by Jake Logan
That meant that this was the man who wore the hideous little hat, and so he must have been the one with the frostbite, too. Slocum realized this as a potential source of weakness, but in his addled state, he couldn’t figure out how to exploit it. Gouge at him? Then Slocum thought of his boot knife.
As Slocum tried to scoot backward on the roof, he felt the rushing wind all around him, felt as if the dark were narrowing, then widening, the sound fading in and out, and he tasted stew rising in his gorge. He cradled his head in his hands, resting his arms on his knees, working to stay alert, conscious, and breathing, all the while trying to keep an eye on the dark shape just a couple of feet away from him atop the swaying car.
Slocum was in no condition to fight, that much was clear to him. But maybe that’s not what the man has in mind, thought Slocum. Maybe he’s just going to toss me off the train and be done with it. Way I feel right now, I doubt I’ll prove much of a challenge.
As he rubbed his temples, Slocum felt something sticky and wet on the side of his head and trickling down one cheek. Blood, his own. That was one thing he’d seen too often in his life, and the one thing he was eager to never see again. The man had walloped him at least one good blow. So why wasn’t the man coming after him to finish him off? Then he saw why—the man was still breathing too hard from hoisting Slocum up the ladder. It had been a mighty exertion and now he was taking a quick breather.
Time enough for me to figure out some way to save my ass, thought Slocum. “Hey!” he shouted.
Nothing.
“Hey, damn you! I’m talking to you!” Slocum shouted the words again, and the effort cost him mightily. He thought he might lose consciousness. But a vision of the lovely Miss Barr—and her toasty warm parlor car—kept him alert long enough to keep up the shouting.
“Why do you wear that foolish derby hat?”
The shape rose up higher against the dull glow of the passing nighttime snowscape.
He heard me, thought Slocum. Good. “And what in the hell happened to that hair of yours?”
That did it. The big man, still on his hands and knees, lunged at Slocum, his animal growl making his buffalo coat–clad body seem like a charging bear. A meaty hand grabbed the cowboy’s boot, yanked at it, but Slocum rolled to the side, kicking at what he hoped was the man’s frostbitten cheek. He was rewarded with a low bark of pain from the man, and a momentary pause in his attack while the big brute clawed at his own face.
Must have hurt more than I hoped it would. Slocum pulled his knees up under himself and reached for his Colt, but his hand closed on an empty holster. Of course, the man had kicked it out of his hands down below in the boxcar. He reached lower, tugging up his pantleg to get at his boot knife, but the man swiped at him again, and Slocum sprawled to his side on the snow-crusted roof.
“Dammit!” he shouted, his head thudding and his vision blurring, either from the head blows or the smoke and cold. Didn’t matter which. He tried to crawl forward, away from the man’s reach, so that he might gain his footing and face him head-on, maybe surprise him with a quick lunge and knock him from the train. Of course, thought Slocum, I might just fly off with him. But he had little else in the way of options or ideas, and precious little time to come up with a more detailed plan.
He made it away from the man by a yard or so, enough to stagger to his feet, all the while feeling through his boot soles the slope of the roof. There was a low steel rail rimming the edge, and as he was facing the rear of the train, he kept his right boot pointed outward in hopes of using it as a guide so he didn’t fall. Maybe he could hook his toe under the rail. It’s a thin scheme, he thought, but better than not having one.
With another shout, the big man closed in on him, swinging his massive, hamlike hands in great roundhouse arcs that Slocum couldn’t see, cloaked as the man was in that damn, dark buffalo hide coat.
“You killed him!” the man roared, swinging his left just as well as he’d done with his right.
“So you can speak,” shouted Slocum. “Didn’t know trained bears could do much more than ride bicycles and smoke pipes!”
“Gaaaah!” Another swing, and this time it connected with Slocum’s shoulder and he felt himself sliding. He grabbed hold of the man’s great hairy coat and pulled himself up, knowing the giant wouldn’t want to venture any closer to the edge. He found himself gripping tightly to the man, and staring into the great red face.
“You’ll have to be more specific, Red. Who’d I kill?”
Another great roar bellowed out of the man’s mouth as he tried to shake off the clinging cowboy. “My brother! You killed…”
Slocum already knew the answer, and as he tried to work the man back away from the roof edge, he wondered if he should correct the man, tell him he’d actually killed three of his brothers. At the same time, he released one hand’s hold on the shaggy coat front and reached down for his boot knife. He figured that in his weakened, woozy state, a weapon would be his only chance at coming out alive in this scuffle. For long seconds, the two men grunted and fumed, their breath coming in short bursts as they each tried to gain ground over the other.
Then Slocum slipped, lost his grip on the big man’s coat, and his arms windmilled in a doomed effort to keep himself upright. He never saw the big ham fist drive hard and straight into his already aching face until it was too late.
The next thing Slocum felt was the rush of air and the distinct lack of anything solid under his boots. He felt as though he would spend forever dropping downward in the cold, black night.
But then he hit something hard and unforgiving. In that finger-snap instant of impact, he felt things inside him pop and crack, things that might never be the same again. In a semiconscious state, he felt himself rolling helplessly, limbs whipping akimbo as he tumbled down a steep, snow-and-talus-covered slope, gaining speed, and he knew he’d reached the end of the line. As he rolled, he thought he heard a big, howling laugh recede into the distance of the night.
12
It was the damned squawking birds more than it was the early morning sunlight that woke Slocum. Crows. Their sawtooth sounds rasping through the gauzy, smothering layer of pain that was just beginning to make its presence felt all over his body. He didn’t half mind that, as he was surprised he had awakened at all. He thought for sure, as an old mountain man he once knew had continually threatened, that this was the day he’d wake up dead. But he hadn’t. Though judging from the overall agony he felt, he wondered if cashing in his chips might not have been the better alternative.
The crows let loose with another volley of vile sounds he was convinced only other crows could love. It sounded to him as if they were laughing, probably at him. He cracked open an eye and saw bright light. He closed the eye and waited. Again with the crows. He opened the eye and blinked a few times, snow kept falling into it, but after a few blinks, it felt soothing. He lifted his head and a volley of sharp, hot pains, like knives sliding under his skin, made him wince and groan. The crows stopped their noisemaking.
He laid his head down again and listened. After a while, the crows began conversing again. It wasn’t such a bad sound, really. And then a thought occurred to him. Where there were crows, there were bound to be trees. And trees meant forest. This seemed a good thing, though he wasn’t sure exactly why.
He lay like that awhile longer, unsure if he should try to move again, or even if he could move. He allowed himself to recall all the events that led up to his being wherever he was. And wherever it was, it was decidedly not on the train. He did know that he’d only been tossed off the train the night before, as he’d drifted in and out of consciousness throughout the night. And now it was the following morning. A damn bright, cold one in the High Sierra.
Let them have the headaches and the angers and the murders, and all over what? A box of gemstones that belonged to a man who already had more money than Slocum would ever see in all his born days? Bah. Enough of the train. It was time for him to worry about himself. And the funny
thing was, at that moment of his lowest ebb, he knew he wouldn’t have all that long to worry.
Slowly, he recognized another sound he’d been hearing, heard it for what it was—the far-off rush of water. More than a trickle or stream could make, this was an actual gushing sound. But far away, and behind him. Maybe, if it wasn’t too far, he could crawl to it. He mustered all his willpower and grunted until he got an elbow underneath himself. Not so bad, he decided. He brushed snow from his face and knew, when he raised his right arm, that something inside was broken. He’d had his share of cracked ribs, but this felt like a whole sack full of them were rattling around inside.
His right knee felt good and twisted, and his left ankle, which lay underneath him, sure felt busted. He thought that might have happened when Big Red had muckled onto his ankle on top of the train.
Slocum gazed before him and had to blink back sunlight, melting snow, and still he couldn’t believe what he saw—a long, steep slope that stretched upwards of a couple hundred feet to a haggard-topped, tumbled-looking embankment running along as if it were a ridge. From there, it continued on up higher than he could bend his neck to see.
He let his gaze trail back down and it stopped in the middle again, just about where that bank of snow ran along into the distance. Had to be the train track. But why it had to be at such a godawful height, he didn’t know. Nor did he know quite how he was going to get back up there. But one thing at a time, Slocum, he told himself. You’ve been through worse scrapes and lived to tell it.
He wasn’t sure he was being entirely honest with himself, but he also decided that now wasn’t the time to go soft.
Then he made the first mistake of his new day: He ventured a look behind himself, and he didn’t like what he saw. “Good Lord in heaven,” he said with a groan and a wheeze that was only partly because of this aching body.
Evidently, after pinwheeling down the long, sparsely treed, heavily rocked slope from the train track above, the only thing that had prevented him from tumbling even farther was a sickly-looking, stunty pine no taller than a man and no bigger around at the base than a thin man’s wrist. It looked to Slocum about ready give up the ghost and call it a day.
Far below the twisted little tree he leaned against, there was nothing but sky, and just below that, there was a sparse canopy of treetops, some of them supporting crows, all bobbing and wagging their heads and cawing out their peculiar brand of laughter at Slocum. And then he saw just why they were laughing at his expense. The trees grew out of the steep slopes of a ravine, at the bottom of which coursed the rough river that he’d heard.
His heart, beating fast and fierce, competed with his fuzzy, pain-addled brain for dominance. Neither trumped the other, but Slocum felt sure that if he didn’t do something to get back upslope, and quick, he’d soon regret any more time spent wallowing in indecision. He had no desire to drop another few hundred feet to an icy death. He had had plenty of that already.
13
“How in the hell you going to get up that slope, Slocum, old boy?” he asked himself out loud in a raspy whisper, wiping at his face with a stiff, cold hand. Then he felt the tender tree begin to uproot itself.
His breath snagged in his throat and suddenly every pain he had felt just seconds before vanished. Little balls of snow, like miniature avalanches, rolled away from him on either side and dropped over the edge. He swallowed, still not daring to breathe, and felt the tired tree slump backward more. His body moved with it. He didn’t dare look, but felt sure that his ass was now hanging out over the edge. The first drop nearly killed him, but he knew that the next one would seal the deal.
Time for thinking’s done, Slocum! he shouted at himself, and jerked forward, upslope. His left hand smacked hard on a sharp gray rock protruding from the snow. It didn’t budge, and he trusted it only because he had no other options. His backside was still pressed against the tree’s roots, but they were loose. It had been his own weight that both nearly took out the tree and held it in place. He’d wonder about it later. Right now, he had to make progress upslope or he’d tire, the rock would slip free, or his hand would—none of them pleasant thoughts.
If only I had something like a claw to dig into the bank with, I might stand a chance of getting up to that track, a little bit at a time. And that’s when he remembered his boot knife. He reached down with his right hand, praying the entire time for the knife to still be there, still secreted in its sheath in the shaft of the boot. And his fingertips touched the hilt—it was there.
He hoped his bloodied hand, the thumb of which looked swollen and barely wanted to move, would be strong enough to keep a firm grip on the knife’s handle. He inched it free of the boot, shifted his weight to the left hand, and felt two things happen at once: The little tree tore free and he felt the roots slip out from under him. The rock under his left hand began to pull free from the slope, sending a clump of snow-caked gravel rolling into his chin and on into his shirt.
He swung up with his right arm, the knife gripped as though he were driving the blade downward into a tabletop. It found purchase in the bony slope just as the gray rock tore free. The lower half of Slocum’s body swung to the left, and from the middle of his thighs downward, he felt nothing under his legs.
Below, in the treetops, the crows cawed and jeered. Pain such as he’d never known coursed through Slocum’s straining body, lancing him from toe to hair with lightning bolts of agony that flashed and pulsed and pulled deep, manful groans from within him.
And all this pain and danger just made him angry. And that was all it took for him to sink his clawed left hand into the snowy, frozen gravel bank above, enough to seize a tenuous handhold. That gained him enough leverage to raise his right arm up high, then plunge the knife down into the slope. He rested but a moment, then repeated the process. Soon, only the tips of his boots hung over the raw edge of the cliff.
Slocum didn’t allow himself to think about the slope he had yet to climb; he did not allow himself to think about the drop just behind him, waiting to pull him from this earth. He thought only about the railroad tracks, how once he reached them, he would walk right up them, heading westward, and he would catch up with that train if it took him a year.
Up and up, one clawhold after another. He’d gained what he was sure was half the distance to the top when he made the mistake of looking behind him. He’d advanced only twenty or so feet. He sagged then, his cheek to the snow, and gritted his teeth. There was no way he was going to let this vile slope win. He would make it to the top, by God. Or he wasn’t John Slocum.
Far above, the bleak black birds circled, cawing, mocking him and his paltry progress. And still Slocum labored upward, one stab at a time, groaning with the exertion, but exulting, too. Each inch gained up the frigid tumble slope was an inch closer to the havoc he would wreak on the bastards who caused this, his near death.
Another stab, and with it a fresh wave of nausea washed over him as broken bones shifted inside, their snapped ends clicking in his flesh and muscle. Sweat stippled his forehead, and still Slocum labored on, a grim smile tugging his mouth corners wide.
14
“I want that chest and I want that bitch and her little cook dead, do you hear me?”
The big man’s brows knitted together. He looked up at the pretty, red-haired woman who leaned close, hissing her demands at him through a mouth pulled tight in frustration and anger.
“Do you understand?”
He closed his eyes and nodded. “Yep.”
She regarded him a moment longer. “Well?”
“Right now?” He touched swollen, cold-stiffened fingers to his frostbitten face. “I…I’m not really ready for climbin’ up on the cars again. I got the secret knock through the roof vent, sure, but I nearly died doing it.”
“And look what it got us,” she said, renewing her sneer and shaking her head, her long red hair bouncing on her shoulders. “I don’t have the time for this foolishness.”
“Then you do i
t yourself,” he said. “I got to get warmed up. I’m sick of this boxcar. Got to get me some food, maybe a shot or two.”
“Bubba, I told you we don’t have time for that.” She stood, lowering the veil on her face, her breath drifting through the lacy mesh.
“Look, I got the man who killed Rupe. I chucked him off the train just last night. Ain’t that enough for now? We’ll be on this damn train for another couple of days. Plenty of time for us to get at the chest.”
“Shhh!” she shushed him, and he could see her slender face through the veil, her jaw clenched tight.
“After I eat, I’ll give it another go. Seems to me you’d be a bit busted up about Rupe’s death, too.”
“I am, believe me. He was foolish enough to get killed and now that leaves just the two of us to see to it that we succeed.”
“What if we don’t?” he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
She leaned back against a stack of crates and stared at him as if he’d slapped her. “That’s not even a possibility, Bubba. If you feel that way, you better jump off this train right now. Or so help me God, I’ll gut you like the spineless bastard you are.”
“Fine way to talk to your brother, Arlene,” he whispered. “I was just asking a question, is all.”
The veil shook with a rage that trembled the slender woman’s body, but she said nothing.
“You got any idea how I can get us in there?” he said in a softer voice, hoping to keep her from yelling more at him. This train trip wasn’t turning out to be anything like what she promised it would be. She’d said that when Ned and Bert met ’em at the station in Salt Lake City, they would make the work on the train even easier. But Ned and Bert hadn’t shown up, then they had to leave without ’em. Bubba was beginning to suspect that they might have been killed, too. Maybe even by that scrappy cowboy he’d tossed off the train.
