by Jake Logan
“But—”
“But you can buy me a drink to celebrate,” Slocum said. “By the time we’re done, it’ll be dark and we can get started.” Slocum saw how eager Holtz was to get on with the excavation, but he held back his desire to do it and maybe have to shoot someone trying to stop them. As they went back into the saloon, other worries came to Slocum. When they unearthed the cannon, how would they move it? The undercarriage would have rotted away after so many years, even in the dry Texas desert.
He shrugged it off. That was a problem to solve when they got to it. A more immediate one was getting Holtz to pay for a shot of whiskey.
“Yes, sir, this is the place. I feel it in my bones,” Holtz said as he leaned on a shovel. His men worked sporadically, digging in the sunbaked ground all around while Slocum dug with a steadiness that accomplished more than any two of the others.
“It looks different here. Even in the moonlight, I can see it,” Slocum said, continuing to dig. Holtz was right. In the silver light cast by the almost-full moon, a distinct rectangle appeared to jump up out of the desert, showing something had been buried here.
“You figure out how to move the cannon when we get it all dug up?” Holtz asked.
Slocum stepped up out of the two-foot-deep pit they had already excavated and took a deep breath. Something was wrong, and he could not put his finger on it.
“I can borrow a wagon,” he said, thinking of Preacher Dan’s enclosed wagon. “We load the cannon barrel in, take it up to the mesa, and there we rig a carriage for it. No need to put it on fancy wheels since we’re not taking it with us after we fire it.”
“Can we fire it after so long?” asked Holtz. He turned to his men and barked, “Keep diggin’, damn your eyes. We don’t have all night. If anybody sees us, we’re done for.”
The men grumbled as was their wont, but put their backs into the digging.
“It might take a bit of renovation,” Slocum admitted.
“Renovation? You make it sound like some kind of house. This is metal, Slocum, iron! It rusts.”
“We’ll know when we find it,” was all Slocum could say. His nose wrinkled, and he turned away from the pit. He coughed and then almost gagged. Something was very wrong.
“My God, Jack, we’re sinkin’!” The four men leaped from the pit and thrashed about. “It’s all over our boots. And the goddamn stink!”
Slocum pulled up his bandanna to keep the smell from making him puke.
“They didn’t bury no cannon here,” one of Holtz’s men said. “This is an outhouse that got covered up. We’re diggin’ down into shit!”
Slocum had to keep from laughing. What the outlaw said was true. He should have realized a saloon would have an outhouse behind it. When the road was moved and the saloon pulled along to remain near it, they had left the outhouse behind. At some point, it had been filled in and a new one dug closer to the saloon.
“You mean we aren’t gonna find the cannon here?” asked another of the outlaws. “We been wastin’ our time! And for what!”
“You got a couple beers under your belts,” Slocum said.
“That’s it, Jack. We quit. We’re not havin’ no part in this no more!”
“Wait, you can’t. This was a mistake.”
While Rebel Jack went to sweet-talk his furious men, Slocum stepped away from the honey pit and found himself staring at the mesa to the west of town again. The brass plaque had indicated the cannon was up there. At least, he had interpreted the memorial map that way. Why else hide the map on the back of the brass plate if it didn’t lead to something important?
Slocum had thought the cannon was up on the mesa. Now he was sure of it. Every instinct told him so.
“We’re gettin’ on our horses and leavin’.”
“Wait, we can talk this out.” Holtz stopped. His hand went to his six-gun, but Slocum clamped his hand around the outlaw’s brawny wrist and kept him from shooting his own men.
“Let them go,” Slocum said. “Gunplay would only draw unwanted attention.”
“Yeah,” Rebel Jack said coldly. “How would we explain digging up an abandoned outhouse?”
He jerked free of Slocum’s grip and joined his men. The five rode back to the road and headed north. Slocum gathered the abandoned shovels and lashed them together. He intended to do some digging of his own up on the mesa.
Barely had he swung into the saddle when Holtz rode back at a gallop. The outlaw smiled ear to ear.
“They’re sticking with us,” Holtz said.
“Your men? What’d you say to them?”
“Not a damn thing. We was ridin’ on out of town when a heavy wagon rumbled up. That bank president came out and ushered a squad of soldiers inside. They commenced to unloading more gold than I’ve ever seen in my life. The boys saw it, too. The army done us a big favor, Slocum. They gave an incentive for the men to stay with us.”
“We still don’t have a cannon,” Slocum said.
“I’ll get the men settled in a new camp and smooth their ruffled feathers. By morning, they’ll be rarin’ to dig up the whole damn town, if it gets them a piece of that gold. I do declare, there must have been ten thousand dollars worth in that shipment. We’re going to be rich men, Slocum, rich!”
With that, Holtz turned his horse and galloped back to join his men, leaving Slocum alone with the shovels. Slocum followed more slowly, not wanting to add to the clamor in the streets that might draw unwanted attention. The stench from the outhouse pit they had opened might go a ways toward stirring up the local citizens. There was no need to let anyone know who was responsible.
Slocum rode up behind Preacher Dan’s half-built church and watched the soldiers finish unloading the gold. They piled into the wagon after Mort Thompson had left the bank, locking the front door. Slocum knew this was only a symbol of the bank’s safety. The incredible, thick-walled iron safe inside provided the real security. Thompson walked away, whistling tunelessly.
The soldiers rattled on in their wagon, heading back north to Fort Union. Slocum itched to break into the bank then and there and try his hand at opening the safe by himself. Some dynamite would work miracles, though it would take considerable time to set the charge and then blow the safe. By that time, Thompson could have recruited a vigilance committee or sent for the company of Texas Rangers down in Sidewinder. More likely, a troop of cavalry would be dispatched from Fort Suddereth to look after their gold.
Slocum needed help getting into that safe. Holtz and his gang were a part of it, but the cannon gave Slocum the greatest hope of success. He looked behind him at the mesa and decided to go up and poke around while the moonlight illuminated the mesa as if it were day.
As he started to leave, he reined back and listened hard. He heard something far away, almost beyond the limits of his keen hearing. He looked around, trying to figure out what he was listening to. He failed. The noise was a scraping sound, a crunching, and then something like wood creaking. Slocum rode back to the church and looked into the shell. No work had been done today on the church. It still lacked a roof, but the walls were up and securely nailed into place.
Seeing no one poking about to make such noise, and thinking the sound must be coming from somewhere else in Bitter Springs, Slocum rode away. He was familiar with every murmur out in the desert or up in the mountains. Around towns, the noises became strange and unidentifiable to him. He preferred the sounds of coyotes and snakes slithering along and the wind blowing through vegetation to the odd creaks and moans of poorly built houses settling.
Slocum noticed how the shovels he had strapped to the back of his saddle clanked and scraped as he rode, adding to the odd sounds in the town. Soon enough, he was out of town and on the path leading up to the mesa. Within half an hour, he stood once more where he and Holtz’s gang had hunted futilely for the hidden cannon. More than the feeling in his gut told him he was in the right place. Interpreting the brass plaque as projecting onto the front and inventing a place for the burial down i
n Bitter Springs had been wrong.
The gang members had demanded it, though, and Slocum knew Holtz had gone along. That showed how little real control Holtz had over his men. Most of the gang had left. If Holtz’s fiery temper flared, he might find himself getting shot in the back or waking up one morning and finding all his gang gone.
He was no more able a leader now than he had been during the war.
In the silence of the mesa, bathed in liquid silver light, Slocum walked around aimlessly, looking this way and that for some notion as to how the Southern artillerists must have reacted seventeen years earlier.
At the edge of the mesa, he looked down into Bitter Springs. The town itself had migrated and grown a little, but not too much. If the battery officer had wanted to command the heights, the cannon would have been set up about where Slocum stood. He turned away from the town and looked across the mesa. In the paler moonlight he saw something he had missed in the bright sunlight. Small boulders produced a definite shadow across the land. He shifted position and the shadows moved. Not knowing when Sibley’s detachment had been here made depending on shadows a chancy proposition, but a slow smile came to Slocum’s lips when he realized he was looking at the result, not the cause.
Shadows depended on the location of the sun or moon. What cast the shadows were stationary. He walked along one small ridge, retraced his steps, and took a few paces along another. Then he came back to the spot where the two minuscule ridges intersected.
“X marks the spot,” he said. Using a shovel from the stack he had brought, Slocum began digging. It was hard work, and the dirt had settled and baked in the sun over almost two decades. About the time he was ready to give up and simply ride down the western slope of the mesa for El Paso, the tip of the shovel hit something hard.
Slocum had not found many rocks as he dug, and those had been smaller than his fist. This was more substantial. He worked his way along the obstruction, and within another twenty minutes a whoop of glee escaped his lips.
He had found the cannon buried about three feet below the surface. Slocum wiped the sweat off his forehead, then got to work. In an hour, he unearthed the cannon and had dug around it enough so he could reach under the barrel. His shovel hit something that made a dull thud as he tried to lever the gun upward. Digging more furiously, he got around and under the barrel and found a second cannon. Jensen had not been blowing smoke out his ass about a second cannon. Both were buried in the same hole.
Slocum threw down his shovel and sat on the edge of the excavation pit. He stared down at the two guns. He remembered seeing other guns like them at more than one battle during the war. Once, he had even commanded a battery and knew the guns intimately as a result. Best of all, the bronze barrels were intact. The artillerists had rammed wadding into the mouth of both cannons to keep the dirt out. Bronze did not rust.
All he needed were strong backs to pull the two cannons from their grave and some gunpowder and shot to resurrect them.
A test firing or two to get the range, and the Bitter Springs bank would be blown apart—and with it the safe. He was on the verge of being very rich.
15
Slocum walked back to the edge of the mesa and stared down at the peaceful little town. His eyes fixed on one building, though. Preacher Dan’s fledgling church. It needed a steeple and a roof; otherwise, the walls were ready for services. And it was in a direct line with the bank. One cannonball flying too short in its trajectory to the bank would blow up the church and anyone inside.
Slocum had not considered the church being an obstacle until this moment. Was a wagon creaking under a load of gold worth destroying the preacher’s dream? If only Whitmore had built somewhere else rather than across the street from the bank, there would not be any problem.
But there was. Slocum had to think this through. If he told Holtz of his discovery, the outlaw would want to rob the bank immediately. That, Slocum knew, was the smart thing to do. They had no idea how long the army’s gold would remain in the bank safe. Expenses for supplies and payroll at Fort Suddereth might deplete the account in a few days. Waiting for a second shipment of gold to match this one might require a month of lying low. Slocum doubted Holtz and his gang were capable of biding their time. They were an impatient bunch, always arguing among themselves and getting into trouble in spite of the golden carrot at the end of the stick. The way they had let the Texas Ranger escape had endangered the location of the camp.
Slocum wanted the gold in the bank, but he did not want to blow up Dan and Tessa Whitmore along with the safe. Brushing off his clothes, he mounted and retraced the trail back down into Bitter Springs. By the time he reached the half-built church, the sun was poking up over the mountains.
“Preacher Dan!” Slocum called, seeing the man poking about inside the church. “I need to talk to you.”
“I’m busy, Jethro,” Preacher Dan said.
“You look like you’re fixing to die,” Slocum said. The man was disheveled, dirty, and ten pounds thinner than when he had arrived in Bitter Springs. “Are you sick?”
“Only in the spirit. I strive to put patches on my immortal soul, but sometimes I fear it is a losing battle and that I am sinking into a sea of sin.”
Slocum stared at him and shook his head. Preacher Dan walked with a limp now, and might have been with Holtz’s gang as they dug up the outhouse for all the dirt and grime caked on him. All that was missing was the stench.
“Come along, son,” Preacher Dan said, pushing Slocum away from the church. “It’s breakfast time. I need to eat. You have been skipping meals, too, from the look of it.”
Slocum realized he was hardly in any better condition than the preacher.
“I need to talk to you,” Slocum said.
“Over breakfast. I’m famished. I . . . I’ve been working in the church and need some food.” Whitmore wiped his hands on already filthy clothes. Slocum saw popped blisters on the man’s hands and wondered what he might have been doing. All the heavy work had been done on the walls. Lifting the roof into place would take both skill and the hard work of a dozen or more men. It was not something a single man, even one of faith, could do.
“I’m a bit short on money,” Slocum said.
“I’ll buy, Jethro,” Preacher Dan said loudly as they passed by two men hurrying along on their way to work. Both had the look of clerks, and Slocum saw them go into the mercantile. Business must be good for the owner to need a pair of clerks.
“There’s a shipment coming in today from up north,” Preacher Dan said, seeing Slocum’s interest. “They have to unload a considerable amount of freight destined for Fort Suddereth.”
“Do tell,” Slocum said, his own thoughts turning to the gold in the bank’s safe. Purchases by the sutler and quartermaster down at Fort Suddereth meant the gold would be gone and put into the pocket of the mercantile’s owner. At that thought, he smiled. What would the owner of the general store do with the gold? He would leave it where it was until he had to pay his own bills. The gold wasn’t going to leave the bank, not for a few days.
“Order what you want,” Preacher Dan said, motioning to the waiter.
“Morning, Dan,” the waiter greeted. “The usual?”
“A steak sounds like the very thing I need,” Preacher Dan said.
“Same,” Slocum said. The waiter hesitated. “He’s paying for it,” Slocum added when he realized how disreputable he looked.
“That’s the problem,” said the waiter. “You really ought to pay some of what you owe on your bill, Dan. It’s gettin’ mighty high since you ain’t paid since that first day you come to town.”
“When the church is finished, I’ll be in a better position to pay. When parishioners flock in—”
“I kin feed you today, but no more. Not till you pay something.”
Slocum watched Preacher Dan closely. The man ought to have been a poker player for all the expression on his face.
“I will see what can be done. Thank you, my son.”
<
br /> The waiter left, muttering to himself. When he was out of earshot, Slocum said his piece.
“I think you ought to be out of town for a spell,” Slocum said.
“Why is that?”
Slocum could not tell the preacher what was going to happen. If he did and Preacher Dan said nothing, he would be an accomplice. More likely, he would try to talk Slocum out of the robbery. Neither was productive. Slocum fell silent, wondering why he bothered. Then he remembered what the trajectory of a cannonball would look like from the mesa. He was not the best artilleryman in the country. He had been more than happy to return to being a sniper and then a scout after an uninspired turn as an artillery officer. A few shots to determine range would be necessary before hitting the safe squarely. At least one of those shots was likely to fall short—and land smack in the middle of Preacher Dan’s church.
“I appreciate what you’ve done for me. You kept me from spending a long time in the Fort Suddereth stockade,” he said. “Don’t ask why. Just take a few days off from working on the church. You and Tessa go down to Fort Suddereth maybe.”
“Or Sidewinder? Where the company of Texas Rangers makes their headquarters?”
Slocum knew he was being poked to see what his reaction would be.
“That’d be fine, too,” he said in a level voice. He pushed back from the table when the waiter came with the steaks. Barely had the waiter left than Slocum drew closer and picked up knife and fork. His mouth watered at the sight and smell of so much beef. He missed being on a trail crew herding cattle. There was always enough steak for hungry cowboys. All they had to do was pick one from the herd and butcher it for enough meat to last days. Since leaving the Double Cross, he had seen little enough meat that didn’t have mold on it.
“They surely do serve up good food here,” Preacher Dan said, diving into his steak. Between bites, he asked, “Why do you want us out of town, Mr. Slocum?”
Using his real name brought Slocum up short. He could not tell the man.
