Slocum and the Lost Command by Jake Logan

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

11

Slocum set out at daybreak but never saw a trace of Holman and the company of troopers riding with him or where Sergeant Davies might have gone. Somewhere around ten o’clock that night he reached Newsome. The town was as quiet as a tomb, but Slocum didn’t expect anything else. He rode through to the far side of town, where Laurel had pitched her camp. In a way he hoped she had moved on so he wouldn’t have to face her.

It was almost as if she had been waiting for him. She sat quietly beside a low fire and spotted him immediately. Laurel leaped to her feet and came toward him.

“John, you’re back. Finally. I’d almost given up on you.”

He dismounted and walked to her. “How long would you have waited?” he asked. “It’s taken a lot longer than I expected to find what I needed to.”

“I’d have waited forever. I took a job in town as a secretary at the bank. I write letters and make certain the day’s teller counts are accurate. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s enough to buy me some food.”

“Not enough to find a room at a boardinghouse?”

“I don’t mind staying out here,” she said, her eyes averted. “There’s nobody in Newsome who’ll put me up.”

“Why not?”

“I think someone must have known what we . . . what we did before you left. That’s tarred me with the brush of a scarlet woman.”

Slocum felt his bile rising. Small towns were all the same. Gossips could ruin a woman’s reputation with just a few choice words. Worst of all, there was no way of finding who started the rumors or who listened and believed. In this case, the gossip was accurate. Slocum felt a warmth in his crotch thinking of the going-away party he and Laurel had enjoyed before he rode to Fort Crumpland.

“What have you found? It’s not good, is it, John? I can tell from the look on your face.”

“Do you recognize this?” Slocum fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the locket, letting it spin slowly and catch light from the guttering campfire.

“It . . . Yes, I recognize it. There’s a picture of a pretty woman and a baby in it, isn’t there?”

Slocum said nothing. He could tell from the pinched look on the lovely woman’s face that she had recognized the locket the instant he had pulled it from his pocket. He handed it to her. Laurel fumbled a moment with the catch, then opened it to show him.

“That’s my mother and that’s me when I was four.”

“You were a pretty child and grew up to an even prettier woman.”

“Thank you, John. My father wore this around his neck, with the pictures. He had given the locket to my mother on their first anniversary, but with his picture in it. When she died, he put hers and my picture in to remember her—me—by.”

“Why’d he leave you back East?”

“I was in finishing school in Pittsburgh,” she said. “Ma died and Pa joined the Army.

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