by Logan, Jake
“No need. The trail’s well marked. If others have made it through, so can we.”
“I’d feel safer if you led the way. You got more experience on these danged mules than any of the rest of us,” Atkins said.
“You’re doing just fine.”
“I’ll be right behind.” Atkins motioned for his two friends to follow, letting Melissa ride behind them and Stephen bring up the rear.
Slocum urged his mule up. The surefooted beast took the incline easily, dislodging a few rocks as it climbed steadily. For an hour they rode, until they found themselves edging along part of the trail that pressed against the mountain on their right and afforded a fifty-foot drop on the left. This didn’t bother Slocum unduly, but he heard the others grumbling.
Slocum turned and stared hard when he heard Atkins say, “…better in the town when…”
The rest disappeared in a gust of wind, but Slocum thought he heard “true.”
Before he could fall back, let Atkins take the lead, and ask, he heard a loud scream. The trail curved around the face of a sheer rock. Seconds later, Melissa cried out, too.
“Stephen, Stephen! Are you all right? Stephen!”
“What happened?”
“Danged if I know,” Atkins said. “You want to keep on?”
Melissa didn’t stop screaming.
Slocum slid from the mule and edged his way past Atkins and one of his partners. Melissa was behind him and already on the trail, on hands and knees looking over the side.
“John, help him. Stephen fell!”
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He stepped closer and chanced a look out. The incline here wasn’t as sheer as in other places, and that might have saved the man’s life. Stephen lay twenty feet below, thrashing about feebly.
“You need a rope or something to go fetch him?” Atkins asked. The man had come back to see what the trouble was. He led Slocum’s mule.
“What happened?” Slocum looked from Melissa to Atkins’s other partner, who was behind Stephen’s mule.
“Can’t rightly say,” the prospector said. “He was a bit wobbly in the saddle. Might have leaned out, got dizzy like, then taken a fall. Seen it happen before.”
“Where?”
“What’s that?” The prospector looked up, startled. The expression on his face told the story.
Slocum went for his six-shooter but something struck him in the back and knocked him from the trail. He flailed about, grabbing thin air, then plunged downward to join Stephen Baransky. He landed hard, tried to get up, and found he couldn’t. Slocum collapsed, and the world turned to darkness all around him.
10
The moans grew louder, but it took Slocum a few seconds to realize he wasn’t the one making the sounds. He stirred and felt jabs of pain throughout his body. He stopped trying to move and worked on recovering his senses a little at a time. The sun was warm on his head so only a few minutes—an hour at most—could have passed. He sucked in a breath and let the wave of pain roll through him. Then he opened his eyes and saw that he was right about the source of the agony.
Stephen Baransky lay in a heap a few yards away. A wound on his face bled. Good. That meant he was still alive since dead men didn’t bleed. Slocum pushed out with his hands and found solid rock to support himself. Using this advantage, he sat up. Another minute went by as he examined himself. No bones broken. He had lost some skin when he hit the rough rock and skidded along a few feet, but luck had been with him again.
If he had slipped another couple feet, he would have plunged another fifty. Surviving that fall would have taken more than luck. At the moment, Slocum doubted divine intervention was going to matter a whole lot to him. He had been dry-gulched again, and this caused his blood to boil. Using the anger to focus his strength, he got to his feet and took a few shaky steps toward Stephen.
The young man’s eyes fluttered open. A look of pure hatred turned his bloody face into a mask when he recognized Slocum.
“You did this. You’re responsible.”
“You’re the one that took a header over the side. I … I don’t know what happened to me. I started to get a rope to come down and rescue you and—”
He bit off the words as his last seconds on the trail rushed back.
“Atkins’s partner knocked you off your mule.”
“I think so. I can’t remember. I was up there, and then I was down here. Everything in between is a blur, but it’s your fault!”
Slocum wasn’t inclined to argue since he agreed. If he hadn’t had the bright idea of teaming up with the other party, they wouldn’t have had a chance to shove him and Stephen over the side of the cliff.
“Melissa!” Slocum stepped away from Stephen and looked to the trail twenty feet over his head. He shouted her name, but the sound bounced off the rock and quickly turned into the soft sound of a wind blowing past jagged rocks. He looked around and saw lead-bellied clouds moving in. The night before he had suspected rain would make their travel miserable. It had held off this long.
“Where is she? Melly! Melly! Where are you?”
Stephen fought to get to his feet, then doubled over as pain hit him in the gut. He fumbled in his side pocket and drew out a flask, tipped it back, and swallowed a hefty slug. The aroma of bourbon reached Slocum. His mouth watered for just a hint of that whiskey, but Stephen didn’t offer. He remembered something Melissa had hinted at about her brother. She thought he drank too much, and he thought she slept around.
They were both right.
“We’ve got to scale that rockslide,” Slocum said. “We’d better do it quick.”
“What happened to her?”
“Don’t worry about her right now. Worry about yourself. We don’t want to be caught on bare rock if the sky opens up. A gully washer on the prairie is bad enough. Here it can sweep all the way down the mountainside and take anything without roots with it.”
Slocum checked to be sure the leather thong held his six-gun in the holster, then patted his vest pocket to assure himself the watch was intact. His brother’s legacy was still ticking.
So was John Slocum. He began climbing, choosing his foot- and handholds carefully and moving at a steady pace. When he had gotten halfway to the trail, Stephen called to him.
“I can’t make it. I’ll pick the wrong rocks and fall.”
“Use the places where I’ve been.”
“But—”
Slocum paid him no further heed. He returned to working his way upward like a human spider. Once the rock gave way under his boot and sent a cascade down onto Stephen’s head. The way the young man cursed told Slocum he was making progress and didn’t need help. By the time he pulled himself up onto the trail, a heavy raindrop smashed into the crown of his hat. The splat! was so loud he thought it was a gunshot. When others followed, he knew they were in for a real frog strangler of a storm.
He crawled across the road and put his back to the side of the mountain and waited for Stephen to join him. It took a few more minutes, and by that time both men were soaked through and through. Slocum had to laugh at how bedraggled Stephen looked. Then he quieted. They were in a fix. Atkins and the other two prospectors—if they even were prospectors and not road agents—had their mules.
“Where’s Melly?”
“She must have been taken prisoner,” Slocum said, knowing what that meant. He forced himself to his feet and pulled the brim of his hat down to shield his eyes from the rain. He started walking back in the direction they had ridden.
“Where are you going?”
“To find your sister. And our mules.” He pulled his coat around so it protected his Colt from the driving rain.
“How’ll you find her?”
Stephen half walked, half stumbled to catch up with Slocum’s long stride.
“There’s no way to track them in this rain. Five minutes would erase any trail.”
Slocum hardened inside. “That doesn’t much matter because there are only two ways they could have gone.”<
br />
“Why not keep going?”
“Not up the mountain to the pass. That’s harder than going downhill.” Slocum didn’t add that he had overheard one of the scavengers talking and had caught part of a name. He had to have been talking about Trueheart. That meant the trio was likely to take Melissa to the scavenger’s boomtown high in the mountains rather than all the way to Almost There.
At least he hoped that was what would happen. The three might use her, then kill her. For them, that would be striking it rich.
“We could pass them in this downpour and never know it.” Stephen struggled to keep up. He pulled the collar of his coat around his neck and lowered his head. The brim of his bowler hardly protected his face from the rain.
“We keep walking,” Slocum said. And he did. But even when the rain let up just before sundown, he hadn’t overtaken the kidnappers. The torrential rain had erased any possible trail.
Slocum reached into his pocket and drew out the silver dollar with the hole shot through it. This was his ticket back into Trueheart’s thriving outlaw hideout. But it wouldn’t do to show up at the gate on foot. He needed some reason to enter and couldn’t think of anything other than stolen mounts or equipment.
“What are we going to do?”
“We keep walking. All the way back to town.”
“I don’t have much money.”
“I’ve got some,” Slocum said. “What we can’t buy, we’ll steal.”
“But—”
“For Melissa,” he said. “For your sister.”
“For Melly I’d steal the moon from the night sky,” Stephen said with pepper in his voice.
They reached the town at the base of Desolation Mountain just before sundown four days later. Slocum was footsore, and every time he stepped down, he got angrier. He had been robbed and lost three men—and two Baranskys. He wasn’t sure which galled him more, not finding Clem or having his daughter spirited away as she had been.
Slocum knew the answer. There would be blood in the streets to rescue Melissa Baransky.
Clem might still be alive, but it was the woman Slocum would kill to save.
“I don’t think I can walk another step,” Stephen said. He dropped into a chair in front of the saloon, ignoring the blare of music coming from inside. Someone banged hard on the piano, almost coaxing out a recognizable song.
“We can find somewhere to sleep, then outfit ourselves in the morning.” Slocum was equally tired from the long hike, but he intended to scout around town before he went to sleep to find any hint that the three prospectors had brought Melissa all the way back here. They would have arrived a day or two earlier.
“I’ve got almost a hundred dollars,” Stephen said. “How much will that buy?”
“Not enough,” Slocum said. He had some of the money taken off Gunnison. It wasn’t much. “It’ll be better if you stay in town and let me get on the trail.”
“What trail?” Stephen said bitterly. “The rain wiped out any tracks. You said so yourself. With my own eyes I saw how even the main trail was almost obliterated.”
Slocum didn’t want to mention Trueheart’s town up on the far eastern side of the mountain, fearing Stephen might shoot off his mouth in front of the wrong men. He snorted as he considered that there weren’t any right men in this godforsaken place. No marshal, no sheriff, there wasn’t even a mayor or town council in Almost There. He suspected Trueheart ran this town as surely as he did the one higher on the hill, but there was no point in dwelling on it.
Melissa was gone. Getting her back as fast as he could was all that mattered.
“I go with you, Slocum. You owe us, but she’s my sister.”
“She accused you of being a drunk, and you called her a trollop.”
“So? We’re always chewing on each other like a dog does on an old, familiar shoe. We’re siblings. Calling each other names is something we’ve done all our lives.”
Some families were like that, but Slocum’s hadn’t been that way at all. His older brother had taught him to hunt and shoot, and his pa had shown him every trick a farmer needed to bring in a decent crop, no matter what the conditions. His ma had been a good cook and was respected at the church meetings. She had taught Slocum and his brother how to read and write. There had been some arguments among them, but his pa had always set them straight.
Most of all, Slocum and his brother were inseparable, standing up for each other against all comers.
He touched the pocket watch and missed Robert anew. He had died during the senseless Pickett’s Charge and had never lived to see much beyond the Slocum farm that wasn’t battlefield.
“I’ll see what mules are in the corral. There’s only the one merchant selling them.”
“I’ll come along,” Stephen said, showing as much hardheadedness as any mule.
Rather than argue the point, Slocum went to the merchant’s corral and checked the swaybacked beasts of burden penned there. He expected to find the mule that had once belonged to Clem Baransky and which he had bought a second time, but none of these miserable creatures was close to it in appearance.
“They might not have gotten back yet,” Stephen said. Then he muttered, “Sorry, not thinking. They were ahead of us on the trail and riding, unless they kept on going. How are we going to find Melissa?”
Slocum didn’t want to believe that the scavengers hadn’t returned to this town with the stolen mules and supplies, but it didn’t seem so. That meant they had gone directly to Trueheart’s hideout. He hadn’t shared that knowledge with Stephen because he didn’t want to deal with the young man insisting on an all-out attack to rescue his sister. Getting into the town would require using the plugged silver dollar again. It wouldn’t be hard to fix one for Stephen, but Slocum didn’t want to worry about what he might do once in Trueheart’s stronghold.
And what he said might be right. The prospectors might have pushed on up the trail with Melissa as their prisoner. They could sell her in the goldfields for as much as they could get grubbing in the dirt for gold nuggets.
He didn’t share this notion with Stephen either.
“We should look around town for her,” Slocum said. “You want to start at the far end and work toward the center and I’ll do the same from the west side?”
“Splitting up will cut the time finding her in half,” Stephen said, nodding. “How do you let me know if you find her?”
“There might be gunplay.” Slocum eyed the way Stephen pressed his hand into a pocket. He might have a hideout gun there. “We need to keep a low profile, or we will all get put into early graves.”
“I won’t let those sons of bitches keep her one second longer than necessary.”
“Then we need to start hunting for her.”
Slocum spoke to thin air. Stephen was already off to hunt building by building for his sister. After an instant of apprehension at what the young man might do, Slocum heaved a sigh of relief at getting rid of him. His gut said that the scavengers—and Melissa—had not returned here. To rescue her he had to get to the center of Trueheart’s outlaw empire.
He considered taking one of the mules and riding out, but he needed supplies. All that was locked up in the merchant’s store. He started for the back door when he heard two men arguing.
Slocum stepped into shadow and pressed against the store wall as two men passed him less than ten feet away. They never noticed him spying on them.
“Got to get back right away. Going to be a big shipment soon.”
“Ah, Mackley, Trueheart’s been sayin’ that fer a month.”
“This time it’s for real. Ever since he got that new guy, production’s up.”
“Why do you think he’s gonna cut us in on this? We been with him for six months. You see how he treats everybody.”
“That’s why we got to stay close.”
Slocum edged along the wall and got a view of the two men beside the corral. The man with his back to him was a stranger, but Mackley’s ugly face was identifiab
le in the dim starlight now that he had heard the man named.
“You ain’t sayin’ we ought to double-cross him, are you? Remember what happened to—”
“You’d prefer him to double-cross you? Wise up. If shipments start going out along the new road, there’ll be some problems. All I’m sayin’ is that we take advantage of them.”
“I don’t follow. What are you sayin’?”
Mackley let out a hiss that sounded like steam from a locomotive.
“What if a wagon went over the edge of the road?”
“Like that first bend?”
“I was thinking farther down the road, the sharp turn not a mile from the bottom. That’s better because we wouldn’t have to move the shipment—or what we take out of it—very far.”
“You always were a thinker, Mackley.”
“With Hersh gone, we need to find somebody else who can get us a wagon. Ain’t nobody here in this damned town who can do it.”
The two descended into a discussion of whom to trust and whom to double-cross. Slocum waited patiently until the two men led the mules from the corral and disappeared westward.
He had a decision to make. It wasn’t hard. Slocum set off after the pair of scavengers, hand resting on the butt of his six-shooter.
11
Slocum hesitated trailing Mackley and his henchman when he heard a gunshot from the main street. When he looked back, Mackley had disappeared. He was torn between going after Mackley and maybe not finding him and sticking like flypaper to the scavenger he still saw. More gunshots spooked the outlaw. He swung onto the back of the decrepit mule and put his heels to its bony flanks. It shot off like a rocket, but Slocum knew it wouldn’t keep up that pace long.
He dashed after the departing man and saw him going eastward along the main road into town. As he had thought, the road Trueheart had built to his hidden mountain town came down the far side of the mountain away from Almost There and the trail up to Desolation Pass. Mackley would be going back soon, too, because the shipments were to begin soon. What those might be, Slocum didn’t know for certain but had a good idea.
