Slocum Along Corpse River

by Jake Logan

  “Gets mighty lonely out here, doesn’t it?” Slocum asked amiably. He moved so that he stood with his back to the small door. The room plunged into near darkness. He looped his toe around the leg of the stool nearest him and sat down. It took a few seconds to position himself so he continued to block the faint light sneaking in through the narrow doorway behind him.

  “Gadsden over there”—he pointed back to where Slocum had been stationed—“don’t say more than a word or two a week. I swear, he hasn’t said two sentences since the day he was born.”

  “Long as everything’s right,” Slocum said, sweeping up the cards and shuffling them suggestively.

  “Nice to have somebody up on the wall to play cards with,” the man said. He licked his lips at the sight of Slocum slowly shuffling.

  Slocum scooted a little closer so the table was almost entirely in darkness. He reached into his pocket and clicked down what looked like a silver dollar. It was a mashed bullet he had kept as a memento of not getting killed.

  The guard fumbled and pulled out pennies and nickels.

  It took Slocum twenty minutes to have the pile of coins in front of him and the bullet tucked back in his pocket so the guard would never know he had been gambling against a worthless slug. Slocum was happy he had won the first hand and pulled in a few of the pennies. There wasn’t much to win here, but he took most all of it.

  “You cleaned me out,” the guard said. “You got to give me a chance to win back some of it.”

  “Any time. This beats watching an empty trail, jumping at every rabbit and marmot that dashes across.”

  “I shoot at the marmots. Hate the bastards. One crawled into my bedroll once and bit the hell out of me.” He rubbed his crotch.

  “Not so many willing to pay to use the toll road,” Slocum said.

  “Not so many.”

  “Who gets let through for nothing?”

  “Nobody,” the man said. He squinted when Slocum slid to the side and let the sunlight fall flush on his face. It was getting late in the afternoon and the sun was threatening to vanish behind a distant peak. “Well, not many. The emperor hires on men from time to time, and they got a special password that gets ’em through the gate without payin’.”

  “But I reckon they do pay, maybe with their guns?”

  “Suppose so. Never thought much on it. They come up, they tell me ‘steamboat,’ and I wave ’em on through.”

  “We got to stay till somebody else shows up?”

  “I’d go, but I gotta stay. I’m in charge.”

  “Why don’t I go to that saloon in town and get another bottle?” Slocum clicked his thumbnail against the empty bottle. “Seems fair since I was the big winner.”

  “Couldn’t make it there and back ’fore it’s time to call it quits,” the guard said.

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow. Be good to have something to do other than play cards.”

  “I want to win back my money,” the guard said. He pursed his lips then waved Slocum away. “Go on, get into town and kick up your heels. But I want the good whiskey, not that piss that Kennard passes off to the regular customers.”

  Slocum nodded. He stepped out into the cool afternoon air and took a deep breath, then went down the rope ladder, feet once more on solid ground. Starting toward town, he glanced back and saw the guard watching. He waved. The guard ducked back into the wooden tower. When he disappeared, Slocum veered off the road and headed south, exploring the territory with an eye toward getting the hell out from under Emperor Galligan’s thumb.

  He found a double-rutted road and made better time until it came to an abrupt end. The wind blew across the surface of a large lake, chilling him. After crossing most of Wyoming in the summer heat, it felt more than comfortable. Walking around, he wondered at how the lake was fed, then saw a waterfall that sprang from the side of a large hillside to the west. The usual way of feeding such a lake was from a river, but the river didn’t spew from the side of a mountain.

  “There might be an artesian well feeding it, too.”

  Slocum spun at the words, hand going to his six-shooter. He relaxed when he saw a voluptuous redhead seated on a rock looking out across the lake. From the deep scoop neckline and the way it exposed the tops of her snowy breasts, he guessed that she wasn’t the schoolmarm.

  When she leaned back and lifted her knees, exposing her trim ankles and a considerable amount of calf, he knew she worked as a dancer.

  “Like my legs?” she asked. She drew up her skirt, teasing him with inch after inch of new bare skin being exposed. She stopped at mid-thigh. “I’m a dancer at the saloon. No, that’s not quite right.”

  “You’ve got the legs for it,” Slocum said, admiring the sight. The sunset turned her flesh into something golden and her hair positively coppery.

  “I’m the dancer. And the chanteuse. They tell me I’ve got quite a set of pipes, but it’s the dancing I love most.” She stood and made a couple quick turns so her skirt billowed outward, giving Slocum a new vista.

  “What do you see out on the lake?” Slocum had to ask.

  “Usually not much. Folks in Top of the World don’t like coming here. I . . . I wanted to say good-bye to a . . . friend.”

  Slocum was put on guard by the way she almost started to bawl. She caught herself and brushed away a tear.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. When she pointed, he looked out to the surface of the water. For a moment he didn’t understand what he saw floating in the lake. Then the strong current carried the body close enough for him to make out the man’s head.

  “That’s Charlie Olson. Me and him were . . . close.”

  Slocum watched in gruesome fascination as the body rushed past and vanished at the easternmost side of the lake.

  “The river,” he said softly, remembering the bodies he had watched rush past.

  “Galligan has a spot to the west where he dumps the bodies. The current gets rid of them, so he doesn’t have to bury them.”

  “He has to get rid of that many corpses?” Slocum asked. He read the answer on the woman’s face.

  “My name’s Beatrice,” she said.

  “John Slocum.”

  She started to make another spin but slipped and plunged off the rock. Slocum moved like a striking snake and caught her. For a moment, he kept his balance and then lost it as his foot slipped in the sandy lakeshore. The two of them collapsed into a heap, Beatrice sitting on Slocum.

  “You kept me from getting hurt.”

  “Not that,” Slocum said. “You’d have fallen into the lake so I kept you from getting wet.”

  Her bright green eyes fixed on his. A tiny smile crept to her lips and she shook her head.

  “You’re wrong. I am getting wet.”

  She bent and kissed Slocum full on the lips. Her weight pressed him down, her breasts rubbing against his chest. He saw no reason to fight the inevitable. She had him pinned. He returned her kiss with the fervor she delivered it.

  Somehow Beatrice skinned out of the top of her dress and displayed her nakedness proudly to him as she straddled his waist. She reached down and caught her own nipples and tweaked. Slocum wasn’t sure if this, the cold breeze blowing across the lake, or something more turned those rosy nubs into hard pebbles. He crushed her hands down with his own, then got a chance to play with the rubbery nips. She moved her hands on top of his and pulled them down harder. She threw her head back, sending a cascade of bright red hair whipping about like a pennant caught in the wind.

  “That feels so good,” she said with a deep sigh. She leaned forward and stared down into his eyes, saying nothing more. Her hands left his to run down his chest, to unbuckle his gun belt, to find the buttons on his fly.

  Slocum gasped in relief as his hardness was released. She caught it in the circle of her fingers and squeezed gently, rhythmically.

  “My, my, you are a big boy, aren’t you?”

  She rustled her skirts about, lifted her hips, and settled down. Slocum wasn’t s
urprised to find she wore nothing under her frilly skirt. She clung to his manhood, guided it upward, and then let him stroke back and forth a few times in the deep pink canyon hidden under her skirt.

  Slocum gulped. The heat, the dampness, it all excited him as much as looking up between her tits to her face now drawn in sexual pleasure.

  She repositioned her hips and he sank balls deep into her heated core. Slocum gasped at the sudden rush inward. He forced himself to control his physical reactions. It had been quite a while since he’d had a woman and even longer since he’d been with one as lovely as Beatrice.

  She rocked back and forth, her hands now resting palm down on his chest for support. Slocum found himself driven to thrust upward, to sink deeper into her. When he did, she squeezed with strong inner muscles, massaging his hidden length and making him sweat just a bit more.

  She groaned in excitement, gripped a double handful of his vest, and began rising and falling faster, setting the pace of their lovemaking. Slocum wanted to do more, but he was pinned beneath her. Truth to tell, she was doing a fine job of arousing him and was obviously getting off on how she moved, the way she twisted from side to side, the tiny practiced twitches she gave.

  “You’re getting bigger inside me. I didn’t think you would. You were already so—” She cried out as Slocum arched his back and drove straight upward, sinking as deeply into her as was possible. All around him he felt the moistness, the heat, and the clinging, clutching sheath of female flesh.

  He sank back but could not keep from thrusting upward again. Beatrice began coordinating her own movements with his thrusting until they were both moaning in stark pleasure.

  When Slocum was sure he couldn’t stand another instant, Beatrice let out a long, loud cry of release. It felt as if a mineshaft had collapsed all around him. And then he exploded like a stick of dynamite. They rammed themselves together again, greedily seeking more, ever more, sensation. And then they were both spent.

  Beatrice sank forward. Her cheek rested against Slocum’s.

  “Been a while since I shaved,” Slocum said. “You might find my cheek a bit prickly.”

  “After that, I don’t care,” Beatrice whispered in his ear, but she rolled over so Slocum could half turn and face her. Inches apart, they just studied each other, the silence just fine.

  Slocum finally asked, “You always celebrate like this when you lose a lover?”

  “Charlie?” Beatrice sighed. “He was good, but he wasn’t you. This was a way of forgetting him, just for a minute, and how he was murdered by that son of a bitch Galligan.”

  “I take it you don’t like the emperor much.”

  “You have a cruel sense of humor. Nobody likes him. Nobody, but they all suck up and run around bowing and scraping because he’ll send them down the river if they don’t.”

  “If everybody’s against him, it wouldn’t take much to send him down the river, as you put it.” Slocum thought those words were strange but certainly summed up Galligan’s control. If the emperor didn’t like somebody, he murdered him and tossed the body into the lake so the current would sweep it down the river.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Beatrice said.

  Slocum reached over and toyed with a rubbery nipple.

  “You’re thinking to jump in the lake—alive—and get the hell out of here. I know a couple people who tried. Galligan’s got a guard outside the east gate watching for that. If the guard doesn’t shoot you, the river will smash you into the rocks and kill you. Nobody gets out of here alive—without Galligan saying so.”

  Slocum had wondered why the sentry had been positioned outside the gate. Now he knew. His job was to watch the river for anyone trying to escape, not catch hapless riders in a trap between the gate and the sentry’s gun.

  “Why’s he here? Galligan?”

  “He’s where he can have complete control over anybody falling into his trap, that’s why. He’s made himself a rich man extorting tolls from the travelers.”

  “The road from the east isn’t that well traveled,” Slocum pointed out.

  “The ones who do travel it are willing to pay big money to get on through. The next nearest pass is ten miles away.”

  “Couriers?”

  “A lot of them. And people going to Thompson. That’s a goodly sized town on the western side of the pass.”

  “Does he control the food and other supplies going to Thompson?”

  Beatrice shrugged. “Don’t see much coming through, which might be why their marshal lets Galligan sit on his damned throne. You’ve seen it? The throne?”

  Slocum nodded. His hand pressed down into warm flesh. He felt her responding again. To his surprise, he was hardening also. It took Beatrice only a few seconds to discover that.

  “The people in Thompson might not like having an outlaw haven on their doorstep, but it’s not that big a problem for them. They can trade north-south as well as farther to the west.”

  “Do tell,” Slocum said. He grunted as her hand began moving with slow, deliberate motion up and down his stalk. Beatrice snuggled a little closer so he pressed down more firmly on her breasts.

  “The outlaws pay Galligan a fortune to hide out here. There’s not a whole lot for them to steal here that doesn’t belong to him, so they’re peaceable enough while in town. But they range throughout western Wyoming and into Idaho and up into Montana. There’s not a U.S. marshal in the region that wouldn’t love to haul off half the residents of Top of the World for the reward money.”

  “And what would you like to do?” Slocum asked.

  “Right now, I can’t think of anything better than this.” She tugged him closer still and scooted so she lifted her skirt to reveal a coppery tangle nestled between her thighs. “And later, later, maybe we can get the hell out of here, you and me.”

  Slocum was amenable to both ideas, but started with the more pleasurable one first.

  5

  “The son of a bitch cheated you,” the guard said. He looked up from the half bottle of whiskey Slocum had put on the low table in the guardhouse and shook his head. “I’ll cut his throat for rookin’ you like this.”

  Slocum had bought a half bottle, not wanting to spend all the money he had won off the guard. He had claimed this was all he had and the guard had jumped to the conclusion Slocum had wanted—that the greenhorn was being robbed.

  “Don’t worry about it. You can have the whiskey. I owe you that much.” Slocum touched the spot on his vest and traced the coins there. He still had close to a dollar left. It wasn’t much but it was something.

  “That’s good of you. I’ll have to stand you a buck or two for another game.”

  Slocum kept from smiling. The guard thought he was tapped out and was willing to loan him money for another poker game. Slocum settled down when he realized it might not be anything more than the game making the crushing boredom of standing watch a little easier to take. Slocum looked across the walkway to the guardhouse where he was supposed to stand watch. His partner there muttered to himself but never once said an intelligible word.

  “We need to—”

  “Hold up,” the guard said. He pressed his eye to a loophole and spent enough time looking so that Slocum found another hole to peer through. A half-dozen men rode up. From their look, Slocum identified them immediately as hard cases. The wood wall suddenly seemed a lot less secure if these six opened fire. One of them was festooned with pistols. Slocum caught his breath when he counted eight six-shooters thrust in his belt and dangling from straps.

  Slocum and the rest of Quantrill’s Raiders had always carried at least that many six-shooters when they invaded a town. A dozen men could sport the firepower of a full company. They would ride through the town shooting at anything that moved. Slocum could usually get off thirty or forty rounds. At the other end of town, they would knock out the cylinders, replace them with fully loaded ones, and then go back through the shocked town, taking their time to pick off any resistance that might have
formed.

  There usually wasn’t much after the first ride through town, but Slocum often had found enough men and sometimes women willing to make a stand for their life and property to justify emptying his six-guns again.

  The rider with the other five had the look of a man who didn’t much care what he shot. Man, woman, child, it didn’t make no never mind to him.

  “I know the leader,” Slocum said. The rider dressed all in black in the lead rode straight for the gate. Looking down on him, Slocum struggled to put a name to the baby face. The rider didn’t look like he was fifteen, but Slocum was sure he was much older. The instant he heard the highpitched, squeaky voice, he remembered.

  “Kid Summers,” he said under his breath. Slocum had been in an Abilene saloon when the Kid had decided to get roaring drunk. He had stripped off his clothes and jumped to the bar wearing nothing but his boots and gun belt. After he shot the barkeep, Slocum had swung a chair at the Kid’s legs and knocked him to the sawdust-covered floor. By then the marshal and four deputies with shotguns had arrived. They took the naked, cussing drunk Kid Summers to jail.

  The Kid might have been drunk but he had sworn to kill Slocum.

  That had been five years ago, and the kid had been drunk as a lord. Slocum doubted he would remember.

  “Got to go talk to ’em. They look like the sort who’d belly up to the bar with Emperor Galligan.” The guard left and called down, “What kin I do fer you gents?”

  “Let me through,” the Kid shouted in his squeaky voice.

  “You gotta pay a toll.”

  “I’m Kid Summers, and I don’t pay squat. Galligan asked for me to drop by.”

  “He give you the, uh, password?”

  The Kid exchanged looks with the heavily armed man, then laughed. The sound was like dragging a knife point across slate for Slocum.

  “He likes to play games. I don’t.”