Slocum #396 : Slocum and the Scavenger Trail (9781101554371) Read online

  Baransky laughed and smiled almost shyly.

  “You make me think I might actually succeed.”

  Slocum started to ask what drove the man, who otherwise sounded sensible, to pursue such a dream. Hawkins interrupted him.

  Huffing and puffing, Hawkins demanded, “When we gettin’ outta here? There’s still light.”

  “Yeah, we need to get on the trail.” Young looked around anxiously at the other parties forming.

  From what Slocum could tell, no one else was within a day of starting the long uphill trek. Most needed to buy supplies, get water, and find pack animals. He had taken care of those details for his small knot of prospectors already.

  “If you’re game, we can put a few miles behind us before sundown.”

  They were.

  After they started up the trail, Slocum began to think he should give back the money and let them go on by themselves. Their constant chattering like magpies disturbed the quiet, but more than this, their boasts about striking it big and what they’d do with the money galled him. All except Clem Baransky. He kept his head down and silently plodded along, conserving his strength because he of was the only one of the lot who had seen how steep the road turned in a very short time.

  The grade increased and even the surefooted pack mules Slocum had purchased began to strain. More than this, Slocum felt his lungs begin to burn as if he sucked in cheap whiskey with every breath. The altitude robbed him of air. The only good result came with boastful words replaced by harsh breathing.

  “Let’s camp here for the night,” Slocum said, finding a clearing with a small pond of sweet water in the center. From the debris and sooty fire pits, more than one expedition had also used this site.

  “We kin go on. Another couple miles.” Hawkins gasped out the words. His face was redder than a beet and he might explode at any instant. But he wanted to press on.

  “We camp here.”

  “We only been walking a few hours. How long ’til we make the pass?” Hawkins grasped the pack on the nearest mule for support. The animal turned, ready to kick out. Hawkins sensed what was happening and transferred his weight to a gnarled oak. Even this bent slightly under the load he placed on it.

  “There’s no reward for getting to the pass first,” Slocum said.

  “There is, too!” Hawkins shot bolt upright. “If any of those thieves in town reach the goldfields ’fore us, they’ll steal our gold. My gold!”

  “T’ain’t yer gold, ’less you find it,” said Niederman. “But you got a point. We get there first, we kin find the best places to hunt.”

  Slocum let them argue among themselves as he began setting up camp. He was spending the night here. The climb had been only a thousand feet but it felt as if it were miles because of the steep grade.

  “Gentlemen,” said Baransky, “we’re not the first up there, so the easiest claims have been made. No matter when we reach the goldfields, we are going to have a real search ahead of us. A day or two isn’t going to matter.”

  “Yeah,” Slocum said, dropping a pack to the ground. “Richard King already hit the biggest strike.”

  “King? Who’s that?” asked Young.

  Niederman and Baransky turned when Hawkins cleared his throat, then pulled out the pick with the RK initials cut into the handle. Slocum half listened as Hawkins regaled them with the bogus tale of the king of the gold mines as he laid a fire and got coffee brewing.

  He looked up when Baransky came over.

  “I can do some of the cooking. Learned when I was on the trail,” the man said.

  “Not going to argue. My cooking’s so bad even the coyotes puke it up.”

  “Doubt that,” Baransky said. He began opening a pack and working on fixing a mess of beans.

  “Why are you risking your life?” Slocum asked. “You don’t look the type. Not like them.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the other three, still playing one-upmanship as to who’d find the most gold. None of them considered they might all fail to strike it rich.

  “I have my reasons.” Baransky got a far-off look and fell silent. Slocum had seen this before. Some men played it close to the vest. Whatever brought Clem Baransky out here was going to stay his own business. He could respect that since he didn’t cotton much to anyone prying into his affairs.

  The beans were edible and the coffee washed them down. A can of peaches each completed the meal.

  “When we headin’ out, Slocum?” Young asked. “I got a feelin’ we’re in a race. Them others, the ones in town, they all had a haunted look to ’em. Hollow eyes and flushed cheeks and they all looked like they’d been in a race just to get to Almost There.”

  “Reckon who’s the hungriest to be rich wins,” Slocum said. “We’ll be out of here at sunrise.”

  He tethered the mules and then prowled the perimeter to be sure nothing was creeping up on them. He didn’t worry about bears, not yet since they were just stirring from hibernation, but coyotes and wolves and maybe even cougars this close to town became scavengers living off what scraps men carelessly left behind.

  After making his rounds, he found all four men sound asleep and sawing wood. Their snores echoed loud enough to keep away any animal. Slocum spread out his own bedroll and lay staring at the stars for a while. The others were already exhausted. The going would get worse. In a few minutes he, too, drifted to sleep.

  When he awoke in the morning, he sat up and looked around uneasily. It took a few seconds to figure out what was wrong. Harry Hawkins was gone.

  2

  “Anybody see what happened to him?” Slocum stood, stretched, and then began a slow circuit of the camp to read the signs in the dirt. The others all denied knowing anything, and he believed them. From all he could tell, Hawkins had left just before dawn. One deep cut in the grass left by his boot heel showed condensation that wouldn’t have been present if he had snuck from camp later.

  “Maybe he was kidnapped,” suggested Niederman.

  Slocum shook his head. He found only Hawkins’s tracks.

  “If road agents had come to rob us, they would have taken all our mules. Only one’s missing.”

  “A good point, Mr. Slocum.” Baransky followed him as he pieced together Hawkins’s last minutes in the camp, learning what signs were important and which weren’t.

  His presence annoyed Slocum, but he said nothing. The man didn’t get in his way, and the more he learned about tracking now, the easier it would be for them all higher on the mountainside.

  “Then why’d he go if he ain’t been kidnapped?” Young scratched himself as he spoke.

  “Dummy,” said Niederman. “He lit out to get ahead of us, that’s what happened. He’s gonna beat us to the gold! Ain’t I right, Slocum?”

  “Looks about right to me.”

  “Why’d he go and do a fool thing like that? In the dark and all alone?”

  “Because he doesn’t know what he’s getting into,” Slocum said. There was nothing but trouble ahead for Hawkins trying to make it on his own. Their first day on the trail had been easy compared to the steep climb ahead.

  “That man don’t have the sense God gave a goose.” Young scratched himself some more, hinting at crabs dining on his flesh. “What’s fer breakfast?”

  “Chow down,” Slocum said. “I’ll find him to be sure he’s all right.”

  “Do you think he’s in danger?”

  Slocum looked at Baransky and shrugged. When a man like Hawkins took it into his head that even his traveling companions were out to steal his gold, there was no telling what trouble he could get into.

  “You want me to come along?”

  “No need. I don’t think I’ll be gone all that long, one way or the other.”

  Baransky stiffened when he realized what Slocum meant. Either Hawkins would be brought into the fold or he was gone, maybe dead, maybe rushing headlong up the mountain to find his fortune.

  Slocum began the arduous task of hiking up the road. He had asked in town and dec
ided that horses were out of the question for this climb. The road, such as it was, amounted to little more than a rocky path in places, and what they had already traversed was the best traveled and easiest. The steepness made riding impossible. Why lead a horse the entire way rather than riding it? Slocum saw no reason. On the lower levels such as the one he trudged up now, a horse with rider could make better time, but a day farther up the mountain that would change. Even mules would be challenged by the precipitous climb.

  Slocum kept his eye on the rocky path and saw plenty of signs that Hawkins had come this way. When he came to a branch, he stopped and frowned at what he saw. For whatever reason, Hawkins had not continued directly up the trail to the pass but had taken the fork to the left.

  A quick look ahead caused Slocum to guess that Hawkins had been cowed by the narrow passage between the rocks. He might even have tried to get through and had his mule balk. Unaccustomed to working with pack animals, he had thought the fork edging off at a gentle slope was a better way to go, an easier route to riches.

  Grumbling, after more than an hour and not overtaking the prospector, he began to worry. Unless Hawkins had left camp far earlier than he had thought and showed more stamina than he had the day before on the relatively easy climb, something was wrong. Bad wrong.

  Replaying all he had seen at the fork convinced Slocum he was on Hawkins’s trail. The scratches on the stone, the lack of evidence of new tracks beyond the rocky passage on the main trail, and other small things had built up to convince Slocum he wasn’t wrong thinking the prospector had come this way.

  He rounded a bend and caught his breath. His hand went to his six-shooter but he didn’t draw. Caught in a patch of prickly pear cactus, Hawkins’s broad-brimmed hat stirred fitfully in a cool, gentle spring breeze. Slocum yanked the hat free. Hawkins would never abandon it, even if a gust of wind had taken it from his head and dropped it among the spiny cactus pads.

  Pulling the embedded spines out would take a few minutes, but the protection offered by the hat, its usefulness as a bucket and as a shield for the face, and all the other reasons a man wore a hat would be apparent even to a greenhorn like Hawkins.

  Slocum dropped to his knees and began going over the ground. Dried blood along the trail caught his eye. He scraped some off with his fingernail but couldn’t tell how long it had been on the small stone. Wind and water might wash it away but that could take an entire season. Nothing told him this was human blood, much less Hawkins’s.

  However, in his gut he knew it was. Something bad had happened to the prospector.

  Stride long now, he came to a steep downward slope in the trail. At the bottom Hawkins lay sprawled facedown. Even at this distance Slocum saw he was dead.

  More than this, he saw that his body had been stripped.

  Skidding down the slope with tiny, loose pebbles making his descent all the more treacherous, he came to a halt beside the man’s body. His boots had been pulled off, revealing wool socks with big holes in them. Hawkins still wore his pants and a shirt but his coat and vest had been removed. Using the toe of his boot, Slocum rolled the body over. Hawkins flopped flat on his back and revealed a tiny spot of blood.

  Someone had walked up, shoved a pistol into his chest, and fired. The powder burn showed that, along with some small singeing of the cloth. The small dot of blood told Slocum that the prospector had died almost instantly. He had seen this in battle too many times. Sudden death prevented more than a drop or two from being pumped out of the body. The killing shot had gone straight through Hawkins’s heart and exited his back.

  He looked around, hand resting on his six-shooter, but saw nothing. Whoever had killed Hawkins had gone back along the trail in the direction he had been heading. Slocum had no desire to bring the killer and thief to justice. The prospector had been stupid leaving the group and ignorant in the ways of getting his mule through the rocky gap along the actual trail.

  “The mule,” muttered Slocum. The killer had taken not only the mule but all the supplies on it. Somehow the loss of the pack animal and all it carried bothered him more than Hawkins’s death.

  Burying the man was out of the question in the rocky ground. Even if he had been Hawkins’s best friend, carrying the body back would also have been out of the question. The trail was too steep and the going too difficult before he could find a level stretch where a decent grave could be dug.

  He could have used some of the dynamite Hawkins had bought to blast a grave, but that had been stolen, too.

  Slocum cast one last look at Hawkins. Insects already worked on his flesh. It wouldn’t be long before the buzzards and even coyotes came in to finish off their meal. Turning his back on the corpse, he drove his toes into the steep slope and made his way back up the trail. It took less time to return than it had to find Hawkins because he wasn’t slowed by studying the rocky ground for spoor.

  But he ought to have been more alert. He reached the camp where he had left the other three prospectors and found it empty. Tired, he dropped to a rock and heaved a sigh of frustration.

  He had collected half his fee from each man, so he was two hundred dollars to the good if he simply went back down the mountain. He wasn’t ever going to collect the remaining fifty dollars owed him by Harry Hawkins. Was it worth the balance to find what had happened to the trio, who hadn’t bothered following his advice to stay here?

  It didn’t matter. He heaved himself to his feet. Money wasn’t at the heart of his decision. He had hired on to do a job and couldn’t turn his back on it. Some small guilt gnawed at him because he should have recognized the gold fever in Hawkins and the chance he would do something stupid.

  Hawkins couldn’t have been stupider. He took the wrong path and got himself gunned down by road agents. As Slocum trudged back up the trail he had already traversed twice that day, he wondered how prevalent such thievery was. The prospective gold miners were flush with equipment and some even had a few greenbacks tucked into their pocket after escaping the avaricious merchants down in Almost There. Mules and other, heavier equipment would fetch a good price back at the base of the mountain.

  A frown wrinkled his forehead as he wondered if the pick Hawkins had bought—the one with another man’s initials carved in it—had been lost in the same way. A lucrative trade could be built up if you were unscrupulous enough. A few men on the mountain trail killed the prospectors, stole their equipment, and sold it to the merchants in town, who resold it at ever higher prices to new prospectors.

  He couldn’t prove it, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t a lawman and had no call to do their job. A man had to rely on himself. Slocum snorted at the thought. If a man couldn’t do a chore, he hired someone to help him.

  Slocum walked faster. He had been hired to guide Baransky, Young, and Niederman to the goldfields on the other side of Desolation Pass. Because they had lit out didn’t mean squat. He had to do his job.

  As he walked, he saw more evidence of the trio along the trail that he had missed before. He came to the fork where Hawkins had gone wrong. The three with their mules had shown more determination and had pushed through the narrow passage. Ample signs on the far side of the tight passage proved it. When he found fresh mule flop, he knew they had come this way.

  For another twenty minutes, the steep trail sapped his energy but then it leveled out. Trees clustered ahead and to both sides, hinting at water. His mouth felt like the inside of a cotton bale. He kept walking, eyes on the trail, until he came to another fork. One prospector had continued into thick woods. Dropping to his belly, Slocum stared parallel to the ground to better eye the tracks as they went across grassier terrain.

  “One went on by himself, two others headed for the trees.” He suspected the men choosing the forested area were the smart ones. They could find water and a place to gather firewood to prepare a hot meal. The one pressing on might end up like Hawkins.

  Hiking alone in such rugged territory was foolhardy.

  Slocum started after the solitary
prospector but hadn’t gone ten paces when gunfire sounded from off to his left—in the direction taken by the two prospectors.

  A million ideas about what happened flashed through his mind. There might have been a falling-out between the two. He decided that wasn’t too likely. Any gunplay would happen over nuggets and claims. They were hardly a day into their trek across Desolation Mountain.

  More gunfire caused him to turn from the path leading higher into the hills and toward the copse. He identified three different reports. Even if the two men had decided to shoot it out, they would have used only two weapons. A third distinctive gunshot brought back his concern over road agents killing and robbing those on the mountainside.

  Before he reached the edge of the trees, he heard another pistol fire. It might have been a black powder gun from the muffled sound reaching through the forest. The answering fusillade made him cringe. One side tried to throw enough lead to cover an attack. He pictured it in his mind. The two prospectors fearfully used their own old, rusty six-shooters as they were attacked by determined outlaws.

  Slocum slid the Colt from his holster and advanced cautiously. To burst out into the middle of the gunfight was worse than foolish—it would be suicidal. Both sides would open up on him. He had to find what was happening and then choose his tactics carefully.

  A bullet sang past his head, forcing him to a crouch behind a tree. He peered around the bole of the juniper and tried to make out where the gunman ahead of him lay in wait. It took a full minute to realize no one had targeted him; the bullet was a stray slug from the increasingly noisy fight ahead.

  Remaining in a crouch, he advanced, every sense alert. Another slug ripped away a splinter above him, forcing him to the ground. As he flattened out, he saw Niederman’s back not ten yards away. The prospector wasn’t moving. Slocum began wiggling forward until he caught Young’s attention. The man’s eyes were wide with fear. He clutched an old Griswold & Gunnison .36 in one hand. Slocum hadn’t seen one of those pistols since the war. Young might well have been given it as part of his inheritance from a father or older brother. In his other hand he held a Colt Dragoon.