocum said. “He’s crazy as a magpie, but he won’t hurt anyone else out here if he’s left alone.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “He killed his wife.”

  Deutsch swung around, eyes wide. He didn’t go for his six-gun, but Slocum aimed straight for the man’s heart.

  “He killed Edna? Son of a bitch!”

  “You sound like you admire him for that.”

  “I’d’ve done it, if I’d ever had the chance. She was a black widow if ever I saw one. Why Pa married her is beyond me.”

  Slocum stared at Deutsch, not sure he had heard him right.

  “Pa?”

  “He’s my pa,” the man said, staring hard at Slocum. “I’m Deutsch Berenson, his only son. Why do you think I’m so hot to get him back to Texas? I can run the ranch, and I won’t put him away in any hospital where he’ll pine away. He may be crazy but he doesn’t deserve that.”

  “He didn’t kill his brother?”

  “I don’t have an uncle. Had an aunt—well, not exactly, I suppose. Pa had a sister who died real young, a lot of years before I was even a gleam in his eye.�
� Deutsch stared hard at Slocum. “You got a whole lot of misinformation in that head of yours.”

  “Tell me about it.” Slocum’s pistol did not waver, but his mind raced. He saw some resemblance between Deutsch and Rolf Berenson, especially the nose and shape of the eyes. But Deutsch’s eyes were sharp, clear, and utterly sane.

  “Nothing much to tell. There’s a corrupt judge who wanted to steal away the ranch. He sent Mayerling and his henchmen. Don’t rightly know what happened to them.”

  “They won’t be bothering you,” Slocum said.

  “It’s like that, is it?” Deutsch heaved a sigh of relief. “That left only Edna. She married Pa for the ranch. She wanted to steal it away from me.”

  “Women can’t own land,” Slocum said, things finally coming together. “But if she poisoned him and kept him on the brink of dying, she could run it and say it was all his orders.”

  “Reckon it’s time for me to admit you know more than I do. How was she going to do that?”

  “Arsenic poisoning would lay him up, but it takes a powerful big dose to kill. She was feeding him small doses. By the time they would have returned, he would have been sicker than a dog and she could have run things.”

  “Sounds like Edna. She was always a crook at heart.” Deutsch laughed without humor. “She wasn’t anything at heart. She didn’t have a heart.”

  “Would you let your pa stay here? On his own?”

  Deutsch pursed his lips and thought hard on it before nodding slowly.

  “If that’s what he wanted, though I’m not sure what he wants means a whole danged lot. He flops from being crazy to sane and back in the span of a few minutes. But he has done all right by himself. With Mayerling and Edna not looking for him, I don’t know there’s much problem. But I’d rather have him around where I could look after him all proper.”

  “How big is that ranch? The judge—and Edna—went to a powerful lot of trouble to get it.”

  Deutsch hesitated, as if judging how much he should lie.

  “You brought Pa back when you could have taken him on down to the judge. You knew about him wanting to steal the ranch with his court orders and fancy legal words.”

  Deutsch thought on it a while more, then answered, “Close to three million acres.”

  Slocum wasn’t sure he had any notion how big that was. Deutsch supplied more information for him: “We can run a fifty-thousand-head herd every year.”

  “That’s mighty big,” Slocum said.

  “Not the biggest,” Deutsch said. “Not even the second biggest. But big. It’s Texas, after all.”

  Slocum holstered his six-gun and said, “Sorry about giving you such a bad time, but it looked as if you were out to kill him. Edna said so and I believed her.”

  “She had a way about her,” Deutsch admitted. “More ’n once she tried to get me into bed to bend me to her ways. When I wouldn’t have anything to do with her, she found ways to run me off. By the time I came to my senses and realized she was bluffing, Pa had escaped from the sanatorium.”

  “And the big hunt for the Gila hermit began,” Slocum concluded. “Let’s cross the river and find him to ask what he wants to do.”

  “Want to ride back with me and get your horses? I saw them in the ravine.”

  “You’re one hell of a tracker. Where did you learn?” Slocum asked.

  “When Edna ran me off, I spent a year with some Warm Springs Apaches off their reservation. It was dangerous riding with them, but there was one old man named Nana who could track a fish through water. I learned plenty from him until he lit out for Mexico to avoid the cavalry. Purt near every trooper in both the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry was on their tail.”

  Slocum fetched his horses, and they returned to the ford across the Gila River. He kept an eye out for Rolf Berenson on the other side, but the old man had disappeared. For once, he had done as Slocum asked, and now Slocum was sorry he had obeyed.

  “We can find him,” Slocum said, “but it’ll be a chore. Even for you, it’ll be hard. He knows this entire country like the back of his hand.”

  “Probably better. Pa never noticed things like his own hand.” Deutsch laughed. Then they worked their way across the roaring river and emerged.

  “He had a cave in a cliff. Indians abandoned it quite a while back, from the look of it,” Slocum said.

  “I know all about that.” Deutsch wheeled his horse around and then shook his head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say nobody’s walked on this side of the river in a month of Sundays. Don’t see so much as a heel print in the mud.”

  “You might have learned from the Apaches, but you also had a head start if tracking runs in families,” Slocum said. He added his skill to that of Deutsch and together they could not find so much as a trace.

  “Let’s go to the cliff,” Deutsch finally said. “He might have ended up there.”

  Before they had ridden a half mile, Slocum saw movement ahead. He reached for his six-shooter, but Deutsch waved him back.

  “It’s all right. Reckon she found him. They got along real good before.”

  “She?”

  “Arlene. She rode out with me to find my pa. That’s one feisty lady.”

  The way Deutsch spoke of Arlene Castle told Slocum more than he wanted to know. He had been thinking on returning to Silver City and seeing her one more time before leaving.

  “I found him. We’ve had a fine old talk,” Arlene said. Seated on a log, Rolf Berenson munched on food Arlene had given him.

  “Slocum here thinks Pa ought to have the chance to decide for himself where he wants to live.”

  “Why, nonsense,” Arlene said, putting her hands on her hips and looking peeved. “He’s going to come home with us.”

  Slocum filled in what Arlene was saying, and she was not referring to anywhere around Silver City as “home.”

  “If he says so. That’s why I came. But just you and me, Arlene, we can go back and make a mighty fine family.”

  “He’s your father,” she said firmly. “He’s taken quite a shine to me, and he wants to go back to Texas.”

  “That true, Pa?” Deutsch dismounted and went to sit beside the old man.

  “Sure, son. She’s dead and no bother. And I like her.” He pointed at Arlene.

  “She’s going to be your daughter-in-law.”

  As Deutsch and Rolf spoke quietly, Arlene came over to where Slocum still sat astride his horse.

  “I hope you’re not too disappointed, John. I know you and me, well, and my pa and the land and getting here.” She blushed.

  “It was an honor to see you to Silver City from Fort Wingate,” Slocum said. “Your pa’s all settled in?”

  “He’s got his land. Six hundred forty acres.”

  Slocum compared that with three million acres. Arlene had certainly worked her way up in the world, in addition to landing herself a husband.

  “Here,” Slocum said, handing her the reins to Rolf’s horse. “You’ll need this for him to ride. It’s a mighty fine specimen of horseflesh.” He would be sad to let the Arabian go, but he had a sturdy pony under him, not to mention a thick wad of greenbacks in his pocket.

  “John,” she started. Arlene bit her lower lip, then said, “If you’re down Texas way, stop by.”

  “I will,” Slocum said, knowing he never would. He looked over and Rolf had put his arm around his son’s shoulders and laid his head down like a small child. Slocum turned back to Arlene, touched the brim of his battered hat, and then headed due west. He wouldn’t have to cross the Gila River again going in this direction—and it was as close to riding away from Texas as he could get without retracing his tracks northward. It was definitely time to find some new country to explore.

  Watch for

  SLOCUM AND THE COMANCHE CAPTIVE

  343rd novel in the exciting SLOCUM series

  from Jove

  Coming in September!

  er Hermit