Slocum and the Long Ride

On the Edge

The Apache drew a long knife from his belt, then ran his mount hell-bent into Slocum's mare.

The collision threw Slocum and his horse into the sand. Somewhere during the impact he'd lost his Colt. The mare's frantic effort to get herself up gave Slocum enough time to look for his gun. No pistol in sight.

The Apache veered from his course to get at Slocum. With enraged, violent screams, he charged across the last, short space to drive his knife into his enemy's heart. The day had come. Slocum had nothing but his bare hands, and he prepared for the last fight of his life . . .

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SLOCUM AND THE LONG RIDE

A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

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e Book ISBN: 978-1-101-61021-3

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Jove mass-market edition / November 2013

Cover illustration by Sergio Giovine.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

There were spirals of black smoke against the azure sky all around him. Ranch headquarters were being burned down by Apache war parties up and down the Sulphur Springs Valley. He pushed his lathered horse south for the Pitch Fork Ranch. A man he knew well, Oran Oglethorpe, had the largest ranch crew in that country, and if anyone could hold off the damn Chiricahua Apaches, he and his Texans could at their place, and by damn Slocum was going to try to get there before the Apaches caught him out in the open.

He rode past the one-room Simon Flat Schoolhouse and noticed that the front door was wide open. Was someone in there?
Oh hell.
He reined the gelding up, then spun him around him on his heels and headed him toward the open door, pounding him with his spurs to hurry. In a flying dismount he hit the ground on his boot heels, and rowels clanging, six-gun in his fist, he threw back the door. Ready for anything—

A young woman, seated at a desk on the foot-higher stage, who at the sight of him and his drawn gun screamed, “Who are you?”

“No, lady, what in the hell are you doing out here? This whole damn country is alive with bloodthirsty savages. Come on. We've only got a few minutes to get the hell out of here.”

She had long brown hair. He guessed her to be eighteen. Her breasts molded the white blouse she wore, and the hem of her long brown skirt rested on her buttoned shoe tops. Standing at her desk, she looked to be indignant about his orders.

“Come on. Those Apaches are damn sure coming.” He was growing impatient with her frowning and the hesitation aimed at him.

“I'm getting ready for my classes next week. Who are you?”

He caught her by the arm and she slapped him. Not letting go, he holstered his gun and dragged her to the doorway. Then he looked both ways before hauling her with him out on the porch. Nothing was in sight, so he headed her for his hard-breathing, lathered horse and caught the reins.

“Now I'll get in the saddle and then put you up behind me.”

“I can't straddle that horse in this skirt.”

“Take it off then.”

“No. It would be too indecent to do that.”

His firm grip on her arm drew her face close to his. “What's worse, being embarrassed or dead?”

“All right. I'll take it off.”

He hoisted himself into the saddle. She tossed him the skirt and then took his stirrup to mount. He pulled her up in place. “Hang on, girl. We've got to ride like hell out of here.”

Looking down to check on her position, he saw the frilly white lace slip's hem and a nice bare leg beside his chap-covered one. No time for that, he simply hoped the bay horse had ten more miles of go left in him to carry the two of them to the Pitch Fork. They were off in a lurch, but she'd ridden before from behind someone else and knew to wrap her arms around his waist. Her firm breasts molded two spots in his back.

“Who are you?” she asked behind his ear as the pony caught his gait again.

“Folks call me Slocum.”

“Where do you live?”

“Where I sleep.”

“You have no home.”

“Nope—no home, no woman—nothing but what you can see on this worn-out horse.”

“You're a drifter?”

“You might say that. I've spent lots of my time figuring out how to stay alive in this world.”

“Are you wanted?”

“Good question.” He spurred the horse to get more out of him as they thundered though a grove of dusty junipers that lined the road. A great place, he considered, to get jumped by a war party who were burning up everything in sight.

“Where is the army?” she asked. “Aren't they supposed to protect these people?”

“There's only so many soldiers and thousands of acres of land in this territory and the one next door, New Mexico. They can't cover it all, and when the Apaches know they're in another area, they can raid unscathed in the last one the army left.”

The horse's breath was rasping in his throat and he'd slowed some. Slocum wished they could find some other horses, loose ones or run-off ones—to replace him, but he hadn't seen any sign of those in the past two hours since he turned down the Sulphur Springs Valley and discovered the outbreak that must be unfolding.

She twisted behind him to look around. “Are those streaks in the sky I can see all burned down ranches?”

“Some may only be haystacks, but yes, they attack and burn you out if you can be burned.”

“How many people have they killed so far?”

He thought about the little girl he'd seen lying in the dust in her blue dress, her blue eyes like the eyes of a china doll head staring into the hard midday sun. A few feet from her, her mother's naked body was sprawled on its back—she'd been ravaged, raped, and then butchered. Even considering it again, he had a hard time keeping the sourness behind his tongue down and not throwing up. The woman's white flesh glowed in the high summer sun, and the blood wasn't even dry from her scarlet knife wounds.

Back to reality, he reined the bay hard to the right with “Hang on, sister” for her. Next they busted into the juniper boughs and he reined up the horse. “Get down and hold him.”

He drew the rifle out of the scabbard and checked the cylinder. It was loaded.

“Trouble?”

“There's some riders coming out of the west. I hope they're so hell-bent on something they didn't see us.”

“Could they be our—” But the
ki-yack
ing coyote-like war cries carried to them, and her complexion whitened. “They're Apaches all right.”

He nodded with the Winchester in his sweaty hands. He dried his right hand on his leather chaps and then went back to holding the wooden stock and trigger.

“How many?” she whispered.

“A handful. Be still. If they don't hear this horse heaving, we may avoid them.”

“Sorry I doubted you. They really are on the warpath,” she whispered. Her shoulders trembled under the blouse. The war party had drawn up at the road, judging from the sounds of their milling horses hidden by the thick junipers.

“Just so they don't see our tracks,” Slocum said, with his heart pounding in his rib cage. His ear strained for any giveaway of the Apaches' intentions in the guttural words of them arguing over something that meant nothing to him. He could hear the excitement in their untranslated words, and their horses plunged around, their nostrils no doubt filled with gun smoke, blood, and sweat. The excitement of killing and raping must feed those bucks. He'd been in their villages many times. They lounged around like they had nothing to do. Let the squaws do all the work, then they'd ride up a canyon and slay a deer, ride back to camp and simply tell a squaw where to go get it. She'd have to skin and dress it—dry the meat into jerky and tan the hide for clothing. While he sat around in camp having had daydreams of being on the warpath.

Then the close-by Apaches left screaming, going east—didn't even use the road. Instead they rode off into the canyons of the towering Chiricahua range of mountains on their left. The rifle back in its place, Slocum gathered her skirt from the saddle seat where he'd laid it and wadded it into his saddlebags. With a sigh of relief he remounted the horse. “That was a good thing—they've rode off.”

Numb-like, she agreed and took his arm.

Bent over to help her, he hoisted her up behind him. “We're still a long ways from the Pitch Fork.”

“How many are out there? Indians I mean.”

He was too busy to answer her. He searched around before riding out into the open-grass and yucca-clad rangeland. The two of them were off again in a rocking lope and headed south as hard as he felt he could make the horse run into the hot afternoon wind.

“Keep ahold of me. I have no idea how many there are, maybe two dozen. Tomorrow there could be as few as ten, or more than thirty. Apaches are strange—if they wake up after a bad dream, they won't ride off into warfare. This might be the day they get killed otherwise.”

“Can they tell fortunes?” He felt her push herself up closer to the high back cantle on his saddle, and she held him looser, like she was more at ease with the pony's stride. They went down into a low spot where a clear small creek ran across the road.

He shook his head at her question. “If they could, they'd never get shot.”

“Where did that water come from?” she asked, slipping down to the ground when he stopped. Ever alert he listened to some ravens in the distance and distinguished them from the Indians' yacking.

“A big spring. Go upstream, get a drink, and fill my canteen. I'm going to walk this hot horse and water him some. Be easy to colic him on water here and him get stiff from not moving.”

“He's sure tired his heart out packing us. Good care might save him.”

Slocum nodded, pulled the horse's head up dripping from the water source, and walked away with him. She had gone a ways out of sight. He turned his back to the direction she went and stopped to drain his own bladder in the road dust. Finished, he buttoned up his fly and heard her coming back.

“Something is dead up there. Maybe you should check and see what it is. I can lead the horse. It may be an animal, but it doesn't smell like one.” She put the refilled canteen's strap over the saddle horn.

He gave her the reins as she flattened out her slip against the wind's efforts to expose her bare legs. She apologized, “I know we are in very desperate straits here, but I am still a woman with concerns about acting like I was taught.”

“No problem.” He hurried up the cow path beside the small stream, and he could soon smell whatever was dead. First, he saw the gray underwear shirt pincushioned with turkey feather–fletched arrows in its back. The man had been dead for some time, and the smell of his decay about took Slocum's breath away. They'd taken his sidearm and left the empty holster. No pants, no boots—they'd removed them but had missed a rawhide cord around his neck. May have been superstitious about it as some religious thing he had. Slocum cut the cord in two with his jackknife and retrieved the heavy item attached to it.

The man was probably in his thirties, with reddish brown hair. In Slocum's hand was a heavy pouch his attackers had missed. He opened it and saw the gold nuggets. Nothing else. In disgust over the strong stench, he shook his head and escaped the brush backward to stand up and suck in some better air. He cleared his throat a few times and spat aside.

“He was a dead prospector.”

“Find any ID?” she asked.

“No. But he had some gold.”

“Prospector you say?”

“I think so.” He put the deerskin pouch in the saddlebags on the other side of the horse. “No time to bury him. I'm surprised the vultures hadn't found him already. They must have enough humans to eat—hell, sharp as their noses are they could have smelled him halfway to Mexico City.”

She never answered him. Obviously close to being real shaken over their hard situation.

“You're ready?”

Concerned-acting, she looked back that direction, and the wind lifted the long hair into her face. She put it back in place with her fingers and shook her head. “Will they ever know who he was or what he was doing out here?”

“I doubt it. Not with no identification on him. They took his pants. Not much way to find out.”

He stepped in the saddle and pulled her up behind him. “Let's ride. Heah yah, horse!”

•   •   •

They were off again. The horse was in a short lope. And Slocum knew in another hour he'd be nose-down dead in the road from sheer exhaustion.

“There's some horses.” She pointed past him. A gray mare and another brown horse—he'd seen them come out of the draw. Their manes windswept, they eyed him suspiciously, like most horses turned out on the range did after a few months' liberty. They got skittish about folks.

He shook loose his lariat.

“You want me off?” She acted prepared to slip off his butt.

“Maybe best.”

She did so, and he kicked the bay after them as they turned to run away. Whipping him with the lariat to go faster and driving after the mare, he figured the horse with her would come back to the mare if he caught her—he'd no doubt been running with her for some time.

He threw the rope, concerned about the wind gusting, but he caught her in his loop, jerked his slack, and dallied the rope on the horn. Now, if she wasn't too wild to ride, they might make the Pitch Fork before dark.

The whole time he talked to the mare, crowding in closer and taking up slack on the rope around her neck. His greatest concern was that he hoped she'd been ridden at some time. Most ranches ignored mares as saddle animals, and they were simply broodmare stock. Slocum dismounted his weary side-heaving horse, and the schoolteacher came to hold his reins for him.

“It's a pretty gray, isn't she?”

“She doesn't have many scars on her withers. I'm concerned she may not have been ridden much. We'll see.”

His companion held the mare, while he unsaddled the dripping, lathered bay. Then easy-like he carried his tack around to transfer it to the gray. He caught a look in her eye of anarchy. Then the mare danced a little away from him when the wet blankets settled on her back. All the time in a soft low voice he spoke to try to settle her distrust and distract her. The saddle on her back, she flew backward, hit the end of the rope with him while he also held the saddle in place. When the gray reached the end of that rope but the saddle was still on her, she stood and trembled as he cinched it up.

The bit in her mouth took some doing. But he fought her down.

He noticed the schoolteacher had been holding the weary bay with the lariat and how she'd talked to the now curious loose brown horse. “I think I can catch him,” she said.

“Bay won't go nowhere, catch her buddy,” he said. Considering talents as she tried to coax the gelding, he decided his rig was secure on the mare's back, and he swung up in the saddle. She did buck around in a small circle, but it was only halfhearted. He gouged her with his spurs and she leaped forward—no buck for fifty feet when he set her down and she slid to a halt. Whirled around, she raced back, and his partner was holding the brown one on a lariat. Then she jumped up to lay over the horse's back, and he moved around for her. “He's broke. I'll ride him.”