by Jake Logan
Where Riley and Harry had gone was anyone’s guess. After Baldy and Drury made the most sense. That left the remaining robber running around loose without anyone in pursuit because Slocum had screwed up and—
He stood abruptly.
“Mount up. We’re riding to the place where the train was robbed.”
“Waiting there won’t get us anywhere,” Tamara said. “Wherever Jack hid his share, it was quite a ways off from the tracks.”
“It’s the only place all the robbers have in common. If they split up, we can avoid following Jackson’s trail since it didn’t bring us to where he hid the silver. That improves our chances of finding not only the other three’s trails but also their caches.”
“I suppose. Jack was always a suspicious sort, sure everyone wanted to double-cross him.”
Slocum said nothing. The outlaw’s instincts had been accurate when it came to Tamara. Avoiding his partners had been a smart move, too. But were the remaining three more trusting of one another? The wagon suggested they were, unless each of their cuts from the robbery required a wagon to cart off. That sent him thinking along other roads, only to be nudged from his reverie when Tamara shook his shoulder.
“You got all distant, John. What are you thinking?”
“The place where they robbed the train. It’s all we have.”
“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. “Let’s get supplies for the trail.” She hesitated, then asked, “Should we get a pack animal or two? For when we find the silver?”
“We’ll worry about moving it after we find it,” he said. Slocum considered how many silver bars he could load into his saddlebags and how far he could ride his old mare weighed down like that.
“We can always hide it in a different spot,” she said. Her eyes sparkled with greed. “That’s if we don’t shoot them all down. If we did, there wouldn’t be any reason to move the silver. Just take what we could and return for the rest when we liked.”
“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. That’s what my grandma always told me, and it’s good advice.”
“You’re always so glum, John. Live a little. Think of all the wonderful things you could do with a mountain of silver. Think of what we could do, the places to go. I’ve always wanted to see Paris and London, dress in fine European gowns, and attend fancy balls thrown by the aristocracy. We would make such a splash! The crowned heads of Europe would bow to us, the fabulously wealthy Americans.”
Slocum knew it was more likely that they would be, even if the silver rose up in a huge mound before them, spurned as uncouth barbarians. He had ridden with enough Europeans to get sick of their superior airs. One had been a remittance man, the third son of a British lord depending on his pa’s largesse every month, and he had been insufferable in spite of being a leech and totally dependent on a man across the Atlantic who paid to keep him away. More than once the remittance man had drunk up his allowance by the middle of the month and begged for pennies to get more whiskey. The last Slocum had seen of him was his back as he rode away in Montana, sure that one day his older brothers would die and he would inherit the family estates. As drunk as he had been, Slocum wondered if he might not realize that dream.
More than once, the remittance man had been as drunk as a lord. All he needed was the title to go with tying on the bender.
“Everyone needs a dream,” he told Tamara. “I’ve always wanted to own an Appaloosa stud farm up in Oregon, but the trail never led that way.” She looked at him strangely, then stepped up into the saddle, settled herself, and waited for him to mount.
They rode from town on the trail of the stolen silver.
* * *
“This is the place,” Tamara said, walking up the railroad tracks. The steep grade made her a tad breathless.
Slocum enjoyed the sight of her breasts rising and falling with the exertion. He felt a little lack of air, too, but not as much. They had tired their horses so much they had to let them rest for the remainder of the day. But they had found the stretch of track where the robbery had occurred. He ignored her and worked out how the four thieves had rushed the mail car.
He looked down the steep embankment and shuddered. Falling from the side of the mountain would be a messy death. He put his back to the sheer drop and pretended the mail car had halted just in front of him. The robbers would rush forward, their six-shooters blazing. The mail clerk wouldn’t be able to fight them off—and then the four robbers would stand in the car, stunned by their good luck. What they had thought to be a few hundred dollars had become ten thousand in heavy silver bars. Maybe more. Tamara didn’t know the exact amount, and Collingswood never revealed it.
The vice president had to be stewing in his own juices by now. To report such a loss to the president and board of directors would get him fired immediately. If he was lucky, he’d only be fired. If the men running the Central California Railroad were like most of the businessmen in San Francisco, David Collingswood could count himself lucky if he didn’t find himself in the crew of a China clipper bound for the Flowery Kingdom. Three years at sea hardly recovered the silver but the board of directors, if they were the least bit law-abiding, wouldn’t slit his throat and dump him into the Bay.
Shanghaiing him was a better punishment all around.
“They uncoupled the cars and they rolled back downhill,” Slocum said, more to himself than to Tamara.
He paid no attention to where she went, being lost in reliving the robbery. The weight of the silver had made applying the mail car’s brake more difficult. The caboose had derailed. He found the bright silver nicks in the steel track where the car had tumbled over, away from the cliff. Farther downhill he found the spot where the brake had finally brought the mail car to a halt. From the damage to the tracks, the car had slid off the rails here but remained upright.
Repair crews had worked to erase the worst of the damage, but Slocum knew riding along this stretch of track, even at the slow speed necessary when going uphill, would be rough. A shudder when he thought of highballing downhill coming from the coast over this damaged section told him how much he preferred riding. Even the old mare under him was safer than hitting this stretch at high speed and going over the brink to the canyon floor so far below because of a defective rail.
All traces of the mail car and caboose had been removed. He imagined crews loading the pieces into freight cars or onto flat bed cars. Or had the Central California Railroad crew levered both back onto the tracks and let another engine pull them to a depot? He hadn’t bothered to ask since the actual cars, if they had been put onto a siding, gave him no useful information. Walking back along the tracks, he tried to find any trace of Jackson and the others’ horses as they carried away the hundreds of silver bars. Too much time had passed. Any chance of tracking here had gone with wind and rain and the passage of dozens of other trains, not to mention the repair crews.
He knelt, ran his fingers over the cool steel rail, then looked up into a blinding reflection from a low hill on the far side of the tracks. Not consciously thinking, Slocum twisted violently and threw himself flat on the ground. Cinders cut into his chest, and he scraped his cheek against a metal burr on the track. The discomfort from these minor scrapes was nothing compared to having his head blown off.
The bullet sailed just above him and out over the canyon.
He wiggled fast like a sidewinder and slid over the verge. His feet found a rocky ledge for support. Peering over the edge, he caught sight of the reflection again. The sniper was too far away for him to use his Colt. Still, the temptation to draw and send some of the six-gun’s slugs in that direction almost overcame common sense.
“John, John!”
“Stay down,” he bellowed. “Take cover. There’s a gunman on a hill a hundred yards away.”
He ducked as a rifle bullet tore past his head.
“What are we going to do? He can
keep us pinned down here forever.”
“Or until another train comes along,” Slocum said. He had no idea when that would be. The ledge where he stood was too shallow for him to sit and wait out the sniper. “Can you draw his fire without getting shot?”
“I don’t know. I think I can. What are you going to do?”
Slocum gathered his strength, found a hole in the rock for his toe, then waited. Tamara moved fifty feet uphill from him, drawing attention away. When the sniper fired on her, Slocum reacted. He kicked hard and launched himself back to the level railroad bed. This time he didn’t use the tracks as a partial shelter. He ran for all he was worth in a frontal assault on the rifleman.
It took only a split second for the gunman to realize Slocum was turning the tables and get off another shot. Dodging, moving fast, Slocum presented a poor target. He saw a couple more bullets kick up dirt around him. One lead slug spanged off a rail. In spite of the death around him in the air, Slocum made his way to the foot of the hill where the sniper fired.
Now he whipped out his six-shooter and squeezed off a couple rounds at what he thought was an exposed elbow. Curses came his way but not from winging his foe. At best he had caused him to move. A few more rounds came Slocum’s way, but the sniper no longer had a clear shot. Using scrubby trees for cover, Slocum inched up the slope until he got to the top of the hill. The spent brass glittered in the afternoon sun, but the rocky stretch gave no hint as to the direction the gunman had taken in his retreat.
Slocum closed his eyes for a moment and used other senses. A faint whiff of tobacco lingered. The gunman had recently smoked a cigar. But distant sounds of bushes snapping back as a man pushed through them caused Slocum to turn in that direction before opening his eyes. The gunman wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but faint sounds of his passage through the underbrush sent Slocum in that direction at a dead run.
When he got to the bushes where the sniper had fled, he found broken twigs and freshly crushed leaves on the ground. He hunted for his quarry, but the man had disappeared into thin air. Listening again, Slocum tried to locate the gunman but couldn’t. Either he had realized how he was being tracked and had gone to ground or he had already escaped.
Advancing more cautiously now, Slocum followed the path. An angry bull might have plowed through the vegetation. Trailing the gunman was easy. Slocum quickly realized the man was circling the hill, heading back toward the tracks.
“Damnation,” he said under his breath.
Leaving Tamara by herself might have been a fatal mistake. The sniper circled around to get the drop on her. Slocum estimated distances, then ran back up the hill since this was the fastest path to the tracks. Atop the hill, he looked down but saw nothing of the woman. Like the bull he had imagined charging through the brush, he roared downhill and came out on the tracks. He looked up along the tracks and didn’t see her. Then he heard the metallic click of a shell being levered into a rifle’s chamber.
He dropped flat as a bullet tore past. Again he used the tracks for shelter, but this time the gunman was back down the tracks, able to shoot parallel to the rails.
Slocum rolled onto his back and got off a couple rounds. Then he raised his hands, his gun still clutched in his right hand. He stared down the barrel leveled at him from ten feet away.
“Drop the hogleg,” the man said.
“You were in Newburg,” Slocum said, playing for time. “You drove the wagon that damned near ran over me.”
“Too bad I missed. Drop the gun.” The man snugged the rifle stock to his shoulder.
Slocum did as he was told, though he knew it was likely the last thing he would do. The man’s knuckle turned white as he squeezed down on the rifle trigger.
13
Slocum saw death in the man’s burning eyes. He started to grab for his six-gun when the outlaw fired. To his surprise, Slocum didn’t feel the hot streak of lead ripping through his body. The bullet sailed past his head and whined away into the distance. With a quick jerk, he brought his six-shooter up and trained it on his attacker, only to find himself pointing the muzzle at Tamara Crittenden.
She smiled as she tossed a rock the size of her fist to the ground.
“You can thank me,” she said. “If I’d been a second later, he would have killed you.”
Slocum stared at the man on the ground, moaning and reaching for the bloody patch on the back of his head where Tamara had clipped him. Before the outlaw could recover, Slocum plucked the rifle from the man’s nerveless fingers and let him use both hands to hold his head. Blood oozed down and soaked his filthy coat collar.
“This is the same man who drove the wagon,” Slocum said. He prodded the felled man with the toe of his boot. “How did you hide the wagon?”
“John, please. Is that important now?”
It was to Slocum. He prided himself on his tracking abilities, and this train robber had successfully thrown him off the trail. Finding out how let him learn how to avoid such a mistake in the future—or gave him reason to appreciate how dangerous the man could be. Being outsmarted rankled.
“The wagon,” he repeated.
“Where did you hide your share of the stolen silver?” Tamara pushed Slocum aside to ask her question. “We can make a deal for it.”
“Like hell we will,” Slocum said, his anger rising.
The outlaw looked up at them, confused. He tried to shake his head, but the pain forced him to stop.
“You work for the railroad?” he grated out.
Slocum and Tamara exchanged a quick look, then both answered that they did. Slocum went further and pulled the sheaf of papers Collingswood had given him as proof of his position as a special detective.
“I can’t read,” the man said.
“You’re lying,” Slocum said. He saw the way the man’s eyes had scanned the page, stopped at the bottom, and then worked back over details of what legal authority had been granted. The outlaw understood well enough what Slocum had been empowered to do. He just didn’t know that Slocum had been fired or Tamara had walked away from her job as the vice president’s assistant.
“You trailed me. I thought you were road agents. How was I to know you’re railroad dicks?” He looked from Slocum to Tamara. His eyes lingered on her form, the tears in her clothing revealing tantalizing glimpses of bare skin. “Got to say, I never saw a railroad detective who looked like you.”
“Remember who crowned you with a rock,” Tamara said hotly. “I can do it again. Or maybe I’ll take a short walk and leave you in the custody of the man you were going to murder.”
Slocum lifted his pistol and pointed it between the man’s eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Montague. I’m just riding back to San Francisco. You don’t have anything on me.”
“Pierre Montague?” Tamara stared at him. “Yes, you’re Pierre Montague.”
“What if I am?”
“The Central California Railroad has a standing warrant out for your arrest. You steal company property from our depots.”
“That’s not me,” Montague said, turning surly. He winced as he probed the wound on his skull.
Slocum pulled Tamara back a few paces so they could discuss their prisoner without being overheard. He kept his Colt Navy trained on the outlaw and never looked at Tamara as they spoke.
“Did the railroad have a wanted poster out for him, or did Jackson tell you the names of his gang?”
“Oh, John, I’ve told you. Jack was the only one I knew. He kept all the details of the robbery and his gang close to the vest. Montague does have an alert out on him. He’s stolen a considerable amount of freight from the Oakland yard and is suspected of petty theft in both Sacramento and Virginia City.” She saw his skeptical look. “I saw the warrant when it was on Mr. Collingswood’s desk. I can be a very snoopy person when I put my mind to it.”
“T
hat’s how you found out about the silver shipment,” Slocum said.
“Yes, and it’s how I found out about you.” She moved closer, but Slocum stepped back. Tamara started to protest, but Slocum silenced her.
“Montague won’t talk. I’ve seen his kind before, and he will die before he tells us where the silver is hidden.”
“He and the other two have formed their own gang. They must have left all their shares from the robbery in a single place.” Tamara hardly contained her excitement at this. Slocum had to dissuade her.
“We don’t know that. I think Jackson going his own way tells the story. They didn’t trust each other. We can play on that distrust.”
“You mean I can play on it, don’t you, John?” Tamara grinned. “You saw how he stared at me. It’s the same way you do when you think I’m not looking.”
Slocum couldn’t disagree with her. He grew impatient with the endless futile search for the stolen silver. Riley and Harry were greedy and hunting for the same treasure trove. David Collingswood might have sent out an army of other railroad dicks on the same mission.
“Go on,” he said softly. Louder, “You’re loco. We have to get rid of him before the train comes.”
“There is a reward on his head.”
“It’s nothing compared to the reward for finding the silver.” Slocum saw her face light up as she understood what to say.
“We did a good job on that, John. Mr. Collingswood will give us a bigger reward for getting so much back. Although the reward for Montague is only a few dollars, it’s more than we have now.”
“We let the crew load the silver. There’s no need to get greedy when we’ve done our job.”
