Slocum Buried Alive

by Jake Logan

  “That’ll be enough, Mac.” A portly man with muttonchops and a finely tailored suit that had to have cost a hundred dollars pushed open the door so Slocum could enter.

  “Yes, sir,” the shotgun-toting man said.

  “You must be Leonard Hawkins,” said Slocum.

  “Uh, no, I’m not. I’m Kenneth Hawkins.” He ran his fingers under his satin lapels and puffed up his chest. He looked back into the funeral parlor as if he was escaping, then pushed past Slocum.

  For a moment, Slocum was alone. Kenneth Hawkins was gone and Mac had disappeared. He realized trying to hightail it only postponed returning to this very spot. The longer he dallied, the more likely somebody would die and provide a coffin with an occupant. He stepped inside and looked around the vestibule. Two fancy wooden caskets formed a short corridor. On the other side of each casket a varnished pine box offered a cheaper alternative more likely to be used by the average Espero citizen.

  Slocum hesitated when soft music filtered through heavy dark maroon velvet curtains hiding the rear room. It came baleful and somber, fitting for a funeral parlor. Slocum had to find out whose funeral was being planned. His hand touched the ebony butt of his Colt, made sure the weapon slid easily from its holster, then pushed through the curtains into a room lit by a dozen black tapers. The flames guttered when the air from the outer room intruded and then steadied again as Slocum let the curtains softly sigh closed behind him.

  The man seated to one side of the bier was the spitting image of Kenneth Hawkins. This had to be a brother.

  This had to be Leonard Hawkins.

  Slocum said nothing, keeping his eyes fixed on the man, who carefully dipped a steel-nibbed pen into an inkwell as he wrote a letter. When Hawkins was satisfied, he blew on the ink to dry it and then pushed the letter aside. Eyes so blue they were almost transparent fixed on Slocum. Hawkins’s face was fleshy and round, matching his bulging belly and dangling wattles. Thin blond hair had been greased back severely, letting only a small cascade fall over his tiny ears as if to hide them. In spite of those ears being close to deformed in size, Slocum guessed they caught everything said, not only in the building but anywhere in town.

  “So?” Hawkins asked.

  “You should use a blotter to dry the ink.”

  The expression on the man’s pudgy face defied description. Ripples flowed and his bloated lips curled back to show perfect teeth. Then he laughed.

  “You are a peculiar man, sir.”

  “I don’t like having a shotgun shoved into my spine.”

  “Do men usually end up dead when that happens?” Hawkins leaned forward in anticipation of Slocum’s answer. When none came, the man nodded. “I see that it does. You carry yourself like a gunman, and the handle of your six-gun is worn.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone for you, no matter what you offer. I’m not a paid murderer.”

  “But you have killed. I see it in your eyes. As owner of the Hawkins Mortuary Service, in business for more than twenty years, I have seen every possible reaction to death. Some mourn in stoic silence, others cry openly, but those aren’t what I look at. I look in the eyes. There I see tombstones or destroyed dreams. In your eyes I see the willingness to kill, but for a good and fair reason. Am I wrong?”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? I can see you want nothing more than to be on your way, even if you have no clear idea where that might be. You are a drifter and ride for the setting sun or some other unattainable goal. Always restless, never satisfied, you will never find peace of mind.”

  “I’m feeling my boot heels telling me it’s time to go wandering.”

  “Wait, don’t go. My offer of temporary employment will be to our mutual advantage.”

  “I’m not looking for work.”

  “I will offer you five hundred dollars to escort my fiancée from Dexter Junction back here.”

  Slocum tried to remember the lay of the land. The distance between Dexter and Espero was only fifty miles. Three days in the saddle each way if he took it easy.

  “Why don’t you go fetch her yourself?”

  “Alas, I am unable to do so.” Hawkins thrust out his foot, wrapped in clean white bandages. “Gout makes even standing unbearable. And I would send my brother, but he is even more infirm.”

  “He looked fine to me when I ran into him outside your establishment.”

  “Kenneth? No, not him. Kenneth is the town banker. I meant Junior, the marshal.”

  “The marshal’s your brother, too? This whole town related to you?”

  “Of course not. I would send Junior, but the consumption he suffers is severe enough to keep him from horseback for any protracted journey.”

  “You’d pay me five hundred dollars to escort your bride-to-be? Nothing else?”

  “Nothing more. One hundred in gold to seal the deal, the remainder when you deliver her safely into my loving arms.”

  “How will I recognize her?” Slocum damned himself for asking such a question. Hawkins was holding something back. Offering such a princely sum for an armed escort didn’t ring true.

  “Here is her picture. She is due on the train from Houston two days hence. You will greet her, then see her safely to Espero.” Hawkins passed over a hand-tinted photograph of about the prettiest woman Slocum could remember seeing. The artist had lightly rouged her cheeks and reddened her lips. Her hair was a midnight black and her eyes, if the artist wasn’t exaggerating with his talents, were so blue the very sky would cry in envy.

  Slocum started to return it, but Hawkins waved it off. Slocum saw that the undertaker’s fingers were all adorned with gold and silver rings, some with diamonds inset. The dying trade in Espero paid well.

  “Keep it for reference.”

  “What’ll keep me from taking your money and never fetching her back?”

  From behind came the hushed sound of the curtains opening.

  “Mac will see to that.” Hawkins leaned back and opened a drawer in his writing desk, took out a small leather bag, and tossed it to Slocum. From the way it jingled, the gold coins were inside.

  Slocum tucked it away in his coat pocket.

  Hawkins lifted his almost-invisible eyebrows in surprise.

  “Aren’t you going to count it?”

  “When I get back,” Slocum said.

  This brought a frown to the undertaker’s face, then he smiled and waved Slocum away as if he were a menial.

  “Best get on the trail. You will not keep Miss Madison waiting.”

  Slocum turned and stared at the mountain of a man who would be his unwanted trail companion. He doubted Mac would be as easy to deck a second time. If trouble brewed, lead would fly.

  Which had to be exactly what Leonard Hawkins feared or he wouldn’t have sought out a man he thought to be a gunman to escort his fiancée back to Espero.

  2

  “You don’t talk much,” Mac said after they’d been on the trail for more than an hour.

  Slocum glanced over at him. It had taken the better part of twenty minutes to figure out why Leonard Hawkins had sent the pair of them rather than dispatching Mac alone to pick up Miss Madison. Hawkins had a suspicious mind and probably didn’t trust one man to be alone with the girl, though why he hadn’t found another citizen in Espero to take this trip was something of a poser. Even if the marshal was laid up and the banker wasn’t up to the trip, there had to be more than Mac willing to go.

  Five hundred dollars was a mighty big pile of money to offer a stranger, too. That made Slocum suspicious of ever collecting. There hadn’t been any point in opening the leather bag and counting the coins. Somehow Slocum sensed that Hawkins had expected him to do just that—and the lack of faith would have pleased the undertaker. What secret thrill he got from meeting those expectations, or maybe smashing ones that didn’t include him being a generous
son of a bitch, lay beyond Slocum’s reckoning. Leonard Hawkins was a tricky bastard who never laid all his cards on the table.

  Or maybe the cards worth looking at were up his sleeve.

  “You work long for Hawkins?”

  “Knew the cat hadn’t got your tongue. Yeah, worked for him going on a year now.”

  “That’s not so long.”

  “It is in Espero. Nobody wants to stay in that town. The ranches all around town barely keep it alive. The railroad went to Dexter Junction, and that caused Espero to dry up. It’s only waiting for a strong wind to finish blowing it away.”

  “Not that Hawkins cares a whit about the living since dying is his business,” Slocum said.

  Mac’s reaction put him on his guard.

  “What have you heard about Mr. Hawkins?”

  “Nary a thing. I just rode into town and had just knocked back two shots of that snake piss the barkeep called whiskey when you came in.”

  “He saw you ride in and knew you was the one.”

  “How come he doesn’t trust you to escort the girl?”

  “There’s—” Mac cut off whatever he intended to say. “We been having problems with road agents. Two guns are better ’n one along this stretch of the road.”

  Whatever the real reason, Mac wasn’t about to spit it out.

  “You want to show me that picture again?” Mac had taken Miss Madison’s picture from him and tucked it into his vest pocket before Slocum had a chance to do more than marvel at her good looks. “Or does he want that kept from me, too?”

  “He’s not keeping anything from you. It’s just like he said. We escort Miss Madison back to Espero, and him and her’ll get hitched. He’s sent for the preacher man already. He rides a circuit, and it takes a couple weeks for him to come around usually.”

  There hadn’t been a church anywhere Slocum had seen in town, but he hadn’t been looking. Not for a church. The only communing he wanted to do was with a bottle, a meal, and maybe a willing woman. Hawkins had pretty much removed all three of those things from his horizon, forcing Slocum to live with the memory of the strong liquor served up at the Six Feet Under Saloon.

  Slocum resisted the temptation to count the money in the bag. Nothing about going to Dexter Junction set well with him. If Hawkins had given him money, riding off with it wouldn’t bruise his conscience one little bit. He didn’t like having men point guns at him for no reason. He had been dragooned into this trip when he ought to have volunteered. Most of all, Mac’s presence bothered him. The shotgun remained slung under the big man’s right arm, ready to be spun out and used.

  “How’d he come to meet Miss Madison?”

  “They haven’t met yet.”

  Slocum nodded. Mail-order brides weren’t all that unusual. Women back East got tired of hunting for husbands and saw nothing wrong with marrying sight unseen some gent out West. Hawkins’s situation looked to be better than most. The undertaker had plenty of money if he threw it around hiring a man like Slocum to fetch his bride. The rings and other jewelry he wore hinted at a fraction of the man’s riches. With a brother working as town marshal and another running the bank, Leonard Hawkins damned near owned Espero.

  His thoughts wandered down that path. Was that why no one else in town could be trusted to escort the man’s bride back to Espero? Bankers and marshals weren’t among the most liked. An undertaker thrown into that mix might make the entire Hawkins clan men to be feared.

  “She’s a mighty fine-looking woman,” Slocum said.

  “Don’t you go getting any ideas,” Mac snapped.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Slocum said. He wasn’t the marrying kind. He once had a girlfriend back in Calhoun, Georgia, but that had been before he had marched off to war with his brother, Robert.

  Robert had been killed in Pickett’s Charge at the Angle, and years later Slocum had gotten himself gut-shot by Bloody Bill Anderson after complaining to Quantrill about the brutality of the raid on Lawrence, Kansas. He had crept back to Slocum’s Stand to recuperate. His ma and pa had died, his brother was buried in some unmarked Virginia grave, and a carpetbagger judge had taken a shine to the farm. A man can take only so much.

  Slocum had left the judge and his hired gun buried down by the springhouse and had ridden westward, never looking back. What with a reward on his head for killing a Federal judge, even a Reconstruction judge, he had never lingered long in any one place. Riding suited him just fine since most towns bored him after a day or a week. Some jobs he’d kept longer. Punching cattle suited him. A season on the range was tolerable. Even gambling proved a profession he could tolerate, though most towns ran gamblers out if they had a suspicious winning streak. Depending on the town, that might mean as little as being fifty dollars ahead.

  Mostly Slocum rode, not looking for trouble but not running away like a scalded dog when it happened to find him.

  Like now.

  “I’ll talk to her when we get to Dexter,” Mac said. He put his hand over the pocket holding the picture. “All I got to do is match this up and—”

  He sat straighter in the saddle, then looked down at the hand clamped over his heart. A tiny red circle spread. Mac pulled his hand away. The red spread like wildfire on his chest. He looked up, confused, then grated out, “I been shot.”

  He toppled from the saddle, a giant tree sawed down. He hit the ground with a thud and never moved.

  Slocum reached for his six-shooter, but he hesitated to draw. He hadn’t heard a rifle’s report, yet there was no denying how Mac had died. A quick look ahead showed how the road curved to the left after entering a thicket. A sniper hiding there had a straight shot, and the rifle report might have been muffled by the vegetation.

  When a glint of sunlight off the rifle barrel showed, Slocum bent low over his horse’s neck and put his heels to straining flanks. He rocketed off the road and into a jumble of undergrowth almost too dense for the horse to plow through. Slocum kicked free of the stirrups, hit the ground, and yanked his Winchester from the saddle sheath. As he moved back toward the road, he levered in a round. By the time he got a good view ahead along the road, the sniper had disappeared.

  Slocum settled down and braced his rifle against a tree trunk. During the war he had been a sniper and a good one. He had learned patience sitting in the crotch of a tree for long hours, waiting for the single flash of sunlight off Yankee braid. Cutting off the head by killing the officer left the blue beast to thrash about in confusion. More than one battle had been turned because of his marksmanship. More than accuracy, he had learned patience.

  This time, the forbearance wore on him. He drew back his rifle and made his way through the thicket, paralleling the road. The shot had come from more than seventy-five yards. A good shot but not one impossible for even a fair marksman. Mac had been a huge target, and hitting him smack in the heart could have been pure luck.

  Slocum slowed and fought his way through the brambles as he approached the spot where the killer had lain in wait. Movement in the brush put him on alert. He lifted his rifle, then lowered it and fired almost point blank as a javelina snorted, then let out a piggish squeal of rage as it charged him. His slug ripped off a portion of the hog’s shoulder. It thundered on. He didn’t have time to work the lever. The pig crashed into him, knocking him over. More by instinct than planning, Slocum swung the rifle and drove the stock into the wounded animal’s head. He knocked it away.

  Rolling in the other direction, he whipped out his six-shooter. The javelina’s tiny eyes squinted down in pure animal fury. It pawed at the ground like a bull ready to charge. This small hesitation gave Slocum time to get off one round, a second, and then a third. The hog exploded forward. Slocum triggered the final three rounds as the heavy animal smashed into him. Again he went tumbling, but this time the pig’s snout with the vicious curved tusks stopped only inches from his face. Saliva dripped dow
n those yellowed teeth and onto his duster.

  With a mighty heave, Slocum threw the dead pig off him, then stood, panting. He realized he made a perfect target for whoever had gunned down Mac. Reloading as fast as he could, he picked up his rifle and went hunting.

  It took only a few seconds for him to find the spot in the thicket where the sniper had drawn his deadly bead. From the evidence there had been two men here, and the javelina’s tracks showed why they hadn’t stuck around to put Slocum into a grave the way they had Mac. The pig had come for them, frightening them off.

  Slocum counted himself as lucky on several scores. They had shot Mac and not him, then the javelina had driven them from a secure position, and finally Lady Luck had downright smiled on him. Otherwise the javelina would have ripped him to bloody shreds. Instead, he had killed it and not taken any damage other than pig spit and some blood on his coat.

  Rather than tempt fate, Slocum returned to where Mac lay in the hot sun drawing flies, making his way through the undergrowth rather than exposing his back on the road. When he reached the fallen man, he stared at him. Mac’s death changed everything. He could ride away, and it would be days before Hawkins figured out he wasn’t returning with his bride.

  Slocum rolled Mac over, pried free the vest pocket matted with blood, and worried out the woman’s picture. He smiled ruefully. The bullet had cut out most of her face. The dried blood on the picture had turned it brittle. He started to toss it away, then looked at it, remembering the shy smile that had been blown away, the tipped-in blue eyes, and the lovely face. He tucked the picture into his own vest pocket, then rummaged through the dead man’s pockets. Mac had less than a dollar in small change. There wasn’t even a watch.

  Digging a grave in the soft earth was easy, but Slocum knew burying Mac deep enough to keep the animals from digging up the grave for a quick meal wasn’t in the cards. Returning to Espero and letting the man’s employer tend to the burial fleetingly passed through his mind, but Slocum decided on a different course of action.

  He had been hired to escort the woman back to her betrothed. He didn’t owe anything to Mac or Leonard Hawkins, but letting her stand on the railroad platform, all forlorn and wondering what was going on, wasn’t to be endured. Of all the things Slocum had done to keep him awake at night, that wasn’t going to be another.