Slocum's Great Race

by Jake Logan

  “Y’all just go on and do your readin’,” said the man. “Don’t worry none about keepin’ the papers in order. We don’t.”

  Slocum inwardly groaned. If they didn’t keep the newspapers stored in chronological order, he might be weeks shifting through the piles to find the ones he wanted.

  “Ain’t nobody come back here to look for anything, so you got the room to yourselves.” The printer wiped his grimy hands on his apron and cast an admiring eye at Zoe. “If you need a job, we got one for a reporter. Don’t pay squat, but in this town, there’re ways of makin’ a few extra dollars as a reporter.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Zoe cast a gimlet eye at him, as if she intended to impale him like a bug with a pin.

  “What I’m sayin’ is that favorable mention of a store or restaurant might get you a free meal or merchandise. If you find the right politician and the jam they’re in is bad enough, they might pay you to ignore a story. Ain’t what you were taught ’bout reportin’, I know, but this is San Francisco and we make our own rules as we go. You folks need anything, just holler.” With that, he went back to his work.

  “I declare,” Zoe said. “That’s downright unethical what he was saying.”

  Slocum paid her scant attention. “The piles are in order. They dump new copies on top of old until the stack threatens to topple. Then they start a new one. These two are likely the only piles we need to go through.”

  There was only one stool in the room. Slocum let Zoe use that while he sat on the floor and began searching through the papers for economic news. Even knowing the Times wasn’t likely to report bad news about local companies, he found plenty to set him thinking.

  “I don’t understand this, John. There’s nary a word about the race. It’s as if Colonel J. Patterson Turner’s Transcontinental Race never existed. That doesn’t make any sense, not with the huge coverage in St. Louis at the start. You’d think he would want even more at the end. After all, that was the idea behind the race.”

  “I think the Turner Haulage Company was about bankrupt when the race started. The railroads going under, along with so many Eastern banks, did the colonel in financially.”

  “Then the race was a hoax. He never had fifty thousand dollars in that mobile bank vault of his. It was all a fraud.”

  “Go ask the gent working the press if the colonel had approached him for a reporter to cover something special. I’ve got a few more papers to leaf through.” As Zoe went to inquire, Slocum found the proper society page, and finally located the story he’d expected to find.

  “The Times was supposed to send a man when the colonel asked, but he never did,” said Zoe, coming back in.

  “The colonel arrived on a train just two days ago.”

  “So he stole his own gold?”

  Slocum nodded slowly. “There’s another story that is mighty interesting, too. The colonel is leaving for Boston on a sailing ship with the evening tide.” Slocum stretched his legs out on the floor and said, “What are the odds he has fifty thousand dollars in gold with him?”

  “Our money! Your key would have opened the vault door, and we were there first. He’s stealing our money.”

  Slocum didn’t bother correcting her about whose gold it was. He had won the key fair and square and had managed to hang on to it—and his life—across the country to fulfill the rules of the race. Nothing said a racer’s companion had to be given any of the prize. And Zoe Murchison had begun the race as a reporter. It was her bad luck her paper had gone bankrupt with so many other businesses in what Slocum had read was being universally called the Panic of ’73.

  “So? What are we going to do about it, John?”

  “If I’m right, I know where he’ll be just before the evening tide. Until then, there’s nothing to do but wait.”

  “Wait? Never. I’d go crazy thinking about that crook Turner. How dare he?”

  “I’m going to rest up. You want to join me?” Slocum had made his invitation clear, but Zoe ranted on about Turner and how the reporters in San Francisco were all corrupt.

  “I need to find out more about the situation here, John. I’ll meet you later. When and where should we get together?”

  “The Embarcadero, Pier Three,” Slocum said. “You can ask when the tide is and be there an hour before. That should give plenty of time to settle accounts with Colonel Turner.”

  “Very well.” Distracted, she gave him a small kiss on the cheek and left the room. In seconds, she was arguing with the printer. Slocum didn’t much know or care what had her so riled about corrupt reporters in the town. He doubted they were any worse here than in St. Louis, especially since her editor had taken her stories and had never printed them. He might have sent her on what he thought was a wild-goose chase to get her out of his hair.

  If Zelnicoff was any kind of newspaperman, he might have realized Turner’s race was a hoax. For all Slocum knew, Zelnicoff might have been paid off to provide spectacular coverage for the Turner Haulage Company although he knew the colonel was bankrupt or close to it. The best way to do this without revealing the fraud would be to send an inexperienced reporter like Zoe to cover it.

  Slocum found himself not caring about any of the details. The one thing he kept burning bright in his mind was what $50,000 in gold looked like. He had some bartering to do.

  Finding Turner proved easier than Slocum thought. The colonel had a mountain of luggage stacked on the pier ready to be loaded aboard the Vermont Queen, leaving for Boston with the tide. Wandering around, Slocum spotted a short man dressed in an impeccable white suit arguing with a dockworker. He walked closer until he could eavesdrop on them.

  “I tell you, Colonel, this is a problem.”

  “There’s no problem, my good man,” Colonel Turner said. “You can deal with it. You know how.”

  Slocum considered going to the colonel and shoving a gun in his belly and demanding the gold, but he stopped when he heard the rest of the argument.

  “You want to know where we took her?” asked the dockworker.

  “No, and I don’t care, I tell you. You sell women into prostitution all the time. I don’t want to know the details, but she must not continue nosing about. Her newspaper is bankrupt, but the local papers are doing well and would love a story about me that is . . . totally untrue.”

  “You can sail with clean hands,” the roughneck said, “if not clean conscience.” The dockhand ducked away, leaving Slocum with his hand on his six-gun. What had been said chilled him. The colonel had to be talking about Zoe—and he had told the dockhand to deal with her on his own. The colonel didn’t know or care what would happen to her.

  Slocum came to a quick decision. The ship wouldn’t sail for a while, and Zoe had dug herself a grave. Slocum pushed past the colonel, who grunted and said something about rudeness. Turner was quickly left behind as Slocum ran to catch up with the dockhand. In the crush of the Embarcadero, it was difficult to single out one man he had seen only in profile. Slocum grew desperate when he couldn’t locate the man.

  Then he saw him. The dockhand spoke with two ruffians. Money changed hands and the dockhand returned to his work. Slocum thought about the chain of events and followed the two. The dockhand had only passed along the colonel’s orders, and probably knew nothing about where Zoe was being held.

  Slocum stayed close to them, hoping they kept together. If they parted, he had to grab one and make him talk fast. From the scars and missing body parts, neither would give in to threats, and there wasn’t time to convince them that he meant business. They worked their way through the edge of Chinatown and north to the Barbary Coast section of town. If the docks had been a rough area, this was a battlefield. Crime ran rampant. Even in broad daylight, Slocum saw several robberies being committed on drunks.

  The streets began to wind about and turn narrow, making Slocum increasingly wary. He was an intruder here and stuck out like a cross-eyed carpenter’s thumb. He slowed and waited when the two men he followed opened a door and cast fur
tive looks around. Neither saw him as they went inside and closed the door behind them.

  Slocum drew his six-shooter and went to the door. He opened it a fraction of an inch to peer inside. Pungent smoke billowed out. His nostrils flared as he recognized opium mixed in with tobacco smoke. Hesitation now meant death—or worse—for Zoe Murchison. As sinuous as a snake, he slipped around the partially opened door and tried to make out what he faced inside. A half dozen men were stretched out on bunks in various degrees of intoxication. All had opium pipes nearby, showing they had been successful chasing the dragon.

  “Go on, smoke it. You’ll feel better,” came the strident command.

  Slocum didn’t hear the response, but recognized Zoe’s voice. Four quick, long strides took him across the room to another doorway. A few feet down a hallway, he saw three men. Two he had followed here, and the third was trying to force an opium pipe between Zoe’s lips. She had been tied to a chair and had fought, from the look of her disheveled clothing. Tossing her head from side to side did not keep the man from thrusting the pipe between her lips. He took a handful of hair and pulled her head back.

  As her head rocked back, she saw Slocum. Her eyes went wide. Something about the change in the way she fought alerted the trio.

  Slocum lifted his six-shooter and fired four times. Three bullets struck one man in the chest. He gasped and dropped to his knees. The fourth shot was a lucky one in the dimness and hit the second man in the head, killing him instantly. The one holding Zoe whipped out a wicked knife and held it to her throat.

  “You drop that gun now or she’ll be smilin’ out of a second mouth.” He pressed the sharp edge against her throat and drew a thin red line of blood.

  “You got me wrong,” Slocum said. “I want to buy her from you. The colonel took a fancy to her and changed his mind.”

  “I can get a hunnerd dollars sellin’ her to a madam. She’s a looker. She’ll do twenty men a day. More till she wears out.”

  “That’s why the colonel wants her for his own.”

  The man with the knife hesitated and Slocum acted. He fired his last two rounds. The first broke the man’s wrist. The second went into his chest, and sent him stumbling back to crash into the wall. He slid down, clutching his wrist and trying to stanch the blood flowing from the hole in his chest.

  “John!”

  Slocum picked up the fallen knife and slit the heavy hemp ropes binding her. She collapsed forward. He awkwardly caught her, then sat her up in the chair.

  “The cut’s not too bad on your throat, but you need to keep pressure on it.” He ripped off a part of her dress that looked cleaner than the rest and put it against the wound. Her hand shook as she tried to slow the bleeding.

  “Am I going to die?”

  “Not today, but you ought to for being so stupid,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t have confronted him. He wasn’t hiding. He was waiting on the dock to board the ship. All I wanted was a story.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Slocum said. He helped her to her feet, then took the time to reload.

  The one he had shot in the head was definitely dead. The other two were still alive.

  “You might not think so, but this is your lucky day. I’m letting you live.”

  “I’ll have ever’ man jack in the quarter after you in a thrice,” shouted the man who had wielded the knife. “You won’t see sundown.”

  “And it won’t matter to you at all.” This time Slocum had plenty of time to aim and finish the job.

  “The other one, John. Kill him, too.”

  “You want to do it?” He handed Zoe his six-shooter. It told him a lot about her when she took it and clumsily pointed it at the third man. Her finger was turning white on the trigger when Slocum grabbed the pistol away from her. “Never mind him. He won’t set the hounds on us, will you?”

  The man shook his head. The fear in his eyes told Slocum there wasn’t any need to kill this one also.

  “Where’s the way out?” Slocum nodded his thanks to the man when he pointed to a battered door at the far end of the hallway. Backing away just to be safe, Slocum watched as the man slumped onto his side and lay still. Shooting him would have been a waste of lead, but Slocum was glad to know Zoe wasn’t some hothouse flower and could defend herself when she wasn’t doing something stupid.

  The air was far from clean and fresh out in the street, but Slocum had never smelled anything sweeter.

  “Come on,” he said, half dragging Zoe. Her dress was soaked in blood, but she had applied enough pressure to stop the shallow wound from bleeding further. They attracted some attention, but many pointedly looked away when they saw the six-gun clutched in Slocum’s hand. More illegal activities went on in this part of San Francisco than legal ones, and no one became too curious unless they wanted to die.

  A half hour later, they were in a better part of town. Slocum found a doctor’s office and insisted that Zoe be treated.

  “It’s not serious, John. I can still talk. I can certainly still write!”

  “Why did you accuse Turner of being a crook when you knew he could do something like this to you? He sold you to a pimp.”

  “He’s an evil man. And I’m a reporter.” She slumped. “I’m trying to be a reporter.”

  “That doesn’t give you a shield against men like him.”

  “I figured it all out. His freight company went under when the railroad he was a director for went bankrupt. He had already sent the prize money for the race to San Francisco, and needed it to start over. He has some kind of messenger service in Boston he can use the money to finance.”

  “So the race started as a legitimate advertising scheme?”

  “It seems so,” Zoe said.

  “The doctor’s going to treat you now,” Slocum said, seeing the man motioning from his surgery. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. You get patched up, then we’ll deal with Turner.”

  “We?”

  “We,” he assured her. She gave him a kiss, and Slocum tasted her blood from her lips.

  Slocum left the doctor’s office and looked around. He knew what he had to do, but getting it done in time might be difficult. He made sure his six-shooter was fully loaded before he set out to get a drink on Meigg’s Pier.

  “It feels like a noose around my neck,” Zoe complained. She touched the bandage the doctor had applied.

  “You have no idea what a noose feels like,” Slocum said.

  “And you do?”

  He didn’t respond to that. He knew. Escaping being hanged rivaled not having your throat cut, but he wasn’t going to argue the point with her.

  “How can we stop Turner?” she asked when Slocum didn’t answer her question. “I want him arrested. I want him to spend years in jail. I’ve heard the Yuma Territorial Prison is a terrible place. I want him sent there.”

  “Convicting him of anything isn’t too likely,” Slocum said. “He’s responsible for too many people getting killed. If he hadn’t started the race, using those rules that had to bring out the killer in everyone, a whole passel of folks would be a lot happier.”

  “You’re right. I have the story ready to sell. I think the Alta California might buy it, but there’s not much interest in San Francisco about the colonel.”

  “Maybe you’d do better with it in St. Louis.”

  “Possibly, though I have been thinking about Clarkesville.”

  “Why?” Even as he asked, Slocum knew the answer. Zoe had gotten on well with the owner of the newspaper there. More than that, she and his son had been drawn to each other in the brief time she’d been there. Slocum sighed. Riding on with Zoe, at least for a while, would have been good, but he understood her need to be a reporter. The small town was a decent start and, depending on how it went, perhaps her destiny. Being married to the newspaper owner’s son wasn’t so bad for a woman like her.

  She deserved more than almost getting her throat slit.

  “There, John, there he is! He’s getting away.”
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  “You sure of that?” Slocum walked to the edge of the dock and saw three men helping Colonel Turner into a skiff. The tide would be right for sailing within the hour, and a half dozen ships in the harbor prepared for their long ocean journeys. All around, dockhands worked to get last minute cargo aboard and, for most ships, only the passengers needed to be loaded before setting sail.

  “Of course I’m sure. That’s him. That’s the man I talked to earlier, the one who . . . who tried to sell me into a brothel.”

  Slocum didn’t bother telling Zoe she would have been lucky to end up in a whorehouse. More likely, the men buying her would have used her on the street corner.

  “I’ll get a policeman,” she said. “He can stop the colonel.”

  Slocum grabbed her arm and spun her around so he could look into her eyes, maybe for the last time.

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Why, yes, John, of course! You’re about the only one I can believe in.”

  “Trust me now. The colonel is going to pay for what he’s done.”

  She looked out into the Bay as two sailors rowed and the third held Colonel Turner upright. She frowned as she watched, then looked in a different direction, and finally back to the small boat bearing Turner to a China clipper.

  “That’s not the Vermont Queen. That boat’s sailing for the Orient. Why is he getting on it when his business is in Boston?”

  “I had him shanghaied,” Slocum said. “The men who hang out at Meigg’s Pier, a particularly nasty place, drunk or sober, are known for their connections with shanghaiers.” He fumbled in his pocket. “I got a hundred dollars for him. Here, take it. You can buy your train ticket to Clarkesville with it.”

  “You sold him?”

  “He’ll be a sailor on the Orient Dynasty for the next two years. The captain, I’ve heard, isn’t a gracious man.”