Slocum's Great Race

by Jake Logan

  She slipped back into the car. Big Thom had settled down in the front seat. The rest of the men had all migrated to the rear to get as far from him as possible. Their instincts were better than hers when it came to recognizing a dangerous hombre. She stood, fists on her hips, glaring at Big Thom, when she said, “Now what?”

  “Reckon you can ask more questions. I like the idea of bein’ famous because you’re writin’ about me. Just spell the name right.” He spelled out his name for her as she sat and dutifully entered it into her notebook.

  Zoe chewed a little on the pencil tip since the lead had broken and was harder to write with legibly. She cried out in surprise when Big Thom grabbed the pencil from her and used a thick-bladed knife to sharpen it. He handed he pencil back. She tried to keep her hand from shaking too much as she accepted it from him.

  “Where do you hail from, Mr. Carson?”

  “You can call me Big Thom. You know the proper spelling. I don’t come from much of anywhere. The notion of being from somewhere slows me up too much, so I keep movin’ around.”

  “Are you a wanted man?”

  “Will be ’fore this race is over, thanks to your stories,” he said.

  Zoe looked hard at him, wondering if he was lying. Then she decided he’d meant it. He was dangerous, and getting more so with every passing mile, but probably wasn’t running from the law. Not yet.

  “What do you intend to spend the fifty thousand dollars on if you win?”

  “When I win,” he said, correcting her. Big Thom got a dreamy expression and then said, “Hadn’t thought much on it. See? You’re bein’ real useful to me, keepin’ me focused on the task at hand. Well, there’s booze and whores, of course. That much money in gold will buy a powerful lot of pussy.” He laughed harshly and stared at her. “That much money’d buy your pussy, wouldn’t it?”

  “Do not be crude, sir.”

  He laughed. She realized he had intended to annoy her, to provoke some emotion. She wrote this down as an insight into his personality.

  “Show me what you wrote about me.”

  “No, I can’t do that,” Zoe said, still writing furiously. A shadow moved across her notebook and she twisted away, to find herself pinned down against the wall of the car. She drew the notebook in and held it tightly against her body to keep Big Thom from grabbing it.

  “You’re writin’ something evil about me, aren’t you?”

  Her eyes went wide with surprise. He was completely self-centered and irrational.

  “Of course I’m writing about you, sir,” she said, pushing her elbow into his gut. It felt as if she’d tried to move an iron wall. “But it’s not evil. However could you get that idea?”

  “Show me!”

  The train whistle sounded and the engine began to slow. The passenger car creaked and protested the change in speed, and Big Thom flopped back into the seat on the far side of the aisle. He glared at her with what she took to be pure insanity. The crazy light faded, and he laughed.

  “You’re a piece of work, Miss Reporter. Too bad this is the end of the line for you.”

  Zoe tried to speak, but her mouth had turned to cotton. Her heart hammered, and her brain refused to function. He was going to kill her!

  “Jubilee Junction!” bellowed the conductor. “All those taking part in Colonel J. Patterson Turner’s Transcontinental Race git off here. Find the clue that’ll git you on to your next stop. End of the line for the colonel’s racers!” The conductor gave Zoe a meaningful look that pinned her to her seat.

  Big Thom Carson pushed past the conductor and vanished through the door before Zoe could say a word. She began gathering her things, such as they were.

  “Help me, please,” she called to the conductor. She was caught in the rush of racers getting off the train to find the first clue that would put them on the road to riches. “My baggage!”

  “Missy, you don’t want to go followin’ these folks,” the conductor said, his dark face caught in a frown.

  “I appreciate your attempt to look after me, but I must go. It’s my job.”

  “You must be daft, missy, after what that one made you—us—do,” the conductor said, pointing to the seat where Big Thom had been. “You get cross of him, and he’ll kill you and never notice.”

  “Oh, he’d notice,” Zoe said. “He’d complain about how much the bullet cost.”

  “Sounds like you known him purty good, missy.” The conductor shook his head as he pulled down her lone bag and swung it around for her. “We will be leavin’ Jubilee Junction in ten minutes. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll be sittin’ right there where you are.”

  Zoe rummaged through her bag, then looked out at the station platform and muttered, “Oh, drat. There’s no time!”

  With that, she snapped the bag shut and ran to the door. She turned to wave good-bye to the conductor, but he had already gone back to the mail car. Heaving a sigh, she hopped down to the railroad platform and looked around for some clue to where the men had gone. The Jubilee Junction platform was virtually abandoned, and none of those from the train, including Big Thom Carson, was in sight.

  She went to the station agent, a smallish man wearing spectacles but still squinting.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “They got horses waitin’ fer ’em,” he said, trying to get a better look at her. “Instructions in the saddlebags, from what I hear.”

  “Where are the horses?” Her mind raced. So many of the men had been tossed off the train, at least one horse had to be available—one for her.

  “Around the other side of the station. You one of the racers?”

  “I’m with Big Thom Carson,” she said. The station agent looked blank. The name meant nothing to him. “The horses,” she said. “Are they fully provisioned?”

  “You mean, is there vittles in them saddlebags? I was paid to provide it, and by jiminy, I did. I—”

  He spoke to thin air. Zoe jumped to the ground, not bothering with the four steps down from the platform, and ran to the far side of the station. Only one horse remained. The racers had taken more than one each, she suspected, to prevent others from following. She gentled the horse as it stood nervously, fastened her bag over the saddlebags, and then clumsily mounted. It had been some time since she had ridden, but the basics were universal.

  She started the horse at a walk, and then moved its gait faster until it trotted along, used to having her astride. As she rode, Zoe quickly realized that the colonel had given different instructions to each racer. It seemed that no two went in the same direction.

  Just when she despaired of figuring out which direction Big Thom had ridden in, and was trying to decide if she shouldn’t just follow another rider, the report from a hand-gun came rolling across the prairie. If she had a brain in her head, she would have ridden in another direction, but then, if she had any sense, she would never have wanted to be a reporter.

  Galloping ahead, she topped a rise and saw what she had expected. Big Thom had gunned down another racer, and was searching the body for another golden key.

  He spotted her as she made her way down the hill, heading directly for him.

  “Wait, Big Thom, don’t!” she cried, but the man vaulted into the saddle and galloped away.

  She wasn’t as accomplished a rider as Big Thom Carson, but she found herself slowly overtaking him. Then he simply disappeared. Zoe drew rein and looked around, wondering where he had gotten off to on the flat plain.

  The glint of sunlight off the front sight of a rifle poking up over the lip of a ravine was all the warning she had before a bullet came arrowing in her direction.

  8

  Slocum coughed, rolled onto his side, and then spat out a mouthful of dirt. He wiped at his eyes and got more dirt from his face. Every bone in his body aching, he sat up and tried to look around. Panic seized him when he saw nothing. Then he calmed as he realized he sat in a deep hole with the only light coming down through a narrow opening high above him. With his
hand pressed against the dirt wall, he got to his feet and braced himself until the dizziness passed. He brushed off as much filth as he could from his clothing, then got around to seeing what had happened to him.

  At first, he thought he had fallen into a trap, but it looked more as if he had broken through a thin layer of dirt over an underground chamber dug out by flowing water. When the water went away—where, he could not say—the underground river had probably dried up during the drought, leaving this cavity behind. The people in the town had moved on and nobody had tromped hard enough on the dirt trapdoor to fall through—until Slocum had blundered onto it.

  It took only a few seconds to realize he could never climb out of the hole. The sides of the shaft were muddy, and refused to take his weight when he dug his toes into them. He stepped back and looked up at the thin sliver of bright blue sky ten feet over his head. Jumping up would gain him nothing but exhaustion. Shouting for help would only attract unwanted attention and make him hoarse. The men who had taken Harry Ibbotson weren’t likely to offer any help more than taking a few shots at him, just for the hell of it.

  Slocum took off his hat and slapped it against his leg. Getting a bullet in the head might be better than dying in a ready-made grave like this.

  “It was a river,” he said, putting the hat back on. “It came from somewhere and went somewhere in the opposite direction.”

  This buoyed his spirits and gave him some hope. Not much, but enough to get him to explore the pit in directions other than straight up to the phantom promise of freedom offered by the sliver of Missouri sky.

  He clawed at the sides of the pit, and when a section of wall fell to his feet in a minor mud slide, he found a dark tunnel stretching beyond his sight. Slocum lit a lucifer and studied in the momentary flare the only hope for his escape. A cold knot formed in his belly. The channel cut by the underground river was hardly larger than his shoulders, was muddy, and ran for who knows how long. For all Slocum could see, the underground river might never have surfaced anywhere as it cut under the prairie. He could crawl into the darkness and never find a way out.

  A quick breath settled his nerves. Then he reached into the tunnel and began crawling. In the wet. In the dark. For what seemed an eternity. The slippery floor impeded his advance, and for all he knew, he had been struggling along like a human worm and getting nowhere. Panic rose, but Slocum forced it down. He was stronger than his own fear. More than once, he had been in dire circumstances and had gotten out alive. He would this time.

  From what might be his grave.

  New fears arose. The mud had not dried, meaning water had flowed through the channel recently. The thunderstorm could have fed it, and if another raced across the prairie, new water might fill the tunnel and drown him. He wiggled along a little faster. The only way he could prevent that was to get free as fast as he could.

  When chunks of the tunnel roof began falling down ahead of him, Slocum did cry out in fear. He was going to be buried alive. In the dark and wet, and die and—

  A huge chunk collapsed in front of him and filled his nose and mouth with dirt. For a moment, he didn’t realize what new element had been added to his plight. Then he spat mud and cried out in joy. He began clawing his way upward, a hot wind against his face. Slocum burst through the ground and exploded onto the prairie, coated with mud and laughing at his escape.

  The underground river had run less than a foot beneath the dried dirt at this point, and his passage had disturbed the tenuous roof enough to free him.

  He sat and shook for a moment, then laughed again and began scraping off the filth that caked him. When he stood and looked around, the cold fear that had seized him underground returned. He thought he had been struggling along for hours and had gone miles. But the edge of the ghost town lay less than a hundred feet away.

  Slogging back with mud falling from him with every step, Slocum got to the nearest tumbledown building and cautiously looked around. Ibbotson’s kidnappers had to be somewhere nearby. He kept a sharp eye out for Molly, too, but nothing moved in the town save a vagrant wind pushing dead weeds down the streets.

  Exploring the town had to be done with one eye on the ground. Slocum didn’t want to tumble down into another sinkhole. Getting out a second time might be impossible. After a half hour of searching, Slocum had discovered something else that was impossible: finding another living soul.

  Circling the town, he found hoofprints leading to the southwest. The muddy ground held the prints, but also obscured the number of horses heading from town. More than a single rider, but other than that, he could not tell.

  He drew his Colt Navy, went into a crouch, and had his six-shooter aimed when he heard movement behind him. Slocum relaxed when his own horse snorted and shook its head.

  “Come on over here,” he said softly, holstering his six-shooter and holding out his hand to the horse. The animal nickered and shook its head again, but did not run off. Slocum took the reins and spent a few more minutes gentling the horse. Wherever it had run off to had saved it from being stolen by Ibbotson’s kidnappers.

  Slocum swung into the saddle, headed on the trail after the riders, and soon lost the spoor entirely. Stumped, he kept riding in the same direction, wondering why he bothered. He had a key in his pocket, but could trade it with another racer for a few dollars, maybe more. If the cutthroat situation he had seen aboard the train continued, only a few men would ever get to the finish line, and they would carry most of the keys. Some of the golden keys might be lost, but Slocum knew that wouldn’t be a problem for men like those he had already faced. The colonel would have the choice of eating lead or handing over the gold. From Colonel Turner’s standpoint, it hardly mattered if the key fit. All he wanted was publicity for his freight company.

  How could any amount of publicity be worth men dying trying to claim the prize? The newspapers would never mention that, but it would rest heavy on the colonel’s soul for all eternity. There were any number of men for whom such a burden would be light and almost meaningless. Colonel Turner might be one of them.

  “Hell, probably is,” Slocum muttered. “He thought up this damned cockfight.”

  He reached a double-rutted road long overgrown with weeds. This gave the first hint where the riders had gone. The crushed weeds still directed him toward the southwest. He had instinctively followed the kidnappers. As he rode, Slocum worked to clean his six-shooter. The Colt was a finely machined killing device and required maintenance that he had neglected. Wiping off the dirt and getting the grime out of the mechanism, he cocked it several times, listening to the action. Only when he was satisfied it operated with its usual smoothness did he return it to his holster and once more pay attention to the trail and the horizon where Ibbotson’s kidnappers would likely be silhouetted.

  Since he had not seen any trace of Molly, he guessed she had either been killed outright, or was also a prisoner of the gang that had snatched her brother. It didn’t make a great deal of sense that any of the racers would kidnap another. Better to simply shoot Ibbotson and take his key.

  There were too many things Slocum simply did not understand, and he was reaching the point where he didn’t give two hoots and a holler. He felt obligated to find out what had happened to Molly and her brother, but more than that, he was tired, beaten up, and in no condition to continue with the race. He traced a finger over the key on his watch chain.

  “A hundred dollars,” he said. “I’ll get a hundred for the damned key or to hell with it.” Satisfied with this as a goal, Slocum rode on hunting for the other party on the prairie ahead of him. So intently was he looking for a tight knot of riders that he almost missed the man crouched in a ravine off to his left. The man’s attention was directed away from Slocum as he sighted down the rifle barrel.

  Slocum came to a halt and watched, wondering what was going on. A posse might be after an outlaw, who had finally been run to ground and had decided to make a stand. That was no concern of Slocum’s.

  The a
mbush suddenly became his concern when he saw the woman appear over a rise and then slowly ride directly into the sniper’s rifle.

  Slocum drew and aimed, not sure if he should fire. When the hidden gunman fired at the woman, Slocum got off three quick rounds. One hit the owlhoot smack in the back. He threw up his hands, bent at a crazy angle, and then flopped about for a few seconds before dying. Slocum’s slug had busted his spine.

  Slocum worked his horse down a steep incline into the ravine, and splashed through fetlock-deep water. The runoff had turned this ravine into a raging river, but the storm had passed and the water had quickly vanished, all but the few inches he sloshed through to reach the dead sniper.

  Kicking free, he slid to the ground and went to the man. Slocum’s eyes narrowed when a flash of gold caught his attention. He fumbled in the dead man’s vest pocket and drew out a gold key.

  “Another of the damned racers,” he said to himself. Seeing that an outline of a key still poked against the wet vest, he ran his finger about and finally worried out a second key. He tucked both into his pocket to go with the one he already had just as the woman peered down from the lip of the ravine.

  “Oh, no!” She covered her mouth with her hand and looked as if she might faint.

  “He tried to kill you. I got him first. Why’d he want you dead?”

  “He’s—that’s Big Thom Carson. I interviewed him.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a reporter, and he was in Colonel Turner’s race—it’s all about—”

  “Fifty thousand in gold. I know,” Slocum said. “A woman paid me five hundred dollars to rescue her brother from kidnappers who took him because he had a gold key.”

  “I recognize you!” she blurted out.

  “Reckon I’d remember you if we’d met,” Slocum said. She wasn’t as pretty as Molly Ibbotson, but she had a button nose and a fine-boned face. Her blond hair was in disarray, but this only made her all the prettier, giving her a wild look.