Slocum and the Cayuse Squaw by Jake Logan

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

An hour later, their horses churned up dust approaching some corrals and pens. Slocum stood in the stirrups and looked for signs of anyone. The headquarters looked like a typical cow outfit, and somehow for him that didn’t match the Polish-sounding name on his list. Still, he hadn’t seen a sign of a human yet.

Then he spotted three paint horses and shouted for her to get down. On the ground, he ripped the shotgun out of the scabbard and tossed it to her. She caught it and broke it open, took two brass shells from her dress pocket, loaded the gun and snapped the breech shut.

Waving the Colt in his hands to indicate the paints, Slocum ran low along the pens. She came on his heels. When they reached the end, he waved her back and peered toward the low-walled shack with the rusty stovepipe sticking out of the shingle roof. On the ground between him and the structure were three bodies—no doubt from their black hair and the blankets around their waists, they were dead Indians.

“Cowski, you there?”

No answer.

“Cowski?” he called louder.

“Yeah, whose out there?”

“A deputy sheriff and an Injun woman.”

A crackly laugh came from the shack. “That’s different. Come on over. I think all them red-balled niggers is dead. They ain’t twitched in the last hour.”

Slocum straightened and drew a deep breath. She hurried to join him, both of them searching around for any survivors.

“You know them?” Slocum asked under his breath as they hurried by the sprawled corpses.

“One is Wolf’s son—Silver Wolf.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“What’s nice?”

“One of them is the big chief’s son,” Slocum said as the short man came outside the half-underground house.

A bandy-legged man hardly five-six, his face wrinkled like old leather from ten thousand days in the broiling sun—a graying mustache under a big nose that looked like a long-horn steer rack and the clearest blue eyes—stood with an oily looking repeater in his hands.

“Sonsabitches, they came to die today, boy.”

“Cowski?”

“That’s me.”

“Sheriff McGrim sent me to ask you to come to Cross Creek.”

“What in God’s name fur?”

“Wolf’s got a large band of renegades and they all have new repeaters.”

“Yeah, these pups had them rifles. They couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with one.”

“Still, sixty rifles might.”

“About even the odds—hell, I’m sorry, never noticed her.” He removed his wide-brimmed hat that dipped from the elements all the way around his small head. Swiftly, he made a bow at the waist toward her, and his great Mexican rowels jingled.

“You’re prettier than the bluebells down in Texas in the spring, little lady. I once lived with an Injun woman in a dugout in the Indian Nation. Guess I’d still be down there with her, but some whiskey trader rode by the dugout one day I was gone and he murdered her.”

Slocum nodded that he heard the man.

Cowski’s clear eyes narrowed and his mouth opened; his teeth fit together and he trembled. Then his hat was back on, covering his thin thatch, and he spoke low and soft.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.