by Jake Logan
“With my help?” Slocum thought hard on the idea that Jesse had brought that much gold with him. There had always been an unpredictable streak in the outlaw. Sometimes that boiled over to him gunning down a man for no good reason—or a reason only Jesse understood. But one thing had been a constant in Jesse’s life and that was a real yen for gold. He was like a bloodhound on a scent when he went after a train shipment. If he had brought some spoils from a robbery or two with him, Jesse would have hidden it where only he could find it.
It would be a waste to let a crook like Jesse James have all that gold for himself.
“What do you want me to do?”
“They know you. You . . . you could ride with them and get clues.”
“After swatting Jesse alongside the head with my pistol barrel, he’s not likely to confide such things in me.” Slocum listened to Audrey ramble on with a dozen lame reasons why he would fit right in, but only one occurred to him—and she had no way of knowing it. Why had Jesse extended his hand in friendship to get Slocum to ride with the gang? He had started to explain why he and the rest of his cutthroats had ridden into the territory when the deputy sheriff had shown up with his posse.
Jesse had wanted something from Slocum and had been on the brink of asking when their discussion had been busted up.
“Might not be too hard getting in with him,” Slocum said as if thinking aloud. “What’s in it for me?”
Audrey smiled broadly, showing her dimples.
“There’s nothing that says all the gold has to be returned for the reward. Why, Jesse might have spent some of it.” She sobered and added, “If we don’t act quick, he’s likely to have spent it all.”
“He hasn’t been in the area too long. That means he’s hidden the gold somewhere between Las Vegas and Raton Pass, if he came that way. He might have come up from Adobe Walls, but there’s not much but prairie between here and there. He’d not just bury it on the prairie or in the desert. He’d wanted something more solid to use as a hiding place.”
“Where he could do a map and have permanent landmarks.”
Slocum looked at Audrey and wondered if she was being straight with him. So much gold had to be a powerful lure. Was it stronger than the promise of seeing her name on a front page story about Jesse James? Fame could trump fortune, though Slocum thought fame was overrated.
“I might have an idea or two where he’d hole up. Men like Jesse are predictable, if you’ve watched them long enough.”
“You’ll help me!” Audrey squealed and threw her arms around his neck and gave him a big wet kiss. Slocum wished there was time for her to give him something more enjoyable to seal their deal, but he had to move fast to catch Jesse. The outlaw had learned well from the likes of Quantrill and Anderson about constantly moving and never letting those pursing you to catch up.
“You go on into Las Vegas,” he told her. “I can find you there easier than anywhere else.”
“Where are you going?”
Slocum wondered if the spring sun had given him heat stroke or maybe the lure of gold jingling in his saddlebags again was too powerful to deny. Hallucination or greed, it didn’t matter.
He was going to join up with Jesse and ride with the James Gang.
4
Slocum edged back through the rocky crevice and came out on the Las Vegas side, looking around for any hint that the deputy had left lookouts. The entire posse must have ridden off on the wild-goose chase that Audrey had set out for them. That wouldn’t last long. Either they would realize they didn’t have a trail to follow or the men would grow restive and drift away. Only the promise of reward money kept most of them on the trail. It was something of a poser for Slocum that such a big posse had been mustered in such a short time.
Such was the power of Jesse James’s name.
He rode back to where Jesse and the others had veered away, leaving him the only quarry for the posse. The road was too well traveled for him to decide which tracks belonged to Jesse and which were ordinary pilgrims along the road. This broad road worked its way toward Raton Pass, which saw a considerable amount of freight traffic. Bent’s Fort supplied not only Las Vegas but Taos and even Santa Fe with goods brought in from back East.
Slocum drew rein when he saw a section of road that looked different. His gut instinct worked for him now. He rode a few yards off the road and found the tracks of a half-dozen horses. While this might have been a bunch of cowboys hunting for strays, he doubted it. The tracks were fresh and the horses had been galloping, as if their riders wanted to get out of sight of others along the road as quick as they could.
The tracks went back west into the foothills and rockier country. Then the trail split and each rider went in a different direction. Slocum frowned, spat some dust from his mouth, then picked one set of hoofprints to follow. Without knowing which was Jesse’s horse, it didn’t much matter who he followed. Frank James always seemed like an impulsive hothead, but Slocum didn’t know him as well as he did his brother. The others were newcomers to the gang, but Slocum suspected they were all relatives of the James clan, even if the drop of blood binding them was scant.
Blood was thicker than water, and Slocum knew the James boys had spilled more than their share of both.
The tracks quickly disappeared as the rider traversed rocky ground. Slocum suspected that none of them was trying to hide where they rode now. They depended more on spreading the posse into segments rather than losing them all. Slocum snorted. He had been the one the posse had chosen. Sometimes Jesse was luckier than he was clever.
He watched the terrain around him closely, alert for any movement. If the gang had lit out thinking the law was on their tail, laying an ambush for anyone happening upon them wasn’t much of a stretch. Slocum saw a broken branch on a small pine tree and rode for it. Someone had passed by recently since the sap still oozed from the wood. Slocum cocked his head to one side when he heard a horse neighing. He started to call out, then knew this was a sure way to get a bullet through the gut again. Jesse wanted him to ride along, but the others hadn’t heard the invitation. To them he was only a stranger who’d happened to be in the saloon when the posse tried to round them up.
Slocum walked his horse into a rocky arena fifty feet in diameter. This would be a hell of a place to set up an ambush, but the man he followed wasn’t on the rocks above. Slocum circled the pit and found the spot where the rider had stopped for a few minutes. Slocum frowned. It was as if the outlaw waited for something—or someone. If so, why had he ridden on? There hadn’t been anyone else in the vicinity or Slocum would have heard them.
He dismounted and walked through the tumble of rocks until he came out on a cave. The outlaw he trailed was nowhere to be seen, but he had definitely stopped here also. Slocum saw where the man had tethered his horse for some time.
He listened hard. He was sure he had heard a horse neigh, but the steep rocks on all sides might have formed a funnel that brought distant sounds to his ear and made him think they were closer.
Cautiously approaching the mouth of the cave, Slocum strained every sense to catch a hint of what lay ahead. Blundering into a cave wasn’t smart in the best of times because bears preferred them to more open, higher ground. He looked for bear spoor and saw nothing. Coyotes had been here frequently but nothing larger.
Slocum reached the mouth of the cave and looked into the depths. Only blackness ahead. He knew the outlaw wasn’t here, but he entered the cave anyway. The inky dark surrounded him quickly. He started to strike a lucifer to get some idea where he was but hesitated. If anyone sat deeper in the cave, he would be a good target. When this thought hit him, he pressed himself against a cave wall to prevent the light from the mouth silhouetting him.
Inching ahead, he tried to find what had made this cave so interesting to one of the gang. In the darkness, he stepped down and the rock under his foot crumbled away. He threw himself backward, sat heavily, and still slid down into the unseen dark pit. Slocum flopped on his back and
clutched wildly at the sides of the cave. His left hand found sharp rock. He winced as the stone cut his flesh, but he got a handhold that kept him from slipping farther. Then his grip began to give way as the blood turned his fingers slippery.
He flopped onto his belly and kicked hard with his boots, digging them into the sides of the pit. When he got enough purchase, he pushed hard, scooted along on his stomach, and reached firmer ground. Panting, he leaned against the wall and recovered his senses. The darkness didn’t help him get his bearings, so he fumbled out the tin from his vest pocket and lit a lucifer. The sudden flare momentarily dazzled him, but before it burned to the end of the wood stick, he took in everything around him.
The pit yawned wide and deep to his right. The faint, flickering light wasn’t strong enough to reveal the bottom. Slocum let out a low whistle realizing how lucky he had been. Then he let out another whistle as he looked up on the wall in front of him at the carefully lettered message.
He stood, dropped the match when it burned his fingers, then lit another to get a better gander at the wall. The symbols were interspersed with a series of four numbers, mostly ones and zeros. Now and then a larger number had been inserted, but the sequences were always four digits long.
Slocum had seen similar ciphers during the war. Each symbol relayed a word or phrase and the numbers gave more information, but about what he couldn’t tell. He ran his finger over one number and it came away chalky. The message, whatever it meant, had been put here recently.
Slocum used one more match to examine the cave, but this time he did it on his knees so he could look at the dusty floor. Another set of fresh tracks were now obvious to him. His footprints went from side to side, but the others followed the wall with the message. Whoever had read the symbols knew the pit was only a step or two beyond and had stopped at the very edge of the message.
The pit hadn’t been dug as a trap, but whoever had left the message used what was already here to get rid of any snoops. Slocum took one last look at the message and then left the cave.
It wasn’t hard to guess that the earlier visitor had been Jesse’s henchman. Had he left the message or had he been sent here to read it? Slocum thought hard about the times he had seen similar codes during the war. Mostly, the guerrillas used them to show the way to friendly farmers or hidden caches of arms and supplies. Since Jesse came to New Mexico, he probably was only a step or two ahead of a federal marshal, and it made sense he would have supplies cached all over.
He had to laugh at the thought of Jesse James running away from a bounty hunter like Audrey. She was determined and smart, but she lacked the iron core necessary to pull the trigger and kill a man—and maybe even justify doing it with a shot to the back.
Slocum stepped outside and looked around. Something struck him as wrong. Then he heard it—or didn’t hear it. There were no sounds of animals moving around, birds in the bushes, or . . . anything.
Reacting instinctively, he half twisted and dived behind a pile of rocks just as a bullet tore through the space where his head had been an instant before. He scrambled, got his feet under him, and had his six-shooter firmly in his grasp by the time he saw a flash of color. The sniper was atop a rock not thirty feet away when he carelessly exposed his arm. Slocum remembered the shirt pattern as belonging to one of the outlaws who had ridden with Frank on the train robbery. There hadn’t been time to exchange introductions, so Slocum knew what he had to do.
Resting the butt of his Colt Navy against his left palm to steady his aim, he sighted in on the shirt sleeve still exposed. A single shot blasted forth, and the report was drowned out by the loud shriek of a man who’d just had his elbow blown off.
Slocum was ready for the next shot as the man reared up and grabbed for his wounded left arm. This round caught the man in the chest, sending him sliding down the far side of the boulder. The crash and grunt told him the man had hit the ground hard, but there was an additional sound that made him wary. The man was sobbing in pain.
That meant he was still dangerous.
Circling the boulder would have taken long minutes. Slocum had to get to the outlaw before he recovered. The elbow wound was probably the more serious, even if he had hit his target dead center in the man’s chest. Slocum had seen men take twenty and thirty bullets during a raid and stay in the saddle, firing back at those who ventilated them. One had taken damned near a week to die.
Slocum didn’t want any of the gang living that long to carry back the word to Jesse that Slocum had not only shot him up but had seen the message in the cave. Whatever the chalked message meant, it was important enough to put into code.
A fleeting thought came to Slocum. Audrey Underwood was less of a bounty hunter than she was a treasure hunter. She had the notion that the gang had brought plenty of gold with them. The message behind him might be a map of sorts to show the others where the loot had been buried.
Slocum got to the top of a small rock, holstered his six-gun, then jumped for all he was worth. His boots scraped repeatedly on the side of the boulder until he found purchase and began working his way upward like a four-legged spider. His hands were scraped raw when he got to the top where the sniper had lain in wait. A quick look confirmed what he already knew. A large pool of blood on the rock showed the damage he’d caused to the outlaw’s elbow. A smaller drop of blood was all the evidence he had hit him with a second shot.
Drawing his six-shooter again, Slocum slid down the far side of the rock on the seat of his britches, landing hard and stumbling forward. The outlaw had been doubly unlucky. When he had fallen off the boulder, he had crashed down into a clump of Spanish bayonet. The sharp spines jutting upward dripped gore, showing where the man had impaled himself.
But there wasn’t a body. He had pulled himself off the foot-long rigid blades and stumbled away. Slocum went after him.
As he rounded a bend, he found himself on the rim of a deep ravine cut by spring runoff. The arroyo was dry, but something new had been added. The outlaw lay sprawled facedown on the sandy bottom. Slocum drew a bead on him, but the man didn’t stir. His back didn’t move, and he gave no sign of breathing. No blood pooled around him, but Slocum wouldn’t have expected that. The thirsty sand would suck up any liquid dropped on it. More than this, dead men didn’t bleed.
He found a break in the steep rim and jumped down into the arroyo, slipping and sliding. He recovered, his pistol pointed at the man. Still no movement. He might be playing possum. Slocum kicked him in the side and got no response.
Rolling him over told the real story. He hadn’t landed back down in the clump of Spanish bayonet. He had crashed down so that his chest was impaled. Slocum saw a half-dozen wounds, any of which might be mistaken for a knife thrust. So much blood had soaked into the man’s shirt, Slocum couldn’t even find his bullet wound. Stepping back, he considered what he ought to do.
He had no way of finding Jesse James or any of the others in the gang, but their dead partner might give him the key to turn once he found the lock.
Slocum found the man’s horse and brought it back. It was messy, but he finally draped the limp body over the saddle and then cinched it down so it wouldn’t slide off. He led the horse away, got his own, and rode back down the hillside until he came to a spot some distance from the cave. The man might have been going in that direction when misfortune felled him.
That was the story Slocum was going to tell if he found Jesse anytime soon.
He dropped the body from the saddle and tethered the horse where it could crop at some juicy grass. It would need watering before long, but if he was lucky, he would be back with the outlaw gang before it got too thirsty.
Slocum rode to the main road and joined a small wagon train, riding alongside as they rolled into Las Vegas. If the deputy or any of the other lawmen in the area were on the lookout for a solitary rider, he wouldn’t make their hunt any easier.
As he rode down the main north-south street, he looked for a likely place where Audrey would have heade
d. A small café would do, even if the woman wasn’t there. His belly growled and some food—and decent coffee—would go a ways toward restoring his good nature.
“John!”
He looked up and saw the woman in the doorway of the café, waving to him. His instincts about her had been right.
As he stepped up, Audrey’s eyes went wide with shock. One hand covered her mouth and the other pointed at him.
“John, you’re wounded!”
He looked down at the dried blood on his vest.
“Not mine,” he said. She looked even more shocked at this. He took her by the arm and steered her back inside, out of sight of anyone in the street. Finding Jesse James might be hard, but he wanted to do it in his own way and at his own time.
“You ordered already?” He looked at where she had been sitting. A china cup of coffee sent tiny curls of steam into the air.
“I . . . yes. You want this?” She pushed the coffee toward him. He took a sip, then pushed it back. It wasn’t any better than the coffee she had boiled over the campfire.
He pulled her down and sat across from her.
“I left one of the gang dead up in the hills,” he said.
“Who? Which one?”
Slocum shrugged. He didn’t know any of them save for the James brothers. As far as he was concerned, a dead outlaw was one less to hurrah a town or murder an innocent citizen. The time for such murdering ways was long past, and the James Gang didn’t know it.
“There’s something more important that I found in a cave.” He looked at the tablecloth but knew drawing on it would mean taking it when he left. Any mark would be permanent on the bleached muslin.
He spread a napkin on the table, then asked, “You have a pencil?”
Audrey silently searched through her purse until she found a broken stub. He held it up and shook his head.
“What kind of reporter are you if this is the best you have? Never mind. Have you ever seen a code like this before?” He quickly sketched out the symbols but omitted the numbers.
