by Logan, Jake
Always Carry Protection…
Bonnie stood there for another few seconds, then stooped over and picked up her nightclothes and slipped them back on.
“Maybe, in town…” she said to Slocum.
“Maybe,” he said. He began to put on his black pants and shirt. He pulled on his boots as Bonnie walked back to the wagon.
Slocum sat down and waited until it was quiet again. Then he plucked a cheroot from his pocket, lit it with a lucifer, and smoked.
Halfway through his cigar, he heard a muffled sound. Instinctively, he reached for his gun belt and unwrapped it.
He peered into the darkness in the direction of the soft sound.
His hand slid to the handle of his bowie knife. He saw a silver flash in the moonlight.
One shadow in the night grew larger and started toward him.
Slocum drew his knife and stubbed out his cheroot.
The shadow crept closer and he saw the form of a man and the man held a blade in his hand.
Slocum lay flat and the shadow began to run toward him.
Ten feet away, he saw the Apache, silent as a cat, running toward him at full speed, running toward the hobbled horses.
When the Apache was two yards away, Slocum rose up. He held the big blade at his waist, ready to strike.
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SLOCUM AND THE GLITTER GIRLS AT GRAVEL GULCH
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ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
Table of Contents
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Slocum and the Santa Fe Sisters
1
John Slocum galloped his black horse off the small butte like roaring thunder. Ferro’s hooves, newly shod in iron by a Laramie blacksmith, struck sparks from the rocks and kicked up twin spools that followed them down like rust-infused dragon’s tails. He passed the four horses ground-tied to clumps of sagebrush and put the blunt spurs into Ferro’s flanks with a practiced tick that parted hide and tapped into flesh. The horse stretched its neck and flattened its ears on the level road with the wind in its teeth, its tail flowing behind it like tassels of black silk.
Ahead of him was a rickety covered wagon pulled by a four-horse team, hell-bent for leather, the driver whipping the horses as he leaned out and looked back at five young Apache braves yelping their war cries and firing single-shot Sharps carbines as fast as they could load them. A man Slocum could not see, who had been sitting beside the driver, stood up with his arms outstretched and fell from the wagon. The Apache shrieks rose to a higher intensity.
Slocum saw puffs of white smoke rising from the top of a butte off to his right. He knew that the smoke could be seen for miles. While he could not decipher the message in the small smoke puffs, he reasoned that the signals could be a summons to others of the tribe at various locations.
Two of the Apache braves turned their ponies and galloped over to the fallen man. One of them dismounted and was pulling on the downed man’s hair after knocking his hat off with a single swipe of his hand.
Slocum slipped his Winchester from its sheath and let his single-looped rein fall behind the saddle horn. He cocked the rifle and heard the mechani
sm slide a cartridge into the firing chamber. He leveled the rifle with his right hand and braced the butt against the hollow where his shoulder joined his chest. Still, the blued barrel jumped up and down and was hard to steady. When the barrel dropped and blotted out the brave on the ground, he held his breath and squeezed the trigger. The Apache brandished a knife. Its blade glistened silver in the sun.
He levered another cartridge into the chamber and heard the ping of the empty hull striking the ground. The other brave looked at him and brought a Spencer carbine to his shoulder. He fired at Slocum. There was a puff of white smoke and a stream of orange and golden sparks that issued from the barrel.
Slocum turned his horse with knee pressure and headed for the mounted Apache.
He heard the whispery rasping sizzle of lead blow past his head with the ferocity of an angry hornet.
The Apache brave hunched low over his pony’s back and the horse galloped in a zigzag motion so that Slocum could not get a clear shot. In seconds, the pony and rider were out of range, headed for the butte, where the smoke signals were no longer visible.
As Slocum approached the wagon, it slowed until it came to a full stop.
“Howdy,” the driver said as he set the brake and looked back. “I’m mighty grateful you run off them redskins, stranger.”
“Your shotgun is dead,” Slocum said as he pulled up alongside the driver.
“I figgered that.” Obadiah Gump lifted his gray felt hat, which had all but lost its shape, and wiped a bandanna across his sweat-sleek forehead. “Tom warn’t with me long, but he should have had more sense than to show himself. We was outnumbered.”
Slocum heard voices from inside the wagon. Terrified women’s voices, voices that whispered in breathy tones.
“What have you got in there, mice?” Slocum asked.
Gump laughed.
“Got me two brides from Denver. Catalog brides, I calls ’em. They put their pictures in a paper and try to get some poor old sodbuster or miner to marry ’em.”
“Mail-order brides,” Slocum said.
“I calls ’em catalog brides. Most of ’em wind up takin’ care of some cripple or workin’ like a slave in a store or on a farm.”
“Where are you headed?” Slocum asked.
“Deadfall. It’s a—”
“That’s where I’m going.”
“You want to ride shotgun for me after I load poor Tom in the wagon?”
“I’m driving four horses there.”
“Hell, tie ’em to the wagon, yours, too, and I’ll pay you two dollars to ride shotgun.”
Two small faces appeared behind Gump. The women wore bonnets, but were young and pretty.
“Gals, meet your rescuer. I didn’t get your name, stranger.”
“It’s Slocum, John Slocum.”
“This here’s Bonnie Loomis, the one wearin’ the pink bonnet, and the other’n is Renata Simpson, under the blue bonnet.”
The girls giggled. Slocum thought they couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. He touched a finger to his hat and nodded at them.
“Gals, we got to pick up Tom Nixon, then this gentleman’s goin’ to hitch up some horses to the back of the wagon and ride shotgun the rest of the way.”
The two girls giggled and batted their eyes at Slocum.
He turned his horse and rode back to where Tom’s body lay. The wagon rumbled up and Obie set the brake. He stepped down and Slocum slid from his saddle.
“Move up front, girls,” Obie said as he dropped the tailgate.
He picked up Tom’s body by the boots while Slocum lifted him from the shoulders. They slid the body onto the wagon bed. The girls were breathing hard and cringed when the dead man’s head slid between them. But they did not cry out or say anything. They both jumped when Obie slammed the tailgate shut and slid the bolts to lock it in place.
“I’ll wait here while you fetch your horses, Mr. Slocum,” Obie said.
“Call me John. I won’t be long.”
“You can call me Obie, feller.”
Slocum rode off to where he had left the horses. He returned in less than ten minutes. He and Obie hitched the lead rope to a wagon post, and he slid a rope around Ferro’s muzzle and tied it to a post on the opposite side. He slipped his rifle from its scabbard and walked to the front of the wagon and climbed up in the seat while Obie hauled himself up into the driver’s seat.
Obie clicked his teeth and rattled the reins across the backs of the four horses and turned the wagon.
Slocum looked all around on both sides of the road but saw no Apaches.
The two girls poked their heads out between Slocum and Obie.
“You going to Deadfall, too, mister?” Bonnie asked.
“I am,” he said.
“We’ve never been there,” Renata said. “What’s it like?”
“I’ve never been there either,” Slocum said.
“Ain’t much of a town,” Obie said. “But they struck gold in Gravel Gulch, so them boys are puttin’ up shacks all over the canyon. Who you bringin’ the horses to, John?”
“Man named Orson Canby bought them,” Slocum said. “Know him?”
“Sure. He’s a hard-rock miner who’s haulin’ timber from the mountains and buildin’ roads all over the valley.”
“I’m going to get hitched to a Mr. Wallace Hornaday,” Bonnie said.
“And my groom is to be Mr. Harlan Devlin,” Renata said. Then both women sighed.
Slocum looked at Obie’s face. It had gone pasty, as if the blood had drained from it like egg from a broken shell. But he did not say anything. Slocum sensed that he didn’t want to comment in front of the women.
“Where did you two come from?” Slocum asked.
“Fort Delaware,” Bonnie said. “We took the stage to Saint Johns and that’s where Obie came to meet us. This is all very exciting to us.”
“We got to Fort Delaware from Denver,” Renata said, “but the men we were to marry got transferred, so we advertised in the Bride Bulletin and both got letters from men in Deadfall. I think they’re both rich.”
“We hope so. All we saw in Denver were derelicts and gamblers. And Fort Delaware was like being in a prison behind the high walls of the stockade.”
“They’s been a few women what have come to Deadfall,” Obie said. “Don’t know if any of ’em got married, though. Some was workin’ at the Wild Horse Saloon or took on washerwoman jobs. But that was a while ago. Town’s growed since then.”
“Why is it called Deadfall?” Slocum asked.
“The prospector who rode into that great big old valley a-huntin’ deer or antelope come across a gulch where somebody had camped. There were all kinds of traps and several deadfalls, a little cabin. Man inside the cabin was a skeleton by then, starved to death or kilt by a b’ar, but he had a sack of gold and the feller who found him also found a map and stakes along the creek. There was the skeletons of animals under some of the deadfalls, so he started callin’ the place Deadfall. He hired help out of Flagstaff and then somebody kilt him and took over his claim. But by that time, news of the strike had got out and the valley began to fill up with miners and all sorts of people who make their money off of prospectors.”
“A boomtown,” Slocum said as the wagon rumbled along the dirt road toward low mountains and timber.
“Kind of,” Obie said.
“I just love gold things,” Renata said. “Bracelets and earrings, gold wedding rings.”
“Me, too,” Bonnie said. “My groom said he had lots of gold.”
“Oh, there’s gold there, all right,” Obie said. “And along with it, plenty of sin and skullduggery, like any boom-town.”
Slocum rocked in the seat, his rifle across his lap. He pulled a cheroot from his pocket, slid a matchbox out of another pocket, and bit off the end of the cigar. Then he lit the cheroot.
He didn’t know what awaited the girls in Deadfall, but he’d seen a lot of mail-order brides wind up in brothels or gambling houses, lured
to Western towns with the promise of marriage and then finding that all that glittered was not gold.
He began to form a picture of Deadfall in his mind, and thought he knew why Obie had blanched when he heard the names of the men who had sent for the women.
The women were young and pretty, and one of them, Renata, was stroking his arm with a single finger.
He felt as if he were being petted, like a dog or a cat.
Deadfall was still more than a half day away by his reckoning, and he knew they would not make it to the valley by nightfall.
Meanwhile, there were two young women in season and likely they had waited some time for male companion-ship.
Anything, or almost anything, could happen in that desolate, sun-baked country where the towering buttes shone like painted castles in the afternoon sun.
2
The falling sun glistened on the buttes and on the dark sides of them, the shadows stretching eastward in long carpets. There was a sudden chill to the breeze, and as the wagon approached the fringe of the low tree-flocked hills, they heard something crack beneath the wagon. The wagon tilted crazily before Obie reined the team to a halt.
“What was that?” Slocum asked.
Obie set the brake.
“Sounded like we broke a spoke.”
“Or maybe two,” Slocum said.
Both men climbed down from the seat and walked around the wagon. One wheel was canted away from the wagon, tilted at a crazy angle.
“Spokes broke all right,” Obie said. “Lucky I got some spares in the toolbox.”
“Take long to fix them?” Slocum asked.
“Have to jack up the wagon, take off the wheel, slip out them three broke spokes, and fit three new ones.” Obie looked up at the western sky, the shadows welling up in the hills. The breeze cooled the sweat on his face and dried it to a filmy transparent paste. He wiped his face with his sodden bandanna.
“We’ll have to camp right here, I reckon,” Obie said. “Be full dark before I’m finished.”
“I’ll help all I can,” Slocum said.
“Just keep your eyes peeled for any more ’Paches.”
“It’s some quiet out here now,” Slocum said as he surveyed the empty landscape. “Maybe too damned quiet.”
