by Jake Logan
“I don’t know.” He herded her inside. “No guests tonight.”
“No. But Captain Silverton is bringing in the caisson tomorrow. I think General Crook is coming down from Fort Bowie for the occasion.
“That will be a real newspaper story. Stolen caisson returned from Mexico and presented to the army. You ever hear where they stole it from?”
“No one is saying. The joke is the gun was never reported missing, the commander was so mad or embarrassed that he’d lost it.”
“Oh, it is court-martial time.”
She stopped at the door to the room and stood with her back against the wall. “I also learned those two deputies from Kansas were at Fort Bowie again. What do you say? A little whiskey, huh?”
“I figured they’d be here in time.”
She fingered his vest. “I know tonight may be our last night. I don’t want to talk about you going away. I want this to be the dream night of my life—understand?”
He closed his eyes and tried to recall a tougher parting. He took her in his arms and crushed her to him—words wouldn’t work for him either.
19
They sat around the smoky campfire up in White Horse Canyon. Trevino, Cordova, Jimenez, and Diego all whittling. Sergeant Lopez squatted near them. Willa and Slocum sat on a log across from them.
A good-size shoat was on a spit cooking under her guidance and turned every little while. Slocum, Willa, and the men all were five hundred pesos richer, and discussed the trip ahead to Santa Cruz to search for Silva.
“My captain says if any one of you ever need a favor, he will try to repay you.”
“Diego, ask him about your brother, Bigota,” Cordova said.
“What is that?” Lopez blinked at them.
“My brother Bigota is in prison in Quaymas for a crime he never did.”
“What is the crime?”
“They say he robbed a man, but he never robbed no one. The man who was to be his witness and tell the judge he wasn’t even near the robbery was afraid they might make him guilty too.”
“Bigota.” Lopez nodded. “I see.”
“It would be wonderful if he could come home.”
“I will see what my captain can do for him.”
“Willa’s going back to her freighting business.” Slocum looked up at them. “She said she would make jobs for any of you who want to work for her.”
No one spoke up.
“We can ride over there in two days, locate Silva, and finish our business. I hope,” he said.
“The pig will be cooked in an hour,” she announced, and handed out bottles of wine.
So the final night was over late. Slocum told them a day of rest, and then those who wanted could ride with him over there.
On the appointed morning. they met at the local livery in town in the early hours before dawn. His four men and Willa all were there. They left in a long jog for the flat valley north of the Whetstones headed west.
By nightfall, they camped halfway to their goal at a small rancher’s place. His gray headed wife, Ruby, fed them supper with Willa’s help. Both she and her husband, Howard, acted overjoyed for the company. The adobe house was neat and snug underneath some twelve-foot-tall cottonwoods they’d obviously planted. They ate under a palm-frond squaw shade that she called house number one.
“Apaches ever bother you over here?” Willa asked Ruby over supper.
“Not bad. They stole our horses once. But we found more.”
Howard agreed with a nod. “I simply guess we wasn’t worth bothering with, huh?”
Everyone laughed.
Willa later told Slocum—Ruby and Howard were fearless people. Lying on his back studying the stars with her beside him, he agreed. “They’re like a flower that grows up and blooms in the middle of the lane. Tracks on both sides—none in the center.”
Tubac once served as a Spanish military outpost to protect the ranchers and farmers along the Santa Cruz River as well as the miners in the mountains around there. By this time, it was made up of a few stores, two cantinas, and a chapel.
Slocum sent Cordova and Diego into town to act like they needed work. The rest stayed in camp well out of town along the river.
After dark, the two returned to the place where they’d set up.
“Francis Silva is a large farmer downstream a few miles from here. Leon likes to frequent the cantinas at night, they say, and raise hell.”
“When is he supposed to do that again?”
“Tonight.” Cordova grinned big. “They say he lets everyone get drunk, then he comes. The bartender told us it is like he trusts no one.”
“Hell,” Willa said. “After the way you cleaned up his gang, would you blame him?”
They all smiled at her comments and shook their heads.
Slocum nodded. “We better saddle up. He’s slippery. He uses hostages for shields. This is no simple-minded outlaw. The man has something that warns him or he’s naturally cagy.”
They waited in the alley until someone saw a rider come into the village and hitch his horse at the rack before Jose’s Cantina. He looked around in the night like a mountain lion checking his territory before he went inside the rollicking bar. Music flowed. The putas shouted and danced. They didn’t give a damn. The noise trailed out into the dirt street.
“That was him,” Cordova whispered. Trevino agreed it was the killer from the mountains.
“Trevino, you and Jimenez cover the back door. Be sure before you shoot that it ain’t us. Diego, you watch the front door in case he gets around us. Don’t risk shooting an innocent bystander.”
“I savvy.”
With a head toss from Slocum, Willa took the horses back. He turned to Cordova. “When we go through that door, all hell will break loose.”
Cordova agreed, both men rechecked the loads in their pistols and Slocum gave him a nod that he’d go in first. His shoulder swept the swinging doors aside. And the Colt in his fist belched fire and smoke. The lights went out and all the whores screamed. Someone tore out for the back door and Slocum shouted at Cordova, “He’s going out the back way.”
Moments later, Slocum stood in the back door and watched Jimenez sitting on the prostrate Silva and tying the reata around his ankle.
“We have that son of bitch right where we wanted him.” Cordova ran for a horse and returned with Silva’s. He took the rope from Trevino and set spurs to his mount. Silva was cursing loudly when Cordova went around the corner dragging him, but his cries soon changed to pain-filled screams when Silva, in a fast roll, was slammed into an adobe wall.
“Come on,” Willa said, bringing them their horses on the run. “Cordova’s headed for the river and a tree to hang him in.”
Slocum looked around for Diego and he joined them. To keep the rest inside, Slocum unloaded his pistol in the air, then spurred his horse after the others.
On the ground groaning in pain, Silva moaned, swore, and cried. The silhouette of the cottonwood trees against the sky was over him, and the rustling of their coin-sized leaves on the night wind was orchestrated with the flow of the shallow Santa Cruz. A rope was soon slung over a large branch with a noose on the end dangling down.
They jerked Silva up and then set him on the horse that Diego held. Cordova stood on his own saddle and set the noose in place. Then he dropped down in the seat and said. “Good-bye, Silva, you son of a bitch. All this was for my little sister Leona, who you raped and gave her the clap, so she died in shame. May you pay in hell for that.”
He took the coiled reata from his saddle horn, raised it high, and sent Silva’s mount flying away. The outlaw’s neck snapped like a shot and he was riding to hell on a fast horse.
Slocum shook their hands, thanking them. They all clapped him on the shoulder and told him they were proud to have ridden with him.
“Maybe we shall meet again, my amigos.”
“Yes,” they said in a chorus, and waved good-bye as he and Willa rode north.
“We get to Tucson
tomorrow, I’m buying you a new outfit to wear,” she said, riding beside him. “I ain’t sending you off looking scruffy. Where are you headed?”
“Preskitt. It’ll be cool up there. Then I may go to Colorado.”
“Drop me a line.”
“I ain’t much on writing, but I’ll try.”
“For a guy I met in an army barracks one lonely night, you ain’t much of a talker either.”
“Willa. Willa. You’ll find yourself a good man. Life’s too short to pine over anyone forever.”
“I’ll try, big man. I’ll try.”
20
The Tucson Herald headlines read, “Famed renegade Chiricuhua Chief Whey reported dead in northern Sonora, Mexico. Reliable sources say ten days ago, the one known as Whey either fell off his horse in a swift river or had a heart attack and did the same thing. Authorities said Whey and members of his war party had been consuming copious amounts of stolen liquor at the time of his death. The whiskey was taken in a recent raid upon a pack train. . . .”
“What do you think of the story?” Willa asked, bringing his coffee out to him on the patio behind her Tucson house in the early morning.
Slocum dropped the paper and smiled at her. “I’d bet Nan Tan Lupan drinks some whiskey to that news.”
“Let me read this to you. ‘Santa Cruz Valley farmer Francis Silva is offering a thousand-dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of the parties responsible for his brother Leon Silva’s lynching last Tuesday along the Santa Cruz river near Tubac.
“‘Local witnesses say a large mob came to the cantina in Tubac, subdued Leon Silva, dragged him outside and down to the river location, where he was hung. Pima County Sheriff Hank Scott says that he has no leads on the parties responsible at this time, but will continue to investigate. Anyone with information should contact his office.
“ ‘According to his brother, Leon was a businessman from Mexico, in Arizona on a vacation.’” He put down the paper and smiled at her.
“Well, that cleans up a lot of things.” She pushed her skirt underneath her to sit down on a chair opposite him. “And the stage for Preskitt leaves tonight at eleven. Here’s your passes. I guess you know you change coaches at Papago Wells.”
“Yes, I’ve rode it before.” He reached over the table and captured her hands. “I have a new set of clothes. You even buy my way out of here. How can I repay you?”
“Stay.”
“Oh, besides that.”
“Maybe this afternoon, we can work that out.” She gave him a sly smile.
“Your freighting business is doing well?” He released her hands and sat back in the chair to appraise her.
“Oh, yes. I’ll get more involved in that now that you are going away.”
He folded up the newspaper and put it on the table. “Well, I must say again. It’s been a helluva time having you with me.”
“A real helluva a time.” she said and then shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it had happened.
Slocum waited in the darkness across the street until the last minute to kiss Willa good-bye, and then he rushed across the street to the coach. The driver grumbled something about leaving his ass there, but finally let him in. The first smell of cinnamon assailed his nose, when he took a front seat facing the rear beside a woman whose stiff dress rustled when he sat down beside her.
“Good evening, sir,” the business-dressed man facing him said as the driver undid the brake and shouted at his horses. “My name’s George Goodwin.”
“Good evening—” He hesitated. He recognized his seat companion. Natalee Farley. The stage’s jerk start tossed them around some. but they recovered.
“My name’s Slocum.”
“Nice to meet you, sir. I just had told Mrs. Conley that this was my first trip to Prescott. Oh, I know that you local people call it Preskitt.”
“Mrs. Conley,” Slocum said, and tipped his hat to her, then turned back to Goodwin. “You will find it an arduous journey, sir.”
At the Pichaco Peak way station, he had his first chance to speak to her in private while they changed horses. “Why the Mrs. Conley business?”
“I knew you’d have to know. When you got on that stage so late, I thought my cover was gone.” She made a displeased face at him in the light coming from the stage stop’s open front door.
“Cover?”
“Well, obviously I am traveling under an assumed name, so I must have something to hide, and I do.”
“What’s that?”
She looked around. The driver was headed for the coach door. With her skirt hem in her hand, she said under her breath, “I’ll tell you later.”
He climbed up after her. This must be a cat-and-mouse game. Where the pussy played with her victim and let him live a while longer, not knowing what she was going to do with him. And he was for damn sure in the dark as deep as the night that swallowed the small peaks around the location.
He’d met—actually found Natalee a few years before, unconscious out in the middle of the Kansas prairie. The day of their meeting, her buckboard team had run off with her and wrecked the rig. He found the handsome young woman lying in the grass beside the upturned, splintered wagon. Not knowing where she belonged, he spread out his bedroll and made a shade for her. Since he knew of no doctor close by, he bathed her face with his kerchief and canteen water while he hoped someone’d show up to claim her.
A camp cook looking for her arrived after a few hours, wearing a food- and soot-stained apron, babbling about how was she doing.
“Fine. She’ll be sore, but I think she’s coming around.”
Bleary-eyed, she sat up. “Hercules, are the cattle all right?”
He swiped off his beat-up felt hat and clamped it to his chest before he said a word. “Yes, Mrs. Farley, they’re fine.”
Braced with her hands on the ground behind her back, she blinked her baby-blue eyes at Slocum. “And I haven’t met you, sir.”
“Slocum, ma’am.”
“I suppose you saved my life.”
“No, but I figured you didn’t need any more sun.”
“Oh, Mr.—”
He cut her off. “My name is Slocum, no Mr. about it.”
“You look like a drover,” she said as if escaping her confusion and the aftereffects of the wreck. “I need a head man. Mine was shot three days ago.”
“I’m on my way back from Abilene. I just finished delivering a herd up there for the Menenger Brothers.”
“Oh, my.” She held the back of her hand to her forehead as if having a spell. Then she sprawled on her back atop the bedroll, looking ready to faint again.
“You alright, Missy?” Hercules asked.
“I’ll be fine, Hercules. You explain to your new boss what has happened to us.”
Slocum, after talking over the herd’s situation with Hercules, loaded the limp Mrs. Farley in his arms and carried her back to her cow camp. That afternoon he met with the crew and made certain everything was settled. She, in the meanwhile, recovered except for a bruise or two.
The next day, with things in hand in the camp, he rode into the Wichita Crossing to learn all he could about the shooting and find her a rig so she would have some transportation. He looked up a bartender the boys had mentioned called Cauldwell who worked in Coyote Slim’s Saloon.
“A man named Zinc Ralston was shot in here two days ago?” Slocum asked the man who’d drawn him a beer.
“Right.” Cauldwell held the glass he’s been polishing up to the light. Satisfied, he stacked it.
“What was the story?”
“Some gambler named Joe Moore shot him over a card game. Ralston was drunk as all get-out and real mouthy that day. He couldn’t have out drawn a gun fast enough against an eighty-year-old man. All at once he went to cussing at Moore, jumped up, and tried to draw his six gun. Far as I could tell, he simply got what he had coming.”
Slocum thanked the man, paid for his beer, gave the him five silver dollars for his troubles and rode back to
her outfit. He sent two of the boys in with the team and repaired harness to get her new buckboard.
Besides sipping lots of Natalee’s honey each night out on the trail, the rest of the drive up to Abilene with her herd went smoothly. She paid him well for all of his troubles, after he got her top price for her cattle.
Now, seated beside her again on the swaying coach headed for Prescott, he considered some of those fine memories he had of her in bed with him. The sun was peeking up in the east when they made the next stopover.
The driver took a much longer layover in Casa Grand. Outside, Slocum caught her by the elbow and guided her to the side of the adobe building to find out the rest of her problems.
“I married—” She looked around the yard outside the stage stop to be certain they were alone. Then she turned her blue eyes back on him. “I married a man named—God, you sure look good.”
Impulsively, she stood on her toes and kissed him. “Oh, Slocum, I’m in a terrible fix.”
“How? Why? You tasted the same.” Then he winked at her.
She blushed. “Damn you. I married this guy in Texas. Big mistake. He was under the impression that I would be the little woman and he would be the big man.” A disgusted frown crossed her face. “That was my ranch. That was my money. None of it was his. Besides, I was not happy in the role of his little woman.
“So he went off to Mexico to buy cattle and he was going to send back for my money, he thought. I was all ready. As soon as he rode out of sight, I sold my ranch, drew all my money out of the bank, and left Texas. End of that story. Oh, I imagine he’s on my back trail. What I need now is a divorce.”
He pulled her up against his body and drew the cinnamon perfume up his nose. “Natalee, I bet we can have all of that arranged for you in Preskitt in no time at all and there won’t be anything he can do about it.”
“Oh, thank God, Slocum, you’ve saved my life twice now. How can I ever repay you?”
He hugged and rocked her ripe body hard against his own. “I can see now this job has got its rewards. Why, twenty-four hours from now we’ll be in the Central Hotel—rocking the bed. How’s that?”
