Slocum's Silver Burden (12 page)

He voiced his concern.

“He might have tried running us over, gone a ways out of town, then circled around,” suggested Tamara. “That means we'd have to choose another road and—”

“He didn't,” Slocum said positively. “We would have seen him if he'd gone after Drury and Baldy. The road south is too steep and goes away from the silver, wherever it's hidden.” He pointed ahead. “East along this road takes us to a spot near the train robbery—”

“Where the silver is hidden,” she finished. With a sharp intake of breath and a release that set her breasts to shaking delightfully, she said, “What can we do?”

“Rest the horses, set up camp here, where we can see the road but not be seen.”

Tamara smiled. “I understand. If we missed the wagon between here and town, if he had hidden somewhere along the road, he'll have to pass us to get to the silver cache.”

“I can use some grub.”

“And a rest,” Tamara said, but Slocum heard the contradiction in her voice.

He dismounted and led his mare to a spot that gave a good view of the road through the trees. The driver would be almost on them before he noticed anyone watching, while Slocum had a view giving more than fifteen minutes' warning of any traveler. He gathered wood and made a small fire while Tamara prepared the food for cooking. They worked in silence, exchanged only a few words while they ate, then spread out their blankets and lay back.

But it wasn't to rest.

The tension had been growing between them all day—since Slocum had rescued her from getting run over.

“I want to thank you,” Tamara said.

“The wagon?”

“No, for this.” She pressed her hand down on his crotch. He had been hard for some time.

“If you like it, why don't you take it out?”

Her fingers danced over the buttons and popped the fly open. His manhood rushed out, tall and proud and straining.

“I'm afraid you might be chilly, all naked and hanging out like that.”

Before he could say a word, she dropped down and enmouthed his length. He gasped as her tongue swirled about the sensitive tip and then worked down the underside to poke into his balls. She kept pressing and pulling until she had him fully out of his jeans and could concentrate her full oral assault on him. Sucking hard on the plum-sized tip, her cheeks went hollow, and Slocum thought he would go crazy with lust.

His hips lifted from the blanket as he tried to sink deeper into her mouth. She held her head stationary and let him thrust until he bounced off the roof of her mouth and went deeper into her throat. When she swallowed, he felt the motion all around his hidden length. It sent a shockwave along his fleshy shaft and into his loins. He knew what a forest felt like now as a fire crept closer and eventually engulfed it. Slow heat, warmer, hotter, fierce heat that devoured body and soul. Her fingers stroked over his hairy balls and then tugged. Slocum had to concentrate not to lose control. Everything she did with her mouth, how she fondled him, the heat of her gusting breath against his groin, all conspired to push his arousal up more and more.

She began bobbing her head up and down, mimicking the motion that suddenly appealed more to him than having her lips stroking the sides of his erection.

He reached down and pushed her away.

“Your turn,” he said. Her bright eyes turned into small suns, burning with lust.

She went end for end and straddled his head, her knees beside his ears.

“No, I want—”

“Lick,” she ordered. “All over. I want to feel your tongue on my body like this.”

She bent down and sucked him into her mouth again. Slocum groaned and sank back. Looking up, all he saw was a mountain of cloth. He began pushing away her skirts until he exposed her legs. Caressing her thighs brought immediate response. She sucked harder. He ran his hands along the insides of her legs, letting the sleek flesh flow like satin under his fingertips. When he succeeded in getting her skirts bunched around her hips, he saw the delicious target she wanted him to sample.

He reared up and applied his mouth to her privates. In reaction, she worked even more furiously on his manhood. He kissed her nether lips, then ran his tongue along the pinkly scalloped flaps until they trembled. Tasting the thick juices oozing from her interior spurred him on. Grabbing her around the legs, he pulled her hips down so she spread wider across his face.

His tongue shot out and ran about, just within the portal to her heated center. She trembled as he continued to explore orally. At the same time he knew his own genitals were getting full attention from her mouth. He pulled her down more so he could drive his tongue deeper into her. Then he raced around the rim of her opening.

Tamara emitted small sounds of passion, without once releasing her lips from their station over the end of his cock. Then she started bobbing up and down, taking him faster and faster. He matched her pace until she began grinding her hips into his face in obvious, silent demand for what she wanted most. He thrust in and out with his tongue and then his world exploded. Tension mounted and he found himself unable to restrain the white-hot rush. He spewed forth his load, and she sucked it all up as she squeezed down hard on his balls.

The rush of sensation passed, and he renewed his tonguing until her legs clamped down hard on either side of his head and she shook hard as if caught in an earthquake. Then she stretched out, her legs straight on either side of his head. Slocum disengaged, rolled over, and came up to lie with her in his arms.

“That was incredible, John. And you taste so good!”

He kissed her almost as hard as she kissed back. Before the sun sank behind the mountains to the west, they found new ways of enjoying each other.

And the wagon never passed them.

“How can this be, John?” Tamara Crittenden stood in the middle of Newburg's main street, staring at the deserted buildings in disbelief. One or two curious residents still in the town poked their heads out, looked at her, then went back to their business, meager though it was.

Slocum turned in a complete circle and shook his head.

“He gave us the slip. I'm damned if I know how he did it. If he'd hidden the wagon along that road and ridden on horseback from there, he'd have had to pass us.”

“He didn't. And there weren't any side roads.”

“Not that I saw.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. They had ridden back to town and had spent the last hour asking anyone who would talk to them if they had seen the driver and his wagon.

The answer to both had been a puzzled “no.” More than one curious citizen asked why they were interested. From the responses, Slocum doubted the train robber had bought off everyone. After asking the same question so many times, one of the men interrogated would have shown a hint of lying. All were honestly mystified. Newburg wasn't a town where anyone got lost. It was too tiny and getting smaller by the day as the last of the diehards moved on to greener pastures.

“You looked? Hard?”

He turned on her. The flash of anger silenced the woman. Slocum took it as an insult to his talent and his integrity that he had missed the trick that had allowed a man driving a wagon to simply vanish.

“I'm sorry. I hunted for tracks, too, and I saw nothing leading away from the road. Even identifying the ones made when he left town after nearly running me down didn't amount to a hill of beans.”

“The wagon tracks disappeared in the dust before the first hill,” Slocum said. He'd gone over every possible tactic and come up with nothing. “Abandoning the wagon and riding the team away is all I can figure.”

“Then he'll have to get another wagon if he wants to load the silver and drive off with it,” she said.

Slocum walked to a spot in the shade and sat on the edge of the uneven boardwalk. The rough plank under him reminded him of the times he had been whipped for misbehaving when he was a young boy in school. He hadn't been the best student and had paid for his sass. Now he thought of the splintery boards against his ass as new punishment for not being good enough. Pushing his failure from his mind, he went back over everything he had learned about the robbery. The three had come to this town and had fled when the two specials opened fire on them instead of trapping them good and proper.

Where Riley and Harry had gone was anyone's guess. After Baldy and Drury made the most sense. That left the remaining robber running around loose without anyone in pursuit because Slocum had screwed up and—

He stood abruptly.

“Mount up. We're riding to the place where the train was robbed.”

“Waiting there won't get us anywhere,” Tamara said. “Wherever Jack hid his share, it was quite a ways off from the tracks.”

“It's the only place all the robbers have in common. If they split up, we can avoid following Jackson's trail since it didn't bring us to where he hid the silver. That improves our chances of finding not only the other three's trails but also their caches.”

“I suppose. Jack was always a suspicious sort, sure everyone wanted to double-cross him.”

Slocum said nothing. The outlaw's instincts had been accurate when it came to Tamara. Avoiding his partners had been a smart move, too. But were the remaining three more trusting of one another? The wagon suggested they were, unless each of their cuts from the robbery required a wagon to cart off. That sent him thinking along other roads, only to be nudged from his reverie when Tamara shook his shoulder.

“You got all distant, John. What are you thinking?”

“The place where they robbed the train. It's all we have.”

“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. “Let's get supplies for the trail.” She hesitated, then asked, “Should we get a pack animal or two? For when we find the silver?”

“We'll worry about moving it after we find it,” he said. Slocum considered how many silver bars he could load into his saddlebags and how far he could ride his old mare weighed down like that.

“We can always hide it in a different spot,” she said. Her eyes sparkled with greed. “That's if we don't shoot them all down. If we did, there wouldn't be any reason to move the silver. Just take what we could and return for the rest when we liked.”

“Don't count your chickens before they're hatched. That's what my grandma always told me, and it's good advice.”

“You're always so glum, John. Live a little. Think of all the wonderful things you could do with a mountain of silver. Think of what
we
could do, the places to go. I've always wanted to see Paris and London, dress in fine European gowns, and attend fancy balls thrown by the aristocracy. We would make such a splash! The crowned heads of Europe would bow to us, the fabulously wealthy Americans.”

Slocum knew it was more likely that they would be, even if the silver rose up in a huge mound before them, spurned as uncouth barbarians. He had ridden with enough Europeans to get sick of their superior airs. One had been a remittance man, the third son of a British lord depending on his pa's largesse every month, and he had been insufferable in spite of being a leech and totally dependent on a man across the Atlantic who paid to keep him away. More than once the remittance man had drunk up his allowance by the middle of the month and begged for pennies to get more whiskey. The last Slocum had seen of him was his back as he rode away in Montana, sure that one day his older brothers would die and he would inherit the family estates. As drunk as he had been, Slocum wondered if he might not realize that dream.

More than once, the remittance man had been as drunk as a lord. All he needed was the title to go with tying on the bender.

“Everyone needs a dream,” he told Tamara. “I've always wanted to own an Appaloosa stud farm up in Oregon, but the trail never led that way.” She looked at him strangely, then stepped up into the saddle, settled herself, and waited for him to mount.

They rode from town on the trail of the stolen silver.

*   *   *

“This is the place,” Tamara said, walking up the railroad tracks. The steep grade made her a tad breathless.

Slocum enjoyed the sight of her breasts rising and falling with the exertion. He felt a little lack of air, too, but not as much. They had tired their horses so much they had to let them rest for the remainder of the day. But they had found the stretch of track where the robbery had occurred. He ignored her and worked out how the four thieves had rushed the mail car.

He looked down the steep embankment and shuddered. Falling from the side of the mountain would be a messy death. He put his back to the sheer drop and pretended the mail car had halted just in front of him. The robbers would rush forward, their six-shooters blazing. The mail clerk wouldn't be able to fight them off—and then the four robbers would stand in the car, stunned by their good luck. What they had thought to be a few hundred dollars had become ten thousand in heavy silver bars. Maybe more. Tamara didn't know the exact amount, and Collingswood never revealed it.

The vice president had to be stewing in his own juices by now. To report such a loss to the president and board of directors would get him fired immediately. If he was lucky, he'd only be fired. If the men running the Central California Railroad were like most of the businessmen in San Francisco, David Collingswood could count himself lucky if he didn't find himself in the crew of a China clipper bound for the Flowery Kingdom. Three years at sea hardly recovered the silver but the board of directors, if they were the least bit law-abiding, wouldn't slit his throat and dump him into the Bay.

Shanghaiing him was a better punishment all around.

“They uncoupled the cars and they rolled back downhill,” Slocum said, more to himself than to Tamara.

He paid no attention to where she went, being lost in reliving the robbery. The weight of the silver had made applying the mail car's brake more difficult. The caboose had derailed. He found the bright silver nicks in the steel track where the car had tumbled over, away from the cliff. Farther downhill he found the spot where the brake had finally brought the mail car to a halt. From the damage to the tracks, the car had slid off the rails here but remained upright.

Repair crews had worked to erase the worst of the damage, but Slocum knew riding along this stretch of track, even at the slow speed necessary when going uphill, would be rough. A shudder when he thought of highballing downhill coming from the coast over this damaged section told him how much he preferred riding. Even the old mare under him was safer than hitting this stretch at high speed and going over the brink to the canyon floor so far below because of a defective rail.

All traces of the mail car and caboose had been removed. He imagined crews loading the pieces into freight cars or onto flat bed cars. Or had the Central California Railroad crew levered both back onto the tracks and let another engine pull them to a depot? He hadn't bothered to ask since the actual cars, if they had been put onto a siding, gave him no useful information. Walking back along the tracks, he tried to find any trace of Jackson and the others' horses as they carried away the hundreds of silver bars. Too much time had passed. Any chance of tracking here had gone with wind and rain and the passage of dozens of other trains, not to mention the repair crews.

He knelt, ran his fingers over the cool steel rail, then looked up into a blinding reflection from a low hill on the far side of the tracks. Not consciously thinking, Slocum twisted violently and threw himself flat on the ground. Cinders cut into his chest, and he scraped his cheek against a metal burr on the track. The discomfort from these minor scrapes was nothing compared to having his head blown off.

The bullet sailed just above him and out over the canyon.

He wiggled fast like a sidewinder and slid over the verge. His feet found a rocky ledge for support. Peering over the edge, he caught sight of the reflection again. The sniper was too far away for him to use his Colt. Still, the temptation to draw and send some of the six-gun's slugs in that direction almost overcame common sense.

“John, John!”

“Stay down,” he bellowed. “Take cover. There's a gunman on a hill a hundred yards away.”

He ducked as a rifle bullet tore past his head.

“What are we going to do? He can keep us pinned down here forever.”

“Or until another train comes along,” Slocum said. He had no idea when that would be. The ledge where he stood was too shallow for him to sit and wait out the sniper. “Can you draw his fire without getting shot?”

“I don't know. I think I can. What are you going to do?”

Slocum gathered his strength, found a hole in the rock for his toe, then waited. Tamara moved fifty feet uphill from him, drawing attention away. When the sniper fired on her, Slocum reacted. He kicked hard and launched himself back to the level railroad bed. This time he didn't use the tracks as a partial shelter. He ran for all he was worth in a frontal assault on the rifleman.

It took only a split second for the gunman to realize Slocum was turning the tables and get off another shot. Dodging, moving fast, Slocum presented a poor target. He saw a couple more bullets kick up dirt around him. One lead slug spanged off a rail. In spite of the death around him in the air, Slocum made his way to the foot of the hill where the sniper fired.

Now he whipped out his six-shooter and squeezed off a couple rounds at what he thought was an exposed elbow. Curses came his way but not from winging his foe. At best he had caused him to move. A few more rounds came Slocum's way, but the sniper no longer had a clear shot. Using scrubby trees for cover, Slocum inched up the slope until he got to the top of the hill. The spent brass glittered in the afternoon sun, but the rocky stretch gave no hint as to the direction the gunman had taken in his retreat.

Slocum closed his eyes for a moment and used other senses. A faint whiff of tobacco lingered. The gunman had recently smoked a cigar. But distant sounds of bushes snapping back as a man pushed through them caused Slocum to turn in that direction before opening his eyes. The gunman wasn't anywhere to be seen, but faint sounds of his passage through the underbrush sent Slocum in that direction at a dead run.

When he got to the bushes where the sniper had fled, he found broken twigs and freshly crushed leaves on the ground. He hunted for his quarry, but the man had disappeared into thin air. Listening again, Slocum tried to locate the gunman but couldn't. Either he had realized how he was being tracked and had gone to ground or he had already escaped.

Advancing more cautiously now, Slocum followed the path. An angry bull might have plowed through the vegetation. Trailing the gunman was easy. Slocum quickly realized the man was circling the hill, heading back toward the tracks.

“Damnation,” he said under his breath.

Leaving Tamara by herself might have been a fatal mistake. The sniper circled around to get the drop on her. Slocum estimated distances, then ran back up the hill since this was the fastest path to the tracks. Atop the hill, he looked down but saw nothing of the woman. Like the bull he had imagined charging through the brush, he roared downhill and came out on the tracks. He looked up along the tracks and didn't see her. Then he heard the metallic click of a shell being levered into a rifle's chamber.

He dropped flat as a bullet tore past. Again he used the tracks for shelter, but this time the gunman was back down the tracks, able to shoot parallel to the rails.

Slocum rolled onto his back and got off a couple rounds. Then he raised his hands, his gun still clutched in his right hand. He stared down the barrel leveled at him from ten feet away.