Slocum and the Hanging Horse

by Jake Logan

  Amy examined them carefully, turning over each item until she satisfied herself that they were not from local sources.

  “Definitely not Mexican or handwoven around here,” she reported. “There’s some blood, but it could be anyone’s.”

  “It doesn’t matter if Jeter spilled it or it is his own shed blood,” Ambrose said. “These belonged to him.”

  “You sure?” Dalton asked. The gunman looked increasingly contemptuous of the entire transaction, but he recoiled when Killian took the clothing, held it to his nose, and sniffed deeply.

  “They’re his,” Killian said, heaving a great sigh. “I recognize his scent as well as any bloodhound could.”

  “The hell you say.” Dalton rested his hand on his six-gun as if he might have to use it.

  “Pay the woman for these items, Miss Gerardo,” Ambrose said, walking away. He clutched the discarded clothing to his chest as if he had rescued a loved one from drowning and now feared to ever turn the person loose.

  “Is he touched in the head?” Dalton asked. Amy ignored him as she haggled with the woman over the value of the clothing. If Ambrose hadn’t shown such fondness for and attachment to the clothes, she might have been able to drive a better bargain. Still, she felt that eight dollars was a fair enough price to pay, and handed the money to the woman.

  “You’re givin’ her that much for dirty, bloody rags? Hell, I’ll sell you the shirt off my back for less than that if you want something dirty and blood-soaked,” Dalton said. He leered at her, after making sure Ambrose was out of earshot. “I’ll take off more than that just for you.”

  Amy glared at him.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said haughtily. Amy made a quick turn, letting her skirt flare out to keep him at least a pace off as she started after Ambrose. She wished she had the rifle with her now. Or a whip. That would suit a cur like Dalton. She stopped when the Mexican woman called to her.

  “What is it?”

  “There is more,” she said to Amy.

  “What? Where?”

  “Not here. In a village two days’ ride to the south, near the big bend in the Rio Grande.”

  “Big Bend?”

  “Sí, there. He has left much there. A saddle. Spurs. Valuable things.”

  “Thank you,” Amy said, returning to give the woman a silver dollar for the information.

  “You will find much, very much.”

  Amy smiled as she trailed after Dalton and Ambrose. This find had to go to Dalton, but spurs worn by Les Jeter? If she returned with those, she would win more than simple gratitude from Ambrose. Thinking with great anticipation on what reward she might get, Amy hastened up the slope to where they had left the buckboard and horses.

  8

  John Slocum saw the smoke rising a mile out of San Esteban. He put his heels to the horse, but the animal wasn’t in any mood to trot along. It kept up the same slow, steady pace it had since he had gone out scouting for any sign of Les Jeter. In a way, the slowness of the horse suited him fine since he had found nothing to show where the road agent had gone. Having to admit this to Sanford or even the good-for-nothing deputy didn’t please him much. Slocum cursed, but knew the former team horse wasn’t going to be rushed. It had spent too much of its life in a harness next to at least one other horse and usually three others. He was lucky to have any mount.

  He still fumed as the horse took its sweet time ambling along into the confusion that had seized the town. Slocum sat straighter in the saddle when he saw the flames dancing high above the bank. The townspeople worked to snuff out the blaze, but it was a losing proposition for them. The interior of the bank finally burned to ashes before the flames died down. The heat had been so intense that some of the adobe in the walls had begun to crack because the straw holding the mud bricks had caught fire.

  “Mighty nasty fire,” Slocum said, swinging down from the saddle and going toward the smoldering ruins. “What happened?”

  “Robbery,” one man said. His face was sooty, showing he had been in the front line of firefighters working to extinguish the blaze. “He waltzed in, held up the bank, then started the fire.”

  “Who?” Slocum went cold inside. He had a good idea who was brazen enough to do such a robbery.

  “Cain’t say, but he was caught inside. Had to be. First off, we thought there was a whole damn gang of ’em, but it don’t look so much that way now. There was only the one door in and out and nobody came out after the fire began. Reckon there was four employees, counting the bank president, inside. Can’t see a passel of robbers anywhere, so it must have been one fella what done all the dirty work. Damned shame. I don’t usually cotton much to bankers, but he was always square with me. Loaned a lot of folks money when they didn’t have much in the way of a ranch or business.”

  “A prince among men,” Slocum agreed. He had little truck with bankers, and knew the president of this bank had to be making plenty of money, or he would have been foreclosing on widows and throwing orphans into the street to make his profits.

  Slocum left the men to continue their thankless task of tossing buckets of precious water onto the embers to cool off the ruins enough to enter. He wandered around to the side, and saw how the high window had been knocked out in such a way that part was in the alley and the rest remained inside the bank. He hopped up, grabbed the crumbling edge of the window, and pulled himself high enough to look inside. The stench of burned human flesh almost made him gag. The man out front hadn’t been lying when he said there were people trapped inside, although Slocum couldn’t identify any of the lumps left inside as ever being human. Looking around, he saw that the window had been hammered at and then forced out of its frame. He dropped down and brushed off his hands.

  The robber might have escaped this way. The window was narrow, but Slocum thought he could wedge himself through, given enough goad. Having the fire licking at his ass would be more than enough incentive to get out of the building. Especially if he had already killed four people and faced an angry mob outside the only real door to the bank. Slocum had started back around to see how the crowd progressed in entering the bank when he saw a jagged chunk of metal with a piece of cloth caught on its sharp edge. He plucked it off the metal and held it up.

  He had seen a shirt with a similar pattern before. During the stagecoach robbery.

  “Jeter,” he said with enough force to make several men turn to look at him.

  “What’s that, mister?”

  “I think it was Jeter who robbed the bank,” Slocum said. “He was wearing a shirt like this when he killed the driver and two passengers. Where’s the deputy? I ought to tell him.”

  “The deputy’s dead,” someone closer to the door said. “Got his damn head blowed off when he tried to get into the bank. I didn’t think he had it in him.” The man looked around and snorted. “He don’t have much at all in his head now, no matter what I thought of him before.” The man pointed out the bits of bloody gray matter spattered into the dusty street.

  “What about the marshal? He ever get back to town?”

  “Cain’t say. Benbow makes himself mighty scarce. Don’t much blame him, not now. San Esteban is becoming a real dangerous place.”

  Slocum considered going to the stagecoach office and talking again with Old Man Sanford. He decided this wouldn’t do any good. If the station agent had contacted the main office in San Antonio as he’d said, they might send Pinkertons or they might not, depending on what the managers thought. Slocum knew it wouldn’t be long before the entire route was made worthless by the railroad being built some distance away. When the locomotives began chuffing along, not only would the Butterfield Stagecoach Company be out of business, but the entire town of San Esteban would have no reason to exist.

  “Anybody see a rider leaving town about the time the bank was burning?”

  One man stroked his chin and scowled. Slocum went to him and stood silently, waiting for the slow mental processes to work through all the details.

>   “Yup, I saw a gent. Talked with him. Real friendly fella. Had a bag slung over his shoulder when he come out of the alley.”

  “A moneybag?” asked Slocum, already knowing the answer.

  “Coulda been. Didn’t get a good look. There was a whole lot of confusion, you gotta know.”

  “A whole lot,” Slocum agreed. “Did he ride east or west when he left?”

  “That way. Away from the fire. That was sensible, and I didn’t think nuthin’ ’bout it.”

  “Thanks,” Slocum said, in a hurry now to find Jeter’s tracks. The outlaw could have circled, or maybe he kept riding. Slocum had to find out. This might be the only chance he had of getting onto the man’s trail.

  The horse protested a little, but it had been used to long, hard days in harness. The horse walked, but Slocum couldn’t urge it to any greater speed. Content to just be moving along on anything other than his own feet, Slocum left town and began watching for any new set of hoofprints. He was in luck. San Esteban didn’t see much traffic on any given day, and the only clear prints were left by a man riding to the west, toward the Rio Grande. Slocum wondered if he had been wrong not pursuing the trail going in that direction before, but in his gut he had felt the one heading into the Davis Mountains was the real trail.

  Slocum began following the tracks the best he could on the sunbaked desert. Some shifting sand had obliterated the trail, but he kept on, getting a fix on a distant mountain peak and going for it as he suspected Jeter had. When he was despairing the most that he was following a will-o’-the-wisp, he saw a sheet of paper fluttering, trapped on a mesquite thorn. Reaching down, he snared it and held it up.

  “Scrip,” he said to the horse, to prove he was about the best tracker in this part of Texas. “Issued on the Fort Davis bank. Loot from the San Esteban robbery.” How the solitary bill had come to escape the bag Jeter had used to carry the loot in didn’t matter. It confirmed that the outlaw wasn’t far ahead. The wind and weather would have destroyed the paper money if it had been impaled for very long on the mesquite bush.

  Slocum had to work harder on following the trail when he hit a rocky stretch. The Davis Mountains were not far off. The foothills presented a constant challenge to him, but Jeter wasn’t heading in the direction he had been before. Angling away, heading through a pass in the mountains to the northwest, Jeter might have decided to take his stolen money and disappear into Mexico. But as Slocum rode and thought on the matter, he knew that wasn’t likely. Eventually, Jeter would die in a robbery. Everything about the man said he had a death wish. He challenged fate by thumbing his nose at local lawmen and even the Texas Rangers. When news of the San Esteban robbery reached Fort Davis, it would bring out a company of soldiers fresh from fighting Apaches. A lone outlaw like Jeter wouldn’t stand much chance after the soldiers had had their skills and courage honed by Indians on the warpath.

  Slocum rode faster through the pass, and came out on a broad plain stretching green and tempting. A town even smaller than San Esteban was situated smack in the middle, beside a creek that ran down out of the higher elevations in the Davis Mountains. He sat with his leg curled around his saddle horn, taking time to roll himself a smoke. Slocum lit it with a sudden flare of his lucifer, then puffed in deeply, letting the smoke fill his lungs and calm him a mite. After being on Jeter’s trail this long, he had gotten himself wound up tighter than a two-dollar watch.

  The thought of Jeter stealing the watch during the stage robbery caused Slocum to tense up all over again. He kept puffing and settled down. He couldn’t face a man with such an obvious need to make a spectacle of himself. Jeter might want to face off in the street and have a shoot-out. Slocum was quick, but had no idea if the outlaw was a real gunslinger able to hold his own with the fastest. If Slocum could avoid such a confrontation, he would do it. But he would get his watch back, one way or the other. If it took shooting it out with Jeter, he’d do it.

  Finishing his smoke, not seeing anyone coming or going in the small village, Slocum lifted his leg off the pommel and slid his foot back into the stirrup. He gently kicked his heels against the horse’s flanks and got it moving to the town.

  Alert as he rode, Slocum knew he might already be centered in Jeter’s sights. It was late afternoon, hotter than Hades, and the residents were likely taking their siestas. Anyone stirring wouldn’t have Slocum’s best interests at heart.

  He entered the town and dismounted in front of a cantina. A Mexican sat beside the door, a huge sombrero pulled down to shade his face from the sun. As Slocum started inside, the man looked up.

  “Hola,” Slocum said in greeting. The man nodded. “Ayudame?”

  “I speak English,” came the answer. “What can a poor man like me do for a rich hombre like you?”

  “Not so rich,” Slocum said, sitting next to the man in the dirt, his back to the thick, cool, rough adobe wall of the cantina. “But you might be able to earn some money if you can tell me about an hombre.” Slocum described Jeter the best he could, then reached into his pocket and held up the piece of fabric he had found back in San Esteban. “He’s wearing a shirt like this.”

  Slocum saw the man pale under his swarthy complexion.

  “A dollar,” Slocum said, fishing out the solitary piece of scrip he had found along Jeter’s trail. In a place like this unnamed border town, such a large sum would be magic.

  “No,” the man said, shaking his head vigorously enough to cause the tassels around the brim of the sombrero to bounce like hailstones on a roof. “No sé.”

  “I think you do know. All I want you to tell me is if he’s in town right now. Nothing more.”

  The man’s eyes went to the paper dollar. The greenback ended up flat on Slocum’s palm. The man reached for it hesitantly. Slocum closed his hand, then turned it over and pressed the bill into the man’s.

  “Gracias,” Slocum said. He had read what he thought was the truth in the man’s frightened eyes. Jeter was no stranger here, but he wasn’t in town right now. Slocum climbed to his feet, ducked under the low lintel, and found himself a chair near the bar where he could watch the doorway. He doubted Jeter was in town, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Tequila?” asked the barkeep.

  “Why not?” Slocum waited for the drink, then asked before the barkeep could return to his post behind the crude bar, “I’m looking for Jeter. Where can I find him?”

  “You got business with him?”

  “I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Slocum said, not trying to keep the anger from his words.

  “He is gone, but I wish you luck. Everyone in this town wishes you luck.”

  “I got that impression,” Slocum said, seeing the man outside peering in, his head bobbing in agreement. The man in the sombrero clutched the dollar Slocum had given him as if it would turn into a bird and fly away. Slocum gestured for the man to join him, but he ducked back out of sight.

  “He’s a good-for-nothing,” the barkeep said, pointing to the door. “But he’s a prince among men compared to Jeter.” The bartender fumbled in his pocket and dropped a cartridge onto the table. “Use that on him. Back, head, chest, it does not matter. Just use it well.”

  “I will,” Slocum said, pocketing the bullet where his brother’s watch should have been. It would remind him of why he wanted Jeter, as if he could forget easily.

  Slocum downed his tequila and let it burn away some of his anger, but not enough to forget why he had come here.

  “Where would I find Jeter?” he asked the barkeep.

  “Don’t know, don’t care. He comes here, spends a few days lording it over everyone, and then leaves like he came—a thief in the night.”

  “But not this time,” Slocum said. He knew Jeter couldn’t be more than a few hours ahead of him.

  “Just passing through, that’s all.” The bartender looked hard at Slocum for a moment, then said curtly, “Drink’s on the house.”

  Slocum saw that, for all the barkeep wanted Jeter dead, he wasn’t goi
ng to be too talkative. Jeter might kill anyone asking too many questions—or answering them. Without another word, Slocum stood and went back into the afternoon heat in time to see Amy Gerardo’s blond hair glinting like gold in the sun as she drove a buckboard into town. Supplies for a week or more bounced about in the rear, but she paid less attention to anything that might fall out than to the houses she passed. Slocum bided his time. It wouldn’t be long before she saw him.

  She drew back on the reins and sat on the hardwood seat, staring at him.

  “Mr. Slocum,” she said. “I had not expected to see you here.”

  “I keep turning up like a bad penny,” he said. “What brings you to this fine town? Out for a constitutional?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “I am on an errand for Ambrose—for Mr. Killian.”

  “He sends you out alone when there are Indians off the reservation and dangerous outlaws like Jeter prowling the countryside?”

  “Is he here? Was he?”

  “You mean Jeter? Just missed him,” Slocum said, watching her closely. He saw an entire rainbow of emotions play across her pretty face.

  “I wanted to . . . see him,” Amy said somewhat lamely. Slocum knew there was more to it than that, but he couldn’t fathom what it might be that had brought her all the way from San Esteban to this desolate spot. “Perhaps, Mr. Slocum, we could join forces. You want to find him as much as I do.”

  “Can’t see that would gain either of us much,” Slocum said. “He’s a dangerous man, but you know that.” He fell silent to let her reply. She didn’t give him anything more to speculate on.

  “I must see to other business here,” Amy said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get to it. Perhaps we can talk business later.”

  Slocum touched the brim of his hat and waited for her to drive on. She went to the edge of town, looked back to see him watching her, then came to a decision. She got out of the buckboard and luckily went into the right house, only to emerge a few minutes later. An older Mexican woman came to the door and waved good-bye to her. Slocum saw the woman clutching what appeared to be a handful of greenbacks. Amy had given her a considerable amount of money. Why?