by Jake Logan
“Aren’t you the naughty boy,” she said.
“I’m looking for a naughty girl,” Slocum retorted. Abigail laughed in delight and plunged into the pool, creating a huge splash as she dived underwater. For a moment, Slocum thought she had hit her head and was drowning.
Then she surfaced, her head between his legs. Her bright blue eyes locked with his, then she sampled almost daintily at his erection. Her lips brushed the tip, and her tongue flicked back and forth like hummingbird wings teasing him. He paddled slowly to her. She did not back away, but let the motion thrust him deeper into her mouth. Slocum shuddered as he felt her tongue cradling his hardness. She began sucking and licking and giving him reason to forget all about his sore muscles and minor scratches.
His legs draped over her shoulders while she sucked on him, and they drifted around the pool until they came to the waterfall. The thirty-foot plunge from higher in the mountains caused an undertow that took Slocum off the surface and drew him underwater. Abigail followed him, her mouth never leaving his manhood. They thrashed about and came back to the surface under the cascading water.
Slocum got his feet under him and found the bottom so she could stand. Abigail abandoned her post at his groin and stood, her body pressing hotly into his. They kissed, lost in an island of heat amid the coldness surrounding them. Slocum felt her nipples hardening as they thrust against his chest. His hands roamed her body, stroking over sleek, smooth stretches of bare flesh, and finally cupping her buttocks to hold her close. The waterfall was deafening, but all Slocum could hear was the hammering of his own pulse as it sped up. Abigail gripped his length and tugged insistently.
“You promised,” she shouted in his ear. “You said you’d get something hot into me.”
Slocum bent his knees and dropped. He reached both arms between her legs, then stood. He picked her up bodily so her thighs pressed into his upper arms, and she was bent double where he could enter her easily. It took a few seconds of jockeying, and then they both gasped as he slid deeply into her molten core.
It was awkward supporting her entire weight while she was doubled up like this, but Slocum felt a wave of strength pass through him that more than compensated for his unstable stance. He pushed his arms out a little, and then let her weight press them back to his sides. This drove her down hard around his fleshy spike so he entered her in a completely different direction than possible otherwise.
She groaned as he began moving faster. He had thought the cold would rob him of any arousal, but he was wrong. Her beauty, her tightness, her heat and desire stoked his fires. He thrust deeper and harder until Abigail cried out in release. Slocum continued for a few more seconds, and then his control vanished. He exploded in her clinging tightness and then, weak once more, sank to his knees. She floated away from him until she could get her feet on the pool bottom.
Abigail came back and knelt in front of him to kiss. He fondled her breasts and then reached around to pull her against him once more. Under the crashing water, they remained kissing and exploring each other’s bodies until the last of their passions had faded.
Drifting away from beneath the waterfall, they paddled out to the center of the pool.
“You’re just the medicine I needed,” Slocum said. He reached over and lightly tweaked a cold-hardened nipple poking from the water.
“And you’re what I needed, too, John. I’ve never met a man like you before. I wish we could stay here forever.”
“We can for a while.”
“The miners will find us.”
“The marshal from town might, too, but I’m not worried. This is a safe enough place to rest up.”
“It’s dawn,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was so late—so early.” She sputtered and sat up on the bottom of the pool, her breasts half hidden by the water. “You know what I mean.”
“I need to get something to eat and then some rest.”
“With me, there won’t be any . . . resting.” She reached out and caught his limp length and teased it.
“I meant sleep.”
He removed her hand from his crotch and splashed out of the pool. He glanced back over his shoulder to see that she watched him with as much interest as he had watched her strip.
“When everything’s squared away,” he said.
“That’s a promise I’ll hold you to,” Abigail said. “You do need to stop getting thrown in jail, though. I won’t always be around to get you free.”
Slocum shook like a dog and got most of the water off his body. He used his tattered clothing to dry himself, and then fished out his spare set of clothes from his saddlebags. The shirt was in worse shape than he remembered, but the jeans were an improvement over the ones he discarded.
By the time he strapped on his gun belt, Abigail was mostly dressed. He should have been slower—or more attentive. He had missed a show almost as good as her disrobing.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“Where’s your brother?”
“You mean William?”
He looked at her strangely.
“Of course you mean William,” she went on hastily. “It’s just that you distracted me so, I forgot all about him.” Abigail finished buttoning her blouse and patted out wrinkles. “He went on ahead. I’m not sure where, but he was quite happy about seeing his gold mine. The Climax was exactly what he had searched for since coming to Nevada.”
Slocum couldn’t make heads or tails out of the Brit’s curious interests.
“If he wanted me to scout for him, why’d he go on ahead?”
“Because you were locked up by the miners, that’s why.” Abigail realized how this sounded. She took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “You have to understand that William thinks of people as expendable. If you are no longer of use to him, he will push on by himself.”
“I figured as much. Why are you different? Did you spend more time with your ma than he did?” Again, Slocum saw how Abigail fought to find the right words.
“Something like that. Our upbringing was so different. In many ways at least. He and I—”
Abigail stopped speaking and turned toward the crevice leading back to the road.
Slocum drew his six-shooter and cocked it, waiting for the rider to follow the sound of a horse neighing that reached their little paradise. Somebody entered the crevice out at the road. In spite of his assurances, Slocum realized they were trapped in the box canyon.
13
“John, they caught us!” Abigail grabbed his arm so hard he winced. She pressed into a large bruise that would take a week to heal properly. Slocum pulled free and pointed his pistol down the rocky crevice. Missing was impossible if he fired. The bullet might stray left or right, but the wall would cause it to ricochet directly into a rider approaching their sanctuary.
“Quiet,” he said. A thousand things went through his head, but one detail always returned. The smoky torch would blind the rider and spook his mount.
“But John—”
He clamped his hand over her mouth to silence her. He watched as the outline of the rider grew less distinct from the smoke building in the crevice. And then there was nothing but a pale slash of dawn at the far end of the passageway. Only then did Slocum release the woman.
“John, how dare you touch me like that!”
“Anything you say echoes down the crevice. That would have brought them down on us in a flash.”
“How’d you know they would back away?”
“We can’t leave for a while,” Slocum said. “I’ll do a bit of the scouting your brother hired me for. Stay here.” Abigail started to protest. His cold stare pinned her to the spot. He sidled into the narrow crevice and made his way to the road, marveling their horses had put up with such a tight fit going in. With the blue sky showing at the far end of the passage, the horses would have no trouble getting out. They would see sunlight and go straight for it.
He slowed and finally stopped just inside the mouth of the crevice. He p
ressed himself against the uphill side of the rock when another rider went past along the road, heading downhill toward Virginia City. Slocum pressed his ear to the rock and heard the steady clomp-clomp of another horse—or horses. Waiting, he counted six go by, and still he felt the vibrations that told him more traffic was on its way.
A small wagon rattled past. Standing on tiptoe allowed him to get a glimpse into the bed. He took a deep breath and then let it out. The way the canvas was tucked, that had to be Pete’s body. When Bold Max rode past, Slocum knew the foreman was the final rider in the procession on its way to Virginia City for Pete’s burial. Most of the miners had accompanied the corpse for a reason. Their respect for the freighter undoubtedly forced the foreman to go along with their desire to attend his funeral. It would be a send-off the likes of which the boomtown had not seen in a while. Most towns like Virginia City filled suddenly with a flood of strangers who would leave as suddenly when the gold petered out.
The men who made lasting friends were few because of the solitary nature of prospecting and mining. The crew from the Climax might be as close to a family as any of the actual families in town.
Slocum doubted they would rest easy until he was brought in for killing Pete since the freighter was one of their own.
Slocum chanced a quick look uphill and saw only dusty road. He went to the edge and peered down at the lower level where the road curled back down the mountainside, and counted a full dozen riders in addition to the pair in the wagon. He didn’t bother adding in Pete. He was dead and unlikely to care if his killer was brought to justice—or if Bold Max got the wrong man.
Slocum returned to where Abigail waited anxiously.
“Well, what’s going on? Tell me, John. You’ve got to tell me!”
He calmed her and explained, “The wagon carried Pete’s body. They’re probably taking him to town for burial.”
“The Silver Terrace Cemetery,” she said. Slocum stared at her. She looked flustered. “William and I looked around town when we passed through. We happened to stop by the town cemetery, to the north, downhill from the main part of town. You can look down on it from Main Street.”
Slocum nodded. It was approaching strange that she and her brother prowled around boomtown cemeteries. William had more peculiar interests than he had shown.
“The Masons have a nice section,” Abigail said lamely.
“I don’t cotton much to cemeteries,” Slocum said. “When my time comes, I don’t figure I’ll be laid to rest in one.” He rubbed his neck and smiled crookedly. “The buzzards will have a feast on my bones, and that’ll be the best I can hope for.”
“How cynical of you,” she said. “Everyone deserves a proper burial. Including that Pete person.”
Something about the way she spoke put Slocum on guard.
“I want to go to his funeral,” she said.
“Why’s that? You didn’t know him,” Slocum said.
“To pay my respects, of course. Is that so odd to your Colonial ways? I should hope not.” Abigail flounced away, leaving Slocum to stare at her in wonder.
“We can’t go to Pete’s funeral,” he called after her. “The barkeep in town thinks I killed his brother, and the Climax foreman’s sure I killed Pete. If anybody spotted me, I’d be strung up before you could say Jack Robinson.”
“I will not be denied this. It is only proper manners, something you are totally lacking, John Slocum,” she said. She crossed her arms and glared at him.
“Bold Max might just figure out who it was that set me free. How’d you come by the key to the lock? It’s not going to be hard for him to decide you and me are in cahoots. They won’t hang a woman in these parts—not too often. But for someone who killed their best freighter, they might make an exception.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I had nothing to do with killing this Pete person.”
“I didn’t either, and that didn’t stop them from wanting to stretch my neck for the crime.”
“I’m going. With or without you, I’m going to that funeral.”
Slocum looked down at his clothing. His shirt was a different color from the one they had last seen him wearing, and his spare jeans were more faded. There wasn’t a whole lot he could do about his hat because he needed to keep it pulled down low to hide his face. Anybody paying attention would spot his cross-draw holster, but he could leave that behind.
Slocum felt a cold lump forming in his gut when he realized he was thinking of walking into a cemetery filled with mourners for a man they thought he had killed—and he was coming up with ways to do it unarmed.
“Three aces,” he said to himself.
“What’s that?” Abigail’s expression of disdain for his supposed cowardice had not changed.
“I said we ought to get on the trail or we’ll miss the planting.”
All the way down the mountain to Virginia City, he cursed himself for being an idiot. There was no way he could hope to strut on up to the service and not get caught. Abigail would draw a great deal of attention wherever she went because of her beauty and because the miners in a town like Virginia City already knew every unmarried female within a twenty-mile radius. The ones that weren’t whores were taken as wives.
“You have to get a disguise,” Slocum said as they rode past the houses at the northern end of town. The tight cluster of falling-down buildings in Virginia City was centered around the Bucket of Blood Saloon, with the Mountain of Gold, where Mac worked, at the southern end. Families populated this side of town, and that gave him a desperate idea.
“How am I supposed to do that?” Abigail asked.
“Your clothing’s too nice.” Slocum motioned for Abigail to remain where she was. He dismounted and went to a clothesline where a woman’s dress flapped in the breeze. Stealing a woman’s only other dress bothered him a mite, so he pulled it down and replaced it with a ten-dollar bill from the poke Cheswick had given him for his work.
He hurried back and tossed her the dun-colored, striped gingham dress.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Abigail wrinkled her nose at the dress. It had been washed in lye soap strong enough to burn Slocum’s fingers.
“Put it on over your clothes. Keep your head down. If you have a scarf, wear that to hide your hair. Blend in with the crowd as good as you can. Even better, stay at the back,” Slocum said. “It’s not like you have to go to the coffin to pay your respects.”
He watched as she reluctantly pulled the dress over her clothing. She looked pleasingly plump this way, but Slocum chafed at the delay. There was no reason to go to Pete’s funeral. The short time he had spent with the man had shown him to be friendly, competent, and not worth getting arrested for.
The only good thing Slocum could see about attending the service lay in nobody thinking the man accused of shooting Pete would show up.
“Let’s go. Silver Terrace Cemetery is down the road.”
Slocum looked over his shoulder and saw the woman who lived in the house struggling with another basket of laundry. He trotted ahead of Abigail to make sure she rode away quickly. Adding dress stealing to his long list of offenses in Virginia City wasn’t something he wanted mentioned as men gathered to get drunk.
“They’ve begun,” Abigail said. “Hurry, John. I want to see.”
“You’re sure you don’t know where your brother is?” Slocum looked over the heads of the crowd, trying to pick out William Cheswick. If his sister was crazy as a loon about going to a funeral, he might be also.
The number turning out for Pete’s funeral surprised Slocum. More than fifty people crowded through the wooden gate and trudged up the hill to a spot near the Masonic burial plots. For a moment, Slocum thought Pete was going to get planted there, but the procession passed that area, and the Fraternal Order of Moose section as well. Still, Pete had a decent enough resting place on the eastern slope of the largest hill in the graveyard. From the look of the pine coffin, someone had forked over a goodly sum to bury him in style.
/> “I’ll wait here,” Slocum said at the cemetery gate.
“Nonsense, people would stare if a woman showed up alone. They’d think there was something between Pete and me.”
“Why?”
Slocum barely got the question out when he had to turn and look away. He let Abigail take his arm so he could maneuver her around to block the view of Mac and a deputy marshal with him. The two walked quickly past, never once giving Slocum a look.
“See?” Abigail said. “You’re invisible. All they can think about is the funeral service. The preacher’s getting ready to begin. Come along, John. Come on!” She pulled on his arm so hard, he dared not fight her or he would draw attention to himself.
The only saving grace was Abigail being camouflaged by wearing the faded dress. She melted into the crowd, and might well have been a local citizen.
Slocum dug his heels in and prevented her from getting closer to the grave. Remaining at the rear of the crowd blocked his view of the coffin, but that wasn’t anything he would miss. Slocum had seen more than his share of dead men in his day. Worse, he had seen Pete when he was shot. The freighter had been about as banged up as possible before the bullet robbed him of life.
“We will have a brief viewing,” the preacher said in a stentorian voice. His words carried for quite a distance, and then echoed back from the direction of Virginia City. “Pay your last respects before I begin the ceremony.”
“Don’t,” Slocum said, but Abigail pulled free and joined the line of mourners shuffling by the now open coffin. The raised lid blocked Slocum’s view, but he knew the body couldn’t look very pretty. More than one of the men passing by swallowed hard and averted their eyes, confirming what Slocum knew already. No undertaker could be good enough to piece together a man’s head after a bullet blasted through it. And Pete hadn’t been afforded such a luxury. Bold Max had done nothing more than plunk the body into a fancy coffin for the service.
He turned when the deputy stepped in front of him, intent on getting in the line paying their respects. Slocum backed away when Mac joined the man.
