by Jake Logan
“Just this once,” Slocum said, dismounting. As he slipped to the ground, he pulled the leather thong off the hammer of his Colt. “That wouldn’t be so bad, now would it? He’s a good-looking man. You can do him for free, Danielle. This one time, special-like.”
“You git on outta here. I don’t know you and I don’t want to.” The cowboy swung his six-gun around and pointed it at Slocum.
“We can settle this. I know we can, the three of us.”
“Ain’t no three of us. Jist me and the whore.” The cowboy started to shoot but Danielle elbowed him in the ribs. Too much booze had deadened his sensations. He grunted but didn’t loosen his grip on her—and then he did the very thing that Slocum feared most.
The cowboy cocked his six-shooter and put the gun to Danielle’s temple.
“I’m gittin’ tired of all this talk. I don’t need her alive fer what I intend doin’.”
Slocum was out of position to draw and fire. He would hit Danielle—but maybe that would be a boon for her. He started to draw, then froze when he saw how hard the cowboy had jammed the gun into the woman’s temple.
“Say yer good-byes, bitch!”
11
“Why not have two of us?”
The cowboy blinked and then squinted. He half turned to see Sara Beth astride her horse. She lifted one leg, showing bare flesh all the way up to the thigh as she swung her leg over the saddle horn.
“I’ll be—” the cowboy started. He never finished his sentence. Slocum drew, aimed, and fired in one smooth movement. The bullet hit the man in the side of the head, killing him instantly. As his gun fell from lifeless fingers, Danielle began screaming.
Sara Beth dropped from the horse and ran to the woman, taking her in her arms and cooing to her as if she were a small child. As she moved Danielle away, hiding the dead body from her crying, hysterical ward, she inclined her head toward the body. Slocum was already moving to put himself between Danielle and the cowboy’s corpse on the ground. He kicked away the fallen six-shooter and dropped to one knee. He didn’t have to check for a pulse. The sightless eyes told the story. His shot had blown away the far side of the cowboy’s head when it exited.
Slocum went through the cowboy’s pockets and pulled out a watch and a few dollars, folded up and tucked away.
“You robbing the dead?” Sara Beth asked acidly.
Slocum handed up the money and the watch.
“It’s for her. She deserves something out of this. Does he have a name?”
“H-His partner called him Lew.”
“I don’t see anything to tell where he worked. It wouldn’t be too good to let his boss know what he tried to do. No reason not to let him think his hand just drifted on and didn’t bother telling him.” Slocum stood. “You want to ride on back to town with her? I’ll see to burying this piece of—”
“I can make it on my own. I don’t want anyone with me. Nobody.”
“Why not?” Sara Beth asked. “You ought to have somebody along for company.”
“He sent you. He’s after me. That’s why I went with Lew. I wanted away, but I didn’t know what he’d try to do.”
“What are you talking about?” Slocum spoke to thin air. Danielle pushed Sara Beth away and ran for the horses still cropping grass. Without hardly slowing, she dragged herself into the saddle and raced off, going deeper into the woods and ignoring Sara Beth’s call for her to stop.
“We have to get her, John. She’s confused, crazy with fear.”
“Let her go,” he said. “She was running from something at Severigne’s—or someone. You have any idea who it was?”
“He must have been terrible to make her think somebody like that was her salvation.” Sara Beth looked as if she would spit on Lew’s corpse. “But I don’t know who it would be. You work there. Did she have troubles with anybody in particular?”
“Not that I saw, but Severigne handled all those kinds of problems unless the customer got belligerent. I haven’t had to throw out but a couple drunks.” He turned grim as a thought occurred to him that Randall Bray might be the one Danielle feared. Everything the banker’s son did seemed aimed at hurting Severigne. After all, Slocum was sure Bray had tried to burn the house to the ground. If the fire hadn’t been put out quickly, a half dozen of Severigne’s Cyprians might have died in the flames.
“Who are you thinking of?” Sara Beth demanded. “Is it Randall Bray? I never liked that little sneak. He was always so nasty, like he was better than everybody else. And the things he’s said to me!”
“Catherine’s still out there,” Slocum interrupted. He considered the time it would take to bury Lew deep enough to keep the coyotes from having a feast. Slocum had nothing against coyotes and didn’t want them to get a bellyache dining on such tainted flesh, but the other woman was likely in as big a world of trouble as Danielle.
Time crushed down, and burying Lew would take a long time since Slocum didn’t have a shovel. He thought of Aronson’s stack of shovels and how the general store owner thought he had wanted one. Now that he did, the store was miles distant.
“That cabin you mentioned,” Sara Beth said.
“Yeah?” Slocum looked in the direction the woman pointed. A tiny curl of white wood smoke rose above the trees. He reloaded his pistol and said, “Can’t be more than a mile off. Less.”
“You going to try to order me to stay?”
“Just don’t go doing any damn fool thing like you just did. He could have killed Danielle and you.”
“If I hadn’t distracted him, you’d never have gotten a clean shot. You’re good with that six-gun, aren’t you?”
Slocum didn’t answer. He stepped up into the saddle and turned his pony’s face for the direction of the smoke. It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning and he had already killed a man. What was the next hour to bring?
His nostrils expanded as he caught the smell of food cooking. Someone was frying bacon. His belly growled and reminded him how long it had been since eating anything but a strip of tough, salty jerky while riding along during the night.
“There, John. Through the trees.” Sara Beth pointed out the cabin he had already seen.
“I suppose I ought to just ride up and shoot the son of a bitch,” Slocum said, more to himself than to the woman. “That’d save a bunch of time and avoid more unpleasantness.”
“Do it, John. I saw what that cowboy was trying to do to Danielle.”
Slocum dismounted, drew his six-shooter, and walked up to the door. He took a deep breath, then kicked open the door, his pistol coming up. He released his touch on his trigger when he saw only Catherine sitting in a chair on the far side of a small table.
“Where is he?”
“John, what are you doing?” The woman put down a spoon so hard that it clattered on the table and she spilled some of the oatmeal she had been eating from a bowl.
“Severigne sent me to bring you back.”
“I—” Catherine didn’t get any farther. From behind him Slocum heard a roar of anger. He lowered his arm, spun, and started to draw a bead. The burly man bowled him over, his powerful arms circling around Slocum’s shoulders like steel bands.
Slocum fired once, hoping to hit the man in the leg. His bullet dug a hole in the door and then he was flat on his back, the cowboy trying to smash his forehead into Slocum’s face.
He fired again and felt the cowboy wince. This gave him all the opening he was likely to get. Slocum pulled his left hand free, struck hard on the side of the man’s head, and dislodged him. He got his knees up, kicked hard, and shoved away from the cowboy so he could come to his knees and raise his six-shooter for a killing shot.
“No, John, no! You’ll have to shoot me first!” Catherine slid in front of the stunned cowboy, who shook his head, regained his senses, and lifted her off her feet to put her behind him.
“You shoot me, not her!”
“Don’t hurt him. Will’s a good man. Don’t hurt him.” Once more Catherine moved wit
h a sinuous grace and interposed herself between the cowboy and Slocum’s pistol.
“You want to be with him?”
“I don’t owe Severigne anything. She doesn’t own me and I can leave whenever I want. You tell her that. You tell her I love Will Hudson and we’re going to get married.”
“You hush, Catherine,” the cowboy said. “You don’t owe him nothing. You don’t have to explain nothing to him.”
Slocum rocked back and got to his feet, the six-gun still pointed in the direction of the hulk of a man.
“Let me get this straight. You two are good together?” He saw from their expressions the truth. “What about Danielle and Lew?”
“I never heard his name other than Lew. He was a drifter I met up with at McCavity’s Saloon. Me and Catherine was planning on running away for weeks. Him and Danielle just tagged along.”
“You didn’t know what he intended to do to her?” Their silence spoke louder than any denial. They didn’t know because they had come here to the cabin. From the messy blanket on the bed, Slocum knew what had been on their minds. “Why not tell Severigne you were taking off?”
“I wanted to, but Catherine said Severigne would talk her out of it. She’s got a silver tongue, that one. I don’t speak too good sometimes, but I love her.” Will put his arm around the woman’s shoulders to protect her.
“You work for one of the ranchers?” Slocum asked.
“Will’s foreman on the Flying B Ranch.”
“You can ride on over the hill to the main house. Go past the bunkhouse to the trail past the barn and ask Mr. Bascomb. I’ve worked for him five seasons now.”
Slocum slid his six-shooter back into its holster.
“I’ll tell Severigne. If you send her an invitation to the wedding, that’d go a long way toward smoothing her ruffled feathers.”
“I, uh, I’m not sure. You see, Mr. Bascomb and his wife don’t know what I was doin’ back at Clabber Crossing. I want to be respectable, John, respectable for Will’s sake.”
“I don’t care what you’ve been doing, Catherine.”
Slocum slipped out of the cabin, leaving the two of them to argue over whether to tell Will’s employer and his wife about Catherine’s background.
“You do it? I heard shots. Where’s Catherine?” asked Sara Beth, her words running together. He saw the way she looked at him, checking for injuries.
“There’s no reason to drag Catherine back. She wants to stay here and thinks she has herself a good man.” Slocum saw Will and Catherine moving around inside the cabin. “From what I saw, she has.”
“But—”
Slocum explained everything as they rode back to the clearing where Lew had tried to rape Danielle. The dead man’s horse still cropped at grass until Slocum snared the reins and fixed them to his saddle.
“You’re stealing his horse?” Sara Beth asked, astounded. “You can’t do that.”
“It’ll do me more good than it will Lew. We’re going after Danielle to make sure she doesn’t get herself into even more trouble.”
“We’re going to track her?” Sara Beth rubbed her hands together. “This is going to be fun. I’ve never done that before, not really. Will you show me how to do it?”
“If her trail’s no harder to follow than when the four riders left the main road, you’re not going to learn much.”
“It might take us a while, won’t it, John?”
“Might,” he allowed.
“Then there’ll be plenty of time for you to teach me.” She smiled wickedly and added, “And there are a couple things I want to teach you.”
“Danielle first,” Slocum said, but his determination to find the fleeing woman and take her back to Severigne was fading as his imagination ran away with him.
They set off on the trail, but the easy tracking became more difficult when Danielle crossed a creek—or did she ride down or up it to purposefully lose any trackers? Slocum had to work to find out.
12
“I can’t find her trail,” Slocum admitted. He walked up and down the bank of the rapidly running stream, hunting for any sign where Danielle had left the water and taken to solid ground again.
“Did she do that on purpose?”
“Could have,” Slocum said. “I don’t know how she grew up. Might be she knows a lot more things than flopping onto her back.”
“Don’t sound so bitter, John.” Sara Beth put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s not all that important that you get her back to Severigne, is it?”
“Reckon not,” he said. It rankled that he couldn’t follow a soiled dove through territory he thought of as his own. The foothills were alive with animals and busting out with vegetation. There wasn’t anything stirring here that he didn’t know intimately—and he couldn’t find a frightened whore fleeing from a cowboy who had tried to rape and kill her.
“She sounded like she was running for her life. That could add to her skill, couldn’t it? She wouldn’t necessarily get more careless.”
“We ought to head back to town. I’m not looking forward to telling Severigne she lost two of her girls.”
“What are you going to tell her about Catherine?”
Slocum shook his head, then smiled crookedly.
“Lost her trail, too. I reckon she’s got a new name now, or will real soon. And do you see her tracks out here?” He tromped down on a carpet of pine needles. The fragrant odor of pine rose and set his pulse racing. Or was it being alone with Sara Beth out here far from all the spying eyes in town?
It didn’t matter. He turned, slid his arm around her waist, and pulled her close to kiss her.
“I wondered how long it would take for you to figure that we had plenty of time for . . . not getting back to town.” Sara Beth’s bright blue eyes danced. She pressed even closer to him, arms around his neck. He bent again and their lips brushed lightly, then crushed in a kiss that grew in passion until Slocum knew it would be a spell before they even thought of riding back to Clabber Crossing.
“Up there,” Sara Beth said. “In the sun. It’s chilly here in the woods.”
Cool water splattered up from the stream, turning Slocum’s jeans damp. He ought to wash all his clothes, but there would be time for that after he got out of them—and found a patch of sun to spread a blanket. They walked up the hill and came out into a small glade that was about perfect. The sun slanted down, just a little past noon. The cool forest and a soft breeze kept it from being too hot here.
Then it got really hot. Slocum dropped his gun belt and Sara Beth dropped to her knees and then worked to get his fly open. One button after another popped free until finally she let out a tiny gasp. She looked up and grinned wickedly, then applied her lips to his hard organ. Slocum went weak in the knees as she sucked and licked, kissed and touched every possible spot she thought would excite him.
It all did.
He ran his hands through her long blond hair, guiding her head back and forth in a rhythm that pushed his arousal up even more. When he felt his loins beginning to burn and churn deep down, he pushed the woman back.
“No more.”
“But—”
He didn’t give Sara Beth a chance to protest. He lifted her up partway and then stretched her out on the blanket. Her breasts heaved under her blouse as she realized what he wanted—what she wanted, too. She unbuttoned her blouse a little bit at a time, slowly revealing the snowy white flesh hidden beneath.
As she worked to open her blouse all the way, Slocum reached under her skirt and ran his hands up the insides of her thighs, gently parting them. By the time Sara Beth had shucked out of her blouse, Slocum had bunched up her skirt around her waist.
“It’s getting hot there, John,” she said.
“Down there’s not in the sun.”
“That’s not why I’m getting hot. I—” She gasped as he knelt between her opened legs and moved forward. He brushed across her nether lips with his hardness, then parted them and hid his bulbous tip just inside. She
quivered and moaned softly. Her eyes closed as she reached out to him. Then she cried out in pure desire as he sank fully into her heated core.
The gentle breeze across his back and the heat at his groin drove Slocum faster until Sara Beth writhed under him, straining up to meet his every inward thrust, and then she shuddered, clawed at him, and sank back. Slocum moved faster now, then released his load in a huge rush.
He sank down atop the woman. Both of them were drenched in sweat that quickly evaporated in the sunlight and wind.
“I don’t want this moment to ever end, John.” She stroked over his lank hair and then wrapped her arms around him to keep him from leaving her. He wasn’t inclined to do so. His brain was floating and his thoughts like the clouds growing and fading in the bright blue sky above.
He felt like a juggler in a sideshow. He had promised Severigne to help out Martin Bray, more to spy on him than to solve the problem of where the bank’s money went. Owing another few weeks indentured servitude to Severigne because of a lousy poker hand didn’t bother him as much as Danielle running away and Catherine finding her place in the world.
But what about Emily Dawson? He turned and looked at Sara Beth, whose eyes were closed, and a smile curled her lips as she basked in the sun. He might have found the body but knew nothing about Emily’s personal life, other than she had only just come to Clabber Crossing. Everything was jumbled up but there had to be a common thread running through it all as if it were some giant tapestry. If he found that string and followed it, he could figure it all out.
Pulling on the thread would make the tapestry unravel, but causing such disarray had never bothered him before. Slocum tried to figure out why it did now. Something boiled just under the surface of an outwardly tranquil Clabber Crossing, and if he pushed too hard, it would all come spilling out. Who would be hurt wasn’t obvious, but he thought Emily Dawson would be there in the boiling stew—or her family and her reputation would be. And Philomena Bray, too. She seemed a harmless woman but snooty.
