Slocum and the Backshooters by Jake Logan

Author:Jake Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

11

The world shook all around him. In the distance he heard a ringing sound and his name being called. The name came faint and distant and—

He snapped awake, struggling to grab his six-shooter. A strong hand clamped on his wrist and prevented him from drawing.

“You settle down now, you hear?” Bench had to hang on to him as he fought.

“Not hearing too good,” Slocum said. He realized he was shouting but could hardly hear himself. Jerking free of Bench’s bloody grip, he sat up and shook his head to see if anything had rattled loose. He was sorry he made the attempt. Sharp pain lanced down hard behind his eyes and made him sick to his stomach.

“The explosion,” Bench grated out. “It was the explosion that did that to you.”

“What blew up?” Slocum regained some of his wits, forced himself to his feet, and looked down toward the road. The sun had risen fully above the horizon, warning him that he had been unconscious for several minutes. A world of trouble could fall on him in that time.

He looked around for any sign of Turner and the rest of the gang, but they were nowhere to be found. Where the wagon had come to a halt, where he had seen the driver and guard both sprawled in the bed, was nothing more than a deep crater. Smoke rose from the sides and, if he let his imagination run wild, pieces of the wagon lay scattered about, both in the crater and along the roadside.

“It blew up.” He felt both numb and a little dumb making the statement.

“Went up like a Fourth of July skyrocket,” Bench said. “You got any ideas why that happened, John?”

“Dynamite. There must have been a couple dozen cases of dynamite in that wagon. They all blew at the same time. Had to, to make a hole that deep.”

“Accident?”

Slocum doubted that. Dynamite was hard to set off without a blasting cap. It could be frozen and fried and even tossed around, if you were careful enough. It took the sharp explosion of a blasting cap to detonate. Whatever had happened in the wagon was not an accident.

“Might be the driver done it. He saw he was bein’ robbed and—”

“The driver was dead,” Slocum said, cutting Bench off. “He was flopped in the rear of the wagon and couldn’t have set it off.”

“Might have been smokin’ a cigar. That coulda set it off,” Bench said reluctantly. Even he did not believe that had happened.

Slocum made his way down the far side of the hill to stand on the edge of the crater. The distinctive odor of detonated dynamite filled his nostrils. His stomach heaved a mite when he saw a burned, severed arm on the far side of the crater. He had walked through battlefields and seen bits and pieces of mutilated soldiers but that had been a long time back. He thought he had put such things behind him.

He obviously had not.

“Where’d Turner and the gang go?” Bench looked around rather than into the crater.

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