by Jake Logan
He was patient but nothing moved except the increasingly ominous swirling clouds overhead. They had scudded low before. Now he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling up. That was never a good sign. A lightning storm was the least of his worries with the rapid spinning in the clouds pulling down several funnels.
“We ain’t gettin’ our asses shot off in here!”
Slocum heard the door creak open on the stage. He started to warn the trio back inside, then decided this might provoke the road agent lying doggo somewhere out on the prairie. The rolling hills hid too much. The sparse vegetation came from too little rainfall over the course of a year, and the movement of the occasional leaf or thorny limb came from raindrops rather than road agents.
“Where are they? I’ll take care of those yellowbellies.”
Slocum didn’t have to look to see who had spoken. It had to be Know-it-all. The arrogance in his words was his doom.
A single shot rang out. Slocum jerked around, saw where the sniper had hidden, and began firing methodically into the clump of waist-high grass. Slug after slug tore off pieces of the grass but no return fire sounded.
This was the damnedest robbery Slocum had ever seen—and he had been on both sides, being robbed and doing the robbing.
“They shot him. H-He’s dead! He’s stone-cold dead!”
Slocum wiggled forward and looked over the edge of the stage. Know-it-all lay sprawled on his face, his six-shooter dropped a few inches from his limp fingers. From the distance, the robber was either one hell of a fine shot or had been lucky. For Know-it-all, the matter was moot.
“I might have chased off the robbers,” Slocum said. He doubted that but wanted to keep his surviving passengers calm. With as much gold as there was likely tucked away into that massive strongbox in the stagecoach boot, robbers weren’t going to kill one man and leave. They’d see the death as one less man to keep them from getting filthy rich at the Army’s expense.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here!” That was Loudmouth blubbering like a baby.
“Can’t drive around the barricade they threw up. You go and clear the road. I’ll stand guard.”
“Like hell you will! I ain’t budgin’. I seen what happened to him!”
“One of you come on up here and keep watch, then,” Slocum said. It surprised him when Complainer scrambled to the top and sat cross-legged atop the luggage.
“All I got’s a derringer,” he said. Slocum silently passed him the rifle. The man took it and appeared to know which end to point toward the road agents.
As satisfied as he could be by this, Slocum slithered over the side of the stage and dropped to the ground, the bulk of the compartment between him and where he had shot up the clump of grass. Over the years he had developed a feel for when he killed a man and when he had missed. His bullets hadn’t even winged the varmint out there on the prairie causing such woe.
He touched the Colt Navy slung in its cross-draw holster to assure himself he could fire back if necessary, then hiked to the stone wall. It had taken some time to construct the barricade, and it took Slocum longer than he liked tossing the middle of it to one side of the road or the other in a gate wide enough to drive through. With every rock he heaved away, he tensed, sure a bullet would rob him of life as it had Know-it-all. He finished and hastened back to the stagecoach.
“Ain’t seen nobody movin’ out there. If Fred hadn’t got hisself kilt, I’d have thought we were out here all alone.”
“Fred’s his name? What’s his whole name?”
“Cain’t say. We passed a flask around and got a bit friendly, but only a bit. First names and nothing more. He didn’t think much of my whiskey, but what the hell? Sorry now I wasted a drop on him.”
“He won’t have anything more to feel all superior to,” Slocum said.
“Wasted the whiskey, I did. And he even spilled more ’n I drunk.”
The complaints continued as the man settled down in the driver’s box, still clinging to the rifle as if his life depended on it.
“You going to ride with me? As guard?”
“You got to drive fast. I ain’t gonna get wet sittin’ here forever. Seat’s not much better ’n inside either.”
The man’s complaining never stopped as Slocum worked the team up to a slow walk, passed the rocks, and then had nothing but empty road ahead. He craned his neck around occasionally, hunting for the gunman who had killed one of his passengers, then had just run off. It didn’t make sense a road agent getting spooked so easily after the careful planning and physical work that had gone into staging the robbery.
“How far are we from town?”
“Maybe five miles from Gregory and another three from Fort Stockton,” Slocum said. “If the team doesn’t falter, we can make Gregory within the hour.”
“Damned good thing. Rain’s gettin’ harder.” Complainer wiped water from his face with a strangely delicate touch of his fingertip and left brown, muddy streaks on his cheeks. He looked like a Comanche on the warpath. “I’m gonna drown if I stay in this here box much longer. Stop the coach so’s I kin get back inside. Them canvas flaps won’t keep out much water, but it’ll be better than gettin’ drenched up here.”
Slocum felt the strain across his back as he pulled the team to a halt to let Complainer join Loudmouth in the compartment. He took the time to rummage about in his own gear and get out a yellow slicker. It wouldn’t keep him from getting soaked, but more than rain bothered him now. He was wet and the wind whipped across the prairie hard enough to give him a chill that went to the bone. Worse, the hair on the back of his neck tingled now. One hell of a lightning storm was building.
“All aboard?” he yelled against the fury of the rising wind. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked over the side. Complainer had closed the door. That was good enough for Slocum. He snapped the reins and got the horses to a steady pull.
He found the chore of driving increasingly difficult. The horses shied at every sudden gust, and the distant flashes of lightning made them surge and try to bolt. So far the lightning was distant enough that thunder didn’t reach him, but when it did, the horses would spook twice, once at the flash, then at the thunder’s report.
Slocum wasn’t sure what made him look behind. Sheets of falling rain hid the road. But not the sky. Above crackled more lightning, flashing cloud to cloud, but what was revealed made him go cold all over.
The frantic turning of the cloud cast down a misty finger that hardened into windy steel. The twister touched down on the road just behind the stagecoach. It danced and bobbed along behind, slipping to one side of the road before darting back to the opposite side, and in one passage caught the rear end of the stage, lifting it and throwing Slocum through the air.
Then all he knew was the earsplitting roar of an approaching locomotive and rain and wind so powerful it felt as if it would rip the very earth from under him.
2
The roar grew louder, forcing Slocum to clap both hands over his ears. But he couldn’t move. His hands refused to lift and his body was paralyzed. He fought down panic as he forced open his eyes. For a moment he thought he had gone blind, too. Then he realized he was facedown in a ditch half filled with water. All he could see was mud. Rocking from side to side freed his body of the sticky mud and allowed him to roll onto his side and thrust his face upward to the driving rain.
In a few minutes he had cleaned the mud off his face while the rain cleaned off the slicker he still wore, though it hung in strips. Sitting up, he examined himself, more by touch than sight. He wasn’t blind, but the storm was so intense that the rain robbed him of vision. Fingers moving over the slicker, he found more than one spot where the canvas had been reduced to tatters and let in rain. He rocked up and came to hands and knees, then shook like a dog sending mud flying in all directions. From here he got to unsteady fe
et.
Staggering a few feet brought him fully aware of his surroundings. The roar in his ears died down to a muted hum. Under his slicker he was aware that he was soaked clean through and that his clothing had been cut to shreds like the heavy canvas that had protected him. A bit of fumbling reassured him that his six-shooter was still in its holster. The leather thong over the hammer had kept it from flying away when he had spun through the air.
“The twister!” Details snapped back into focus for him. He had been in the driver’s box when the tornado picked up the stage and flipped it ass over teakettle. He had been flung from the box and had gone his separate way.
A troubling memory of seeing the horses caught in the tornado and carried aloft made him shudder. They had remained bridled together as the whirling wind had taken them away. How long they could have survived was anyone’s guess. Slocum doubted it had been too long. He looked around, getting his bearings. A few nearby planks of painted wood were all that remained of the stage.
“Hallo!” His cry was smothered by the wind. He stepped over the ditch running almost bank to bank with rain and found the roadbed. Only the direction of the wind gave him any hint as to where he was. The darkness wasn’t complete, but with the sheets of rain falling all around, it might as well have been.
It was the wind that told him which way to walk along the road. The twister had come up from behind. The wind had been blowing toward Gregory. He pulled the brim of his hat down and trudged along in the mud, stepping over bits of the sundered stage.
Less than a hundred yards toward the town, he heard a faint cry for help. At first Slocum thought it might only be his imagination, then the plea came louder.
“Here. Over here. To your right. Help me, for the love of God, help me!”
The ditch alongside the road ran wider here with the storm water, forcing Slocum to vault over it. He had most of his strength back but still almost fell into the small river, dropping to his knees to keep from being swept away. Even an inch of rapidly flowing water could knock a man from his feet. The water here would have been over boot tops.
“Driver, I need help. Please!”
Slocum saw a hand waving feebly through the rain and homed in on it, though it vanished now and then, dropping to the ground. He topped a small rise and saw Complainer flat on the ground. It had taken most of the man’s strength to call out and lift his arm. Slocum dropped down beside him.
“How bad you hurt?”
“Can’t say. Hurt all over. Feel like I been rolled around inside a drum, then got beat on.”
Slocum had the man lift his arms and straighten his legs, then checked to be sure nothing important had been broken by the twister.
“You look to be in one piece.”
“Glory be, how’s that possible when I hurt like this?”
“Tornadoes are strange critters,” Slocum said. “They can destroy the strongest building but leave a flower blooming beside it. Me and you, we got lucky. Can you stand?”
Slocum helped him to his feet. It took several tries before the man could walk with Slocum’s arm around his shoulders for added support. They got back to the road. It was necessary to check the wind’s direction again because Slocum had gotten turned around. That warned him he wasn’t as sharp as he had thought before.
“I can’t make it into town. That’s miles.”
“I can leave you and fetch help, but the tornado went this way. If it hit Gregory, there might not be a whole lot of folks able to come back for you.”
“Don’t leave me. I’ll keep up. I will.”
They walked in silence for the better part of an hour. Slocum glanced at the man, who had been complaining the whole way until the funnel cloud had snatched them from the stagecoach. The experience had mellowed him and put a cork in his nonstop griping.
“Dizzy, hard to stand up,” the man said.
“Let’s set for a spell,” Slocum said. He needed to rest, too. There wasn’t a muscle in his body that didn’t feel as if he had just lost a hundred-round bare knuckles fight.
“What’s your name?” Slocum didn’t tell him he had his own cognomen already thought up.
“Rafael Stanton. Friends call me Rafe.” The man lifted his chin and studied Slocum. “Don’t know you’d want me for a friend, or me you, but you can call me Rafe or whatever else you want, for all that.”
Slocum had to laugh at that. He introduced himself.
“Mr. Slocum, you have a knack for surviving. Out here in this miserable West Texas desert, that’s the only thing to have. I’m glad you was drivin’.”
“You a newcomer?”
“I’m on my way to Fort Davis. Bought half share in a store there from my brother. He’s the only family I got left.” Stanton coughed, then spat. “Fact is, he’s the only one who’ll put up with me.”
“There are things to be thankful for in the world. And what you can’t change, you might just live with.”
“You noticed my constant complainin’?” He shook his head, and blood mixed with rain flew off in tiny droplets. “Wife said that, too, ’fore she upped and died. Cancer, the doctor said. Might just have been she reached the end of her rope puttin’ up with me.”
“A man can change,” Slocum said.
“After comin’ this close to death, I got reason enough. No amount of complainin’ would call off that damned tornado.”
“Let’s get back to the trip. We’re almost there.”
And he was right. Less than a half hour later, the town of Gregory showed in front of them. Or what was left it. The twister had dashed about every other building, taking out those on the right side of the street while leaving those on the left. From what Slocum could see as he trudged in, most of the glass windows along the south side of the street weren’t even broken. He might have thought a vandal had knocked out the few broken windows.
Doing an about-face to see what remained on the other side of the street would have convinced him it hadn’t been a vandal but an army of outlaws as thorough and vindictive as any of Quantrill’s Raiders during the war. Utter devastation had leveled the buildings and left only rubble.
“The hotel might have been leveled,” Stanton said, “but the saloon’s still running.” The man shuffled off, balance precarious. He caught himself on the saloon wall, then spun around and stumbled inside.
Slocum considered following him. He was hungry and needed a shot or two of even cheap trade whiskey to kill some of the aches and pains he had accumulated on the trip from Buena Vista. But duty pressed down on his shoulders. The stage office was on the intact side of the street and the door stood ajar, people moving about inside the depot. Reporting the situation to the stationmaster mattered more than the rotgut he was likely to pour down his gullet.
For the moment.
He pushed the depot door open all the way to see the portly stationmaster sitting behind a cluttered desk. Henry Underwood looked up, then did a double take when he realized Slocum stood in the doorway.
“Land o’ Goshen,” Underwood said. “Get the man a chair.” This he directed to a youngster who looked like he had been pulled through a knothole backward.
The boy’s hair was in wild disarray and his clothing as ripped as Slocum’s. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure the boy was another survivor of the tornado that had struck Gregory.
Slocum sank into the chair, aware for the first time how bone tired he was.
“I didn’t hear you drive in. You got . . .” Underwood’s voice trailed off. “What happened, Slocum? Where’s the stagecoach?”
“Gone, smashed to splinters by the tornado. I was lucky to get away alive.” He described how he had been thrown high into the air but wasn’t carried away by the cyclonic storm the way the team had.
“You lost the passengers?” Underwood spoke carefully, but Slocum kne
w the stationmaster’s real question was hanging on the tip of his tongue.
“Came in with one, one’s dead being shot down by the road agents, and the third?” He shrugged his shoulders. Even this small motion hurt like hell.
Underwood started to ask the question. Slocum beat him to it.
“The payroll’s gone. Blown away. The tornado took it along with the rest of the stage.”
“Dear Lord,” the stationmaster said, collapsing in on himself. “We got to tell the Army right away. They might send out a patrol to hunt for it.”
“The same twister that got me hit Gregory,” Slocum said. “Any luck finding the townspeople carried off by the wind?”
“People ain’t gold,” Underwood said positively. “We got a chance of getting the payroll back. I got a telegram telling how the shipment was bolted to a brass plate weighing over two hundred pounds. With the strongbox and payroll gold, it was heavier than four hundred.”
“Doesn’t make a difference to a twister,” Slocum said. “I thought I heard a freight train roaring down on me. It was the wind. The damn thing spun so fast it blurred my vision. There’s no way to stand against such power.”
“Gregory will rebuild. New folks will come in. If we can replace the stagecoach, they’ll come on the stage and by wagons. This is a good place, sweet water in the wells, Fort Stockton not so far away to protect us from Apaches and the rest of them Injuns.” Underwood took a deep breath. “You got to report the loss right away.”
Slocum looked hard at the stationmaster. Telling an Army officer his payroll was missing might get him hanged on the spot. Or maybe they wouldn’t wait to build a gallows. A firing squad would do just fine.
“That’s your job.”
“Yours,” Underwood insisted. “Don’t fret none. They ain’t gonna harm you. Killin’ the messenger what brings bad news isn’t what they do over at the fort.” He coughed behind his hand, then looked up to see if Slocum was buying his lie. “They got to keep you alive to recover their money.”
