“I’m pleased to know you, Mr. Buckle.”
“Call me Tom. You’ll be seeing me more around here. I’m Jedd’s new deputy. Been doing the same duty over in Bowater, but since Jedd’s boss was knocked out of commission and Jedd advanced to the full town marshal’s role, he’s asked me to work for him, and I’ve accepted. I’ll be moving to Scarlett’s Luck in the next little while.”
“I wish you well. Welcome to our town.”
“To hear that from the very man whose name the town carries means much to me. Thank you, Ben.”
Ben turned to McSwain. “How did you come to be here today?” he asked.
“I’ve been to my daughter’s house, over in Bowater. I was called there by a man sent by my son-in-law, who gave me very distressing news. Emma has been taken.”
“Taken?”
“Kidnapped. She is being held for a high ransom that Stanley, her husband, claims inability to pay. He has asked me to pay it in his place.”
“Can you do it? I guess I’m asking, do you have the means?”
“It happens that I do. How I came by it is something about which I can hold no pride. But have the means I do, and I am ready to pay that ransom if it is necessary. But I was not willing to do it without talking it through with Jedd. Stanley was quite insistent that I not leave his home and that I begin taking steps to immediately obtain the diam—uh, to obtain the resources in my possession, which at the moment are safely locked away in a vault in San Francisco. There was something odd in it all, though, something that set me on edge and made me insist upon speaking to Jedd about it first. The fact that he insisted on being the one to whom I should present the ransom, rather than me giving it directly to whomever has Emma…that worried me.”
“Me as well,” Jedd said.
McSwain nodded. “That is why I insisted on coming to Jedd before making any major actions. I trust Jedd’s judgment on such matters.”
Jedd said, “And my judgment is that before anybody starts handing over ransom payments to somebody like Stanley Wickham, who I think is about as trustworthy as a riverboat gambler—and I’m aware I may be misjudging him because of Emma—there is a place that merits a look first. A place that could be relevant to any situation involving a missing woman in this area. You know the area I’m thinking of, Ben, if you’ll put your mind to it.”
Ben frowned. “The ridge…the one I told you about, where there’s cabins with no doors?”
Jedd nodded, then spoke. “I went to that place, Ben, and Tom here went with me for a part of the way. There was cause to believe that those odd little cabins were put there to serve as pens for bears caught for the bull and bear fights, but a closer look showed there’d been human beings kept there, too, and recent. I found a woman’s comb inside one of those cabins. And in more than one of them there were droppings that were not of bears. Looked to be human spoor.”
“But nobody there when you were looking around?”
“Obviously not. I doubt I’d be here and alive today if there had been. But here’s the crux of it all: there’s strong rumors in these parts that somebody has been using that place as a holding spot for women being sold abroad for evil purposes, sold to bad men of wealth and power. A well-established operation, the rumors have it, going back well before California became part of the United States. So when a woman goes missing, as Emma has, you have to consider at least the possibility that she’s gotten snared into that particular net. God, I hope not, but I think another look at that valley is called for.” Jedd turned to Bellingham. “A question for you, Crozier. You are a man who spends his time asking questions, listening to answers, and listening as well to what’s going on around you. Since you’ve been in California, have you heard much rumor regarding the enslavement and sale of women through Mexico by land and the California bays and ports by sea?”
“I’ve heard it talked of frequently,” Bellingham said. “And lately, more such talk than when we first arrived.”
“Do you take the talk seriously?”
“I must admit that I do. There is a ring of grim truth about it, and such a prevalence of it, that I have to believe there may be at least some truth there.” He paused. “I can say one thing with confidence: such a trafficking does go on. It exists. Whether this valley with its cabins is part of it, I have no idea. But the trafficking is real. It occurs.”
“Yes, it does,” Tom Buckle said.
“I’m going to go with you, Jedd,” Ben said abruptly. “I ain’t no lawman, but I’ll go, if it would help anybody caught up in such a bad snare as that one.”
“I appreciate that, Ben. But it ain’t the place or situation for you.”
Ben looked down at his ragged, liquor-ravaged form and nodded sadly. “I ain’t much count to nobody, I don’t reckon.”
“Don’t forget why you brought me here, Mr. Scarlett,” young Napier cut in. He’d been so quiet that he’d almost faded into the background.
Ben’s face came alive again as remembrance struck. “That’s right! Jedd, considering all that’s going on here right now, and what you’re about to do, you need to hear what Squire here has to say. He was visiting his sister’s grave over at the base of that ridge, where the trail is—”
“I know the spot,” Jedd said.
“—and he heard something. Sent a chill through me when he told me of it. It must have chilled him, too, because he was looking for a lawman when he found me. He saw I was wearing this….” Ben pulled back the long sash of the wrongly tied cravat and yanked Blalock’s badge from his vest and handed it to Jedd. “Found that on the street where Marshal Blalock’s horse died on him.”
Jedd pocketed the badge and turned to Squire. “Talk to me, son.”
Squire told his tale of the woman’s scream from somewhere beyond the top of the ridge. When the brief story was done, Jedd looked at his new deputy. “Tom Buckle, welcome to the first day of your new job. And this time I’m afraid you’ll have to not back off from going into that valley with me, no matter how hurtful it might be as regards your late sister.”
Buckle looked Jedd in the eye. “I’d not miss it, not this time. I’ll go in her memory, and for the sake of this man’s daughter…and the woman who should have been yours.”
“Hear, hear!” McSwain said. “Jedd, if Emma is up there, you find her, and you bring her back…to both of us. And I’d like to come with you while you do. I’m no lawman and I know I’m no more likely than our friend Ben here to be of true help, but she’s my daughter, Jedd. And if she’s been taken by such rabble as that, I have to be there.”
Jedd replied, “I’ve said here that I think we are obliged to take a new look at that valley, but as regards Emma, I actually doubt she’s there, Zeb. She’s missing, but there’s been a ransom demand. And the kind of folk rumored to be holding prisoners up in that little basin valley don’t take women to hold them for ransom. They steal women to sell them. If they had Emma, there never would have been a call for ransom.”
McSwain nodded. “I’m not sure there really has been an authentic call for ransom, Jedd. The only mention of ransom that’s been made was made by Stanley Wickham. He had no letter, no note to show me. Only his word that such a demand has been made.”
“Wait…are you hinting that you believe Wickham would have his own wife kidnapped to try to get money out of you, Zeb?”
“I would not put it past him. The man is a snake and I never should have stood by while Emma married him. I have tried to make my peace with the notion of him as her husband, but there are alarms that sound in my mind every time the mere thought of the man passes through it.”
“I’m the same way about that, Zeb,” Jedd said. “But all that to the side, I think it’s best you stay here with Ben, for now. Squire, has your family settled in these climes?”
“My father has a mining claim about three miles from here.”
“Maybe you’d best get home, then.”
“I’ll…I’ll wait with Mr. Scarlett and Mr. McSwain. I want to k
now how this all turns out.”
Jedd nodded, then to Bellingham said: “Crozier, you’re keeping silent. I’m hoping you don’t have a notion that you’ll be going along with us on this. If we find somebody up there, it probably won’t turn out to be a good time or place for note-taking.”
“You will talk to me afterward, though? This could provide an important theme and bit of plot for my novel.”
“Talking about that novel openly now, I see?” Jedd observed.
“No reason not to.”
“I’ll talk to you at any length you want after this is through.”
“Then I’ll stay put here with the others.”
“Good man, Crozier.”
Jedd and Buckle armed themselves, and Jedd removed his deputy’s badge and handed it to Buckle. Then he put the marshal’s badge previously worn by Blalock on his own chest.
“Jedd Colter, town marshal,” he said. “I never would have thought it.”
“I hope you don’t find her in that place, Jedd,” McSwain said. “But if you do, bring her back.”
“You can count on it, Zeb. Deputy Buckle, let’s go.”
“Yes, sir, Marshal Colter.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
There was time to plan, that much she had to admit. Penned up as she was, there was nowhere she could go and little she could do, so she spent much of her time studying her claustrophobic prison, trying to identify weaknesses, possible escape avenues….
And it all came down to one thing: to escape this place she had to have a knife. With a knife she could cut her bonds, and with a knife she could, just maybe, work the blade up through a gap and pin the tip into the sliding wooden bar that held the trapdoor entrance-exit closed. She could work the bar free of its holders and push the door up and open. And simply climb out.
If she had a knife. And there was no knife in this little place. She’d already scanned each crevice, each gap, each corner, in the wild hope that, somehow, someone at some past time had left a knife, a broken blade, even a piece of broken glass, that she might be able to reach and use. Nothing. That hope was fading.
And there was no new hope rising to replace it. Without a way to cut her hands free, there was no hope. None at all. She would be here until they took her to the next place, wherever that place would be. A port, a dock, a wagon rolling toward Mexico…or maybe just another wooded valley filled with cabin prisons. She could not know.
She stared out through the biggest gap between two logs and pondered the fact that only a hand’s width of wood separated her from the outer world. That, and a few strands of twined fiber. If she could just…if she could just…she could not even finish the thought, because there simply was nothing she could “just” do.
The bar moved and the door lifted open, and Turner was there. He knelt, smiling at her in a way that sickened her. “You amaze me,” he said. “In a situation such as this, yet you still remain as beautiful as any woman could be. Unwashed, unkempt…but beautiful. That’s a rarity, you know, a woman who can maintain her beauty through such hard circumstances.”
“Are you really going to…to send me away? To some strange man somewhere else?”
“This is my trade, my dear. My life. It’s what I do…send women off to strange men somewhere else, in exchange for the money they pay me.”
“But you are wasting me. Wasting me on a stranger! Why do that? I could be…I could be yours!” And somehow, she made herself smile at him.
He seemed surprised, actually struck wordless a few moments. Was the woman beginning to lose her mind through the effects of deprivation and worry? He’d been at this dark game long enough to have seen it happen before, with others, this shifting of the captor from enemy to friend. He’d never allowed it to go far, though he had used it to his own advantage sometimes.
None of those other mentally disintegrating and desperate women, though, had been what Emma Wickham was: the essence and summation of feminine beauty…perfection. He’d had other women be drawn to him in a wild hope that, somehow, he would turn from captor to benefactor for them. Yes, but none of those had been anything close to what it would take for him even to consider taking them for himself in anything more than a momentary, lust-venting way.
Emma Wickham, however, was different than any other. She was one, the only one among all he’d seen, whom he might consider as a woman he could make his own, in some personal and permanent way. He might actually, at some previously unexplored level of himself, be able to love her. Love. Not a word or concept he was accustomed to thinking of, even believing in. For him there had never been anything but power, domination, violent passion…never love. Love was a fiction of fools.
He was not fool enough to believe he was at this moment in love with this imprisoned beauty. But he did see in her something that made him think love might actually be a real thing, after all, something at least possible between two people. That alone was enough to set her apart and make her special and important and worthy of his attention.
As he pondered all this, he moved toward her, eyes locked on hers. He reached her, leaned forward, felt her bound hands groping at him to embrace him as best they could within her rope-limited range of motion. She could not achieve it, of course, but the resolve with which she had tried actually moved him. A man who had thought himself beyond the reach of normal human emotion…he had been moved. It was a novel and somewhat unsettling experience.
She was trying to reach him, trying to kiss him, but again her restraints kept her from success. He looked at her deeply, smiled, then pulled away, not even kissing her or even wanting to. He had already vented his carnal passions upon this woman. Now he wanted something more, and different. And higher. That had never happened before, and it was more than he could deal with.
He turned away from her and wordlessly left her alone in her log prison. He closed down the door and barred it shut, then moved on to the pen of another woman, one he felt free to use and treat in the way he was accustomed to using and treating women. Women who did not waken things in him that had nothing to do with power and lust and domination.
It would be another two hours before he noticed that, somewhere along the way, the knife he carried in a sheath on his belt was gone. He looked for it in a wild fashion, appalled that it was missing, but try as he would, he could not find it, nor imagine how it could have been released from its holder without his awareness.
He’d dropped it, he finally decided. It lay somewhere amid weeds or stones, out of sight, lost by accident. It had to be. Had to be.
She could not have said exactly how she’d done it. She’d followed her instincts, used subtle shifts of her body, her head, to cause him to move responsively, and she’d thus managed to maneuver him, without his awareness, into a place where she could knock the knife he always carried free of its sheath. It had fallen beside her leg and she’d managed to mostly cover it with her skirt. Turner had left her pen without awareness that his knife was missing. An hour, then two, had passed without him returning to look for it.
Amazing. She’d prayed for a rescuer to be sent, and it appeared that the rescuer who had come had been…herself.
But merely having that tool in her prison was hardly a guarantee of escape. Her tied hands would not quite reach the knife, and even if she managed to get it in hand, she was unsure of being able to work into a position allowing her to apply blade edge to rope. The way these men bound their prisoners was diabolically clever and thoroughly thought out. The bound ones were allowed just enough range of motion to keep them always trying to wriggle out of their cords, thus preserving their muscles and bones from the atrophy that would come if they were held utterly still. Yet the range of movement was so small that almost nothing could be actually achieved. Even eating required bone-straining effort.
Emma had moved her skirt enough to expose the knife to her view again, and had changed position as far as it seemed possible to let her come close to reaching it…but close was not enough. Straining, exerting, she t
ried to will her bones and joints and muscles to achieve impossible levels of flexibility, movement, and range…her fingers creeping closer and closer, but never quite reaching…
And suddenly a scuffling and scrabbling above, on the top of the pen, told her he was back, and it was too late. He obviously had discovered his knife was missing and realized where he’d lost it. No hope now. He would retrieve the knife, probably punish her violently, maybe tighten her bonds, and she’d have lost the only feeble chance she’d found to help herself.
She closed her eyes as the trapdoor folded back and feet thumped down on the floor of the pen. She waited to feel his rough hand grasp her. It did not, and Emma dared to open one eye….
It was not Turner who had entered, nor was it Paco. The person was Rosita, Paco’s daughter, the crippled girl whose duty it was to crudely bucket-wash the soiled bodies of the prisoners after they’d voided themselves.
Emma opened both eyes but did not look directly at the girl, whose age was hard to guess. She supposed Rosita, who appeared half Mexican, half Anglo, to be perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age. Despite her youth, her eyes had the hard glare of an older, life-toughened female. She stared unflinchingly and silently at Emma.
“He has killed one of you,” Rosita said, her voice soft and her Mexican accent light. It surprised Emma to hear her speak; her impression had been that Rosita was a mute, Rosita having never spoken in her presence earlier. Emma had not even known the girl’s name until she’d heard one of the other prisoners call to the girl while she was leading Emma to the place where she “washed” the women with hard-dashed bucketfuls of water.
“Who has been killed?”
Rosita knelt before Emma. “She was a young woman, like you. Gringo like you, with hair like the silk of corn. But she was crippled, as I am, with a badly formed foot. Senor Turner went to her pen to make his use of her, and he had not known she was crippled. When he saw her withered foot, he cursed her and hit her and called her a ‘twist-foot hen.’ She tried to rise and he hit her harder. There was a broken splinter of wood on the wall of her pen and she pulled it free of the wall and went at him with it, hoping in her anger to stab him. He kept her from it and pushed her to the ground, and hit her about the head again and again with his fist. She cried out for a time, and then she was silent.” Rosita paused. “She will be silent forever now.”
Colter's Path (9781101604830) Page 24
