by Jake Logan
The road leading across the prairie in the direction of the Framingham farm had been washed out in a dozen places, forcing Slocum to detour often as he rode the mile or more back to the farmhouse. He drew rein and stared at the destruction. The twister had bounced along here and had plucked away the roof and the north side of the house, leaving the rest standing. All around evidence of the incredible destruction caused by the tornado made him wonder if anyone could have survived.
He touched the package with Framingham’s name on it, wondering if he ought to return it to Underwood or simply toss it onto the pile of debris.
Slocum rode forward slowly. His paint shied, telling him bodies were buried under the debris. He might not see them, but the horse smelled them. Its nostrils went wide and its eyes showed white all around.
“Whoa, easy now,” he said, gentling the horse. It refused to be mollified and started backing away.
Bowing to the inevitable, Slocum let the horse get far enough away that it was no longer spooked. He dismounted, tethered the horse to a wagon wheel that had recently been part of a wagon, if the grease around the hub was any indication. Where the wagon had blown, he couldn’t say. Nowhere in sight.
He returned to the house, his steps slow and his eyes peeled for any trace of a body. He was getting tired of burying victims. Gregory had been half destroyed, and he had counted himself lucky not to be on the burial detail there with Old George and the telegrapher. But the Yarrows had been murdered by outlaws. He had no compunction about letting their killers rot on the prairie, feed for buzzards and bugs.
But here was another matter. He was used to violence, even mindless violence such as the Terwilligers dished out. The starkness of the twister’s destruction was completely impersonal. Nothing could have withstood the fierce tornado winds or the blinding rain and hailstorm surrounding it. Men killing men he understood. This was destruction on a scale that made him both humble and angry.
Before it no one stood for long. Not even John Slocum.
He closed his eyes and remembered the helpless feeling when the twister had lifted the rear of the stagecoach into the air and sent him flying. The fastest gun, the strongest arm, the quickest run, all meant nothing against the tornado.
His hand flashed to his six-shooter when he heard faint sounds from under the house’s wreckage. He took his hand away when he realized it was only wind blowing between planks, causing a whistling sound that he had thought to be human.
Slocum made his way into the tumble of planks and furniture. As he pawed through, not sure what he sought, he had to stop and shake his head when he saw a large mirror on a dresser. Rain had smeared mud across the flat surface, but the mirror hadn’t even been nicked, much less broken. In the middle of such destruction, the tornado had chosen to leave this untouched.
He rubbed off some of the dirt and looked at his reflection. It was a good mirror. It’d be a shame to leave it out here, but he had no way of returning to Fort Stockton with it. Such a large looking glass would fetch a decent price and help Audrey and Claudia, just a little. As he turned, movement behind caused him to go into a crouch, spin, and whip out his six-gun.
The Colt Navy centered on a disheveled woman holding a shovel. She looked at him—or did she look through him? He wasn’t sure she even realized he stood in the middle of the destroyed house staring at what was likely her mirror.
“Ma’am, you Miz Framingham?”
He repeated his question before she snapped away from whatever consumed her thoughts. Her eyes focused on him for the first time.
“Who are you?”
“Name’s Slocum. Came to deliver a package to Justin Framingham.”
“He’s dead.”
“You his wife?” The woman nodded dully. “Then I reckon you can take this in his stead.” Slocum held out the brown-paper-wrapped package. “I’m not the regular mailman.”
“Usually drive into Gregory for our mail.”
“Not much of the town left, ma’am,” he said. “Postmaster’s dead and I was out of a job as stage driver so I agreed to bring the mail around.” He wasn’t sure why he felt he had to explain. It might have been nothing more than filling the silence when she didn’t respond as he’d expected.
“I buried him. My husband. I buried him.”
“The tornado?”
She looked hard at him, then nodded solemnly.
“I didn’t want to. I loved Justin. Most of the time.” She looked around, her shock returning. “This was our place.”
Slocum made his way through the rubble to stand near her.
“That’s a mighty fine mirror. The wind didn’t even crack it.”
“It came from Boston. A wedding present from my pa and ma.”
“It survived. You can, too,” he said softly.
She dropped the shovel and threw herself into his arms. Slocum held her clumsily. She was quite an armful, young and pretty under the dirt. He didn’t know what to do, so he held her close until her sobbing slowed and finally stopped.
“That wasn’t very mature of me,” she said.
“You’ve had a big loss. Any others in your family besides your husband?”
“No,” she said. She clung to him, no matter how he tried to disengage. Slocum finally surrendered to the inevitable and let her hang on. She mumbled something into his shoulder.
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“My name’s Bonnie and . . . and I need to forget. Make me forget all this. For a while.”
She looked up at him, her lips slightly parted, waiting to be kissed. Her body trembled against his as he asked, “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?”
She kissed him with a passion that caused him to recoil. She followed his lips with hers. Her fingers clutched fiercely at his arms, keeping him from backing away any farther.
When she broke off, she whispered hoarsely, “Please. I won’t ask anything else from you. The death. I . . . I want to feel alive, to not think about all this for a little while. Please.”
Slocum looked around and saw that a mattress had been tossed away from the bedsprings—which he didn’t see anywhere. The side of the mattress had been ripped open, leaking wads of stuffing out onto a pile of rubble. She saw it the same time he did and turned so that she could fall backward onto it. As she fell, her fingers curled like hooks into his upper arms, pulling him down atop her.
She looked up. Her lips moved in a silent plea. “Please.”
This time he kissed her. Her arms wrapped around his neck and pulled him down hard against her softly yielding body. Beneath him she began wiggling, moving, her legs positioning themselves. He reached down and fumbled to get his gun belt off and cast aside. Then her fingers joined his trying to pop the fly buttons.
He wasn’t hard when she dug into his jeans and found his penis. She needed him, but he wasn’t sure he could deliver. Then her fingers curled around his limpness and began squeezing, not with brutal necessity but gentle persuasion. In spite of his doubts, Slocum felt himself growing harder. When she pulled him out from his jeans, he was firm in her grasp.
“Do it,” she said. “Please. I need to feel more than I do now. Make me feel everything. Make me feel . . . nothing.”
She reached down and hiked her skirts, bunching them up around her waist. She arched her back and lifted her rump off the mattress to aid him. It took Slocum a bit longer to unfasten the ties holding her undergarments, but he finally pulled them down around her thighs to expose the dark, furred triangle between her legs.
His hand pressed down. She closed her eyes and moaned at his manual manipulation. His fingers slipped up and down her nether lips until juices oozed from within. He smeared this oil around the upper juncture of her vee’d sex lips. The tiny pink spire rising there quivered under his touch. He stroked back and forth, flicking it with his thum
b.
The woman gasped, lifted her hips, and pressed her crotch into his palm. When his finger slid easily into her tightness, she cried out in release.
“Yes, I need more, more, please, oh please, more!”
She thrashed about beneath him, then gripped his fleshy stalk and pulled insistently toward the spot where his finger still moved in small circles. He pulled his hand away and inserted himself. For a moment, neither moved. Then Slocum found himself astride a bucking bronco. She lifted and twisted, dropped and rotated her hips, demanding ever more from him. He slid in and out of her heated center and then gave himself over to the obvious. Clutching her shoulders, he rolled over, pulling her with him.
They remained locked together at the waist, but she came out on top, straddling his waist. He looked up into her drawn face. He wasn’t sure this was passion rather than grim determination—and it didn’t matter. She shoved her hands down on his chest, lifted herself up, and then slammed down hard, taking him balls deep into her clutching sheath.
She began moving with greater speed and determination until she set a pace Slocum was hard pressed to match. Finally, he stopped. He simply lay back and let her pleasure herself. His shaft burned with the friction of the fierce up and down moves, her rotating hips, the way she threw her head back as if she rode a wild stallion. Faster she moved and then he groaned as she tightened around his buried length, making him think he would be crushed to death.
A long, loud cry rose to the heavens and then she fell forward, her cheek resting next to his. He felt hot tears flowing again, but this time when he held her, the tenseness was gone from her body. He wasn’t sure how long they lay there, but the sun dipped low in the west when she finally sat up.
She looked at him as if he were a total stranger, stood, and arranged her skirts.
“Can we leave now?” she asked. “There is nothing keeping me here, and I would prefer to live at Fort Stockton, or perhaps at Gregory.”
“If you don’t mind traveling in the dark,” he said. She turned away as he tucked himself back into his jeans and buttoned up. He stood, looked around for his holster, and bent to retrieve it.
“I want to be away from here as fast as I possibly can go.”
The bullet tore through her chest, staggered her back a pace, and then she fell heavily.
11
For an instant Slocum froze. He remained bent over, hand on his holster and eyes on the fallen woman. He heard nothing but the report echoing away to nothing. He doubted the shooter had a good view of him in the twilight, but Slocum couldn’t be sure. Slowly sinking to his knees to avoid quick movement that might draw unwanted attention, he drew his six-shooter and then worked his way toward the woman.
Her sightless eyes stared upward at the evening star hovering at the horizon. She wasn’t going to make a wish on that first star or any other one. She had been killed instantly with a bullet through the heart.
Slocum doubted the sniper was that good a shot, but lucky was sometimes better that skillful. Or had the unseen gunman wanted to kill Bonnie Framingham? A more likely explanation caused a chill to seize Slocum. He might have been the target and the shooter had missed in the gathering darkness.
He moved as quietly as he could until he got behind a heap of debris. Part of the house’s wall still stood. He edged upward and peered through what had been a window in the direction of the shot. If the dark protected him from sight, it worked similarly for the gunman. Try as he might, Slocum couldn’t see movement from where the shot had been fired.
Ducking back, he looked around, then made his way along the broken wall. A quick look around it didn’t draw fire. Staying low, he made his way to a well, then to a pile of bent metal that once had been a plow and was now driven into the ground by the tornado. He took a deep breath, then ran for all he was worth toward a stock tank.
Still no fire.
He pressed his back against the earthen tank, then oozed over the top into the muddy bottom and made his way to the far side. This time he drew fire when he poked his head up. The foot-long orange muzzle flash pinpointed the man’s location. Slocum tried to remember what the terrain between the two of them looked like. He hadn’t gotten a good look when he had ridden up, and after that, he had been too occupied. At least the woman’s last wish had been granted. She had forgotten her woes for a brief moment and then the bullet had taken her to the Promised Land.
Slocum went to the side of the stock tank, slithered over its side, and fell to the ground. From here he worked his way along on his belly until he reached an outbuilding. Here he got to his feet, put his thumb on the pistol’s hammer, and spun around, firing as rapidly as he could at the place where he had seen the muzzle flash.
He intended to drive the man from cover or force him to return fire. Slocum knew he was a sitting duck out in the open, with his own muzzle flashes and reports pinpointing him in the dark. Four of his slugs tore through some brush. Then he listened hard.
Nothing.
Running forward, aware he had only two rounds left in the cylinder, he bulled through the brush to the other side. The mud didn’t hold footprints very well but what he saw on the ground were fresh. He bent to examine one, but the loose soil and water robbed the print of any real information. He found a rifle casing and tucked it into a vest pocket. Then he pressed on into the dark.
Twenty minutes later, he admitted defeat. He hadn’t heard the sniper ride off, but there was no trace to be found. The woman might as well have been killed by a ghost in the night.
As he returned to the wrecked house, he tried to piece everything together and decided there wasn’t a good answer. He might have been the intended target. Or it could have been Bonnie Framingham. For all he knew, the lack of visibility might have confused the shooter into thinking husband and wife stood amid the ruins of their house. Justin Framingham might have enemies galore, as many as the Terwilligers. There was no way Slocum could know.
He retrieved his gun belt and took the time to reload the four spent chambers. Strapping on the cross-draw holster made him feel better, even if the sight of the woman’s body didn’t. Poking around until he found the shovel she had held, he knew what had to be done next. He used several matches, finding where she had buried her husband. Slocum dug a grave alongside and did the best he could for a marker.
Sergeant Wilson had said words over the Yarrows’ graves, but Slocum didn’t know Bonnie Framingham any more than he had the Yarrows and wasn’t inclined to false words.
He did the best he could, saying, “I’ll find who shot you down. That I promise.” With that he threw down the shovel, turned his back to the grave, and walked away. Delivering mail wasn’t proving to be a job he did all that well.
His nervous paint balked when he mounted but soon enough decided getting away from the wreckage and death was better than fighting its rider. Slocum rode for an hour, camped under the stars, then found the road at daybreak and made it into Gregory within the hour.
* * *
The sound of hammers and saws made Slocum come alert. The townspeople worked industriously to rebuild the half of the town that had been devastated. In another week Gregory would be restored to prestorm splendor.
Slocum snorted at the idea the people rebuilt to have their town leveled again by a new storm. That was reality out here on the plains. Where would the citizens move that was any better? The town supplied Fort Stockton, acted as a junction for the stage line, and rumors abounded about the railroad, even if many didn’t believe it would happen—and would eventually kill off the town when the line bypassed Gregory. The entire state would be connected with the steel rails one day. There would be winners and losers, the losers turning to ghost towns in a few months.
Slocum knew the stagecoach would be the first casualty. Why ship passengers or mail in a creaking stage pulled by a team of horses that had to be changed every few miles? T
he way stations would become ghost towns.
It all seemed futile to him. Better to simply ride on and let others in Gregory worry about becoming relics of the past.
“Hey, Slocum, you done with deliverin’ the mail already?” Henry Underwood stepped from the stagecoach office, thumbs hooked into the armholes of his vest. His big belly poked out. For all the destruction in town, he hadn’t missed any meals.
“Not sure that’s what I want to do with my life,” Slocum said, swinging to the ground. He unfastened the mail bags and dropped them in front of the station agent.
“You don’t get paid a dime, then. Not for the time you drove the stage, not for nuthin’!”
Underwood obviously thought this threat would bring Slocum around.
“I’ve seen more than my share of people dying out there,” Slocum said. “Sometimes I get to thinking how if I don’t see people dying, maybe they won’t.”
“That’s crazy talk. People will die whether you see it or not.” Underwood cocked his head to one side and looked hard at Slocum. “Who’s been dyin’ out there?”
“Captain Legrange told me to mind my own business,” Slocum said. That wasn’t strictly true but came close enough to the officer’s orders.
“He still huntin’ for his payroll, I reckon,” Underwood said. He rubbed his chin. “There’s nuthin’ we can do ’bout that. But you can deliver the mail.”
Slocum thought about the woman who had been cut down after they’d made love. She had been a desperate woman, pushed to the edge and struggling to come back when she had been gunned down for no reason he could tell. The death had shrouded his trail all the way back to town, and he still couldn’t figure out if she had been the target or if he had. Even in broad daylight, it would have been a difficult shot for any rifleman.
“I suppose I have things to tell the sheriff.”
