Slocum 428 (14 page)

“By God, by God, you'd think with all the critters roaming around these parts that I could at least rassle me a bear or a moose or buck or something, heck anything, to get to town even faster.” Jigger was feeling pretty good, despite the fact that he was still seeing double. Only time that ever happened for such a long spurt was when he'd been on a toot.

But he reckoned that would clear up before long. Hell, he didn't care one way or another. So long as he could find Whitaker. And if he saw two of him, why, he'd just have to gut 'em both.

As he trudged toward town, the raw cold and creeping snow seemed to find its way under every ragtag piece of clothing he wore. He'd swaddled himself as best he could with bits of his own togs, plus whatever he could find in Hella's cabin. But it didn't seem enough.

“Have to work harder at it, that's all. Make the most of the journey.” He grunted with his renewed efforts, stomping faster in the snowshoes. Would he ever get there? “Bah!” he shouted into the blowing snow. Of course he would! It was the blows to his head that put the doubt into him. Normally he was fearless, as sure of himself as nature was that snow would fall and then summer would bring sun.

Soon, though, he tired once again. Felt fatigue weighing him down like a sopping, cold wool blanket. He wasn't certain how long he'd been walking, but he knew his head throbbed and pounded worse than ever, and his legs felt as though they were lengths of sappy green wood. He had nearly reached the big roadside boulder that he knew marked the halfway point, so that told him he had been walking toward Timber Hills for several hours.

By then it was nearly dark, and he felt as though he'd been trudging along for days, with nothing to show for it save a whole lot of aching muscles, a powerful thirst, and a pounding noggin. He leaned against the ice-slick side of the boulder and closed his eyes. He slowly leaned his head back against the mammoth rock and let his confused feelings out in a long, low sigh.

Could be he wasn't in his right mind just yet. Could be Hella knew of what she spoke. Could be he needed to heal up a mite before he lit out after Whitaker. He sighed again and tried to work up the courage to push off the rock and once more take to the trail.

But the very thought of Whitaker's name was enough to force him to grit his teeth, and just at the moment he knew to push himself upright again, he heard a familiar sound, uptrail, but approaching fast. What was it?

No, couldn't be . . . The boys? His boys? Titus and Balzac? No other horses he knew sounded so bold in the snow. Their huffing and blowing, those steady hoofbeats drum-drum-drumming, all taken together made him sure he was hearing his boys, all right. But who would be driving them?

As if in response, he saw his boys picking them up and putting them down, followed tight behind by his old log sledge leaning with the bend of the trail, creaking with the effort, and laden, he could see in the near dark, not by logs, but by men, lots of men. His loggers! One of them near the front held a storm lantern by the bail, swinging it in slow, wide arcs. Another man called out something into the blowing snow.

Jigger raised his arms and was ready to shout when he heard what it was the men were shouting. It was his name, over and over again. “Jigger, Jigger, Jigger . . . ”

They nearly coursed by him, so hard were they sliding, but he waved his arms and shouted back, even though the effort felt as though his head were splitting open anew. But it had worked. The man teaming his boys yanked hard on the lines, and the huffing team slowly drummed to a halt a good many sledge lengths past him. Jigger did his best to run toward them. He passed right by the sledge full of men and hugged his boys, Balzac and Titus.

Within seconds, the men had piled off the sledge and were shouting, “Can it be? Jigger? It is, by God!”

They swarmed him, hugging and clapping his back with big, mittened hands. “Where you been? What happened to you?”

All their questions matched his own, and it took a few minutes for each side to get the basic story out of the other. Finally they dragged Jigger aboard the sledge, dosed him liberally with blankets and whiskey, and began singing chorus after chorus of old log camp ditties not fit for any ears other than those of logging men.

And they continued on toward town to help Jigger do what he'd set out to do—and what they also had set out to do: deal with the one man they all agreed was the vicious rascal who deserved nothing but the hard and harsh treatment they would soon see fit to dole out.

“Look here,” said Hella, bending down, stripping off a mitten and palming barely covered tracks in the narrow mountain logging road.

Slocum thumbed a match alight and lit a small candle stub. The wind had died down to the point where the flames barely guttered. Slocum didn't trust the wind, and just knew it wouldn't be long before another gust whipped up the fresh snow into a rough biting breeze once again. He held a cupped hand close to the flame and bent low to the trail.

“Jigger?”

“Has to be. But look, other tracks. Men's boots, but no snowshoes. And hoofprints.” She moved backward on her knees up the trail, feeling with her hand, peering low.

Slocum stayed close, holding the light-giving candle. “Sledge runner,” he said. “Lots of men's tracks. Had to be the men from the Tamarack, likely out looking for Jigger.”

“And you,” she said, looking at Slocum mere inches away.

“Sure,” he said, not convinced. Still, it was nice of her to say so. It had been a damn long time since anyone had cared enough about him to send out a gang of men looking for him. It felt good to be included in such sentiment.

“Now what?” said Hella, standing and stretching her back.

“Now,” said Slocum, doing the same. “Now we head to town to do the same thing they're likely doing.”

“What's that?”

“Track Whitaker. We have to get there in time to prevent a killing. And that's not the worst news.”

“It's not?” said Hella.

“Nope. We're on snowshoes.”

“Good thing it's all downhill!” She took off at a run, trailing a laugh.

Slocum sighed and put a hand to his sore ribs. As he took off after her, he wondered once again—and not for the last time—what in the hell he was doing up here with all these crazy critters in the mountains anyway.

By the time Jigger and his men slid on down the main street of Timber Hills, they were all seeing double, but Jigger was feeling better, he figured, than a man in his condition had any right to feel.

“Girly! Where's my Ermaline at?” Jigger roved up and down the street with his men, bottles in hand, looking for his daughter. “Now split up. And if any of you find my daughter or that weak-kneed soft boy, Jordan, you bring them to me. You hear?”

Old Amos from the livery joined Bumpy from the mercantile—two of Jigger's oldest friends—and tried to persuade him to leave off the foolishness and come with them for a nice big feed at the pancake house. But it didn't work that way. The little logging boss was in high dudgeon, and he had his men with him. There was to be no stopping Jigger McGee that day.

“Whitaker! You come on out here in the street!” Jigger shouted and wobbled on his feet. “I aim to drop you like the sack of bear turds you are!”

Finally Amos and Bumpy did the only thing they knew to do—they fetched Ermaline McGee. She was at least as tough as her old man, might be she could simmer him down. She had been pulling on her boots in the foyer of Mrs. Tigg's boardinghouse when they knocked.

“Course I heard him. I'm not deaf. I was just about to head to the source of all that noise when you two knocked. Now out of my way!” And off she strode, the two older men in her wake, each wondering what levels of excitement the next few minutes might bring to Timber Hills.

“There you are, daughter!” Jigger's voice, a slurred thing from all the whiskey he'd consumed, nonetheless rang up and down the main street. “I been expecting you. Got any more bad news for me?”

“What happened to you, Daddy?”

“Oh, so now you care about what happened to old Jigger, eh?” He took another swig from the bottle he was holding. “Your foul father-in-law-to-be is what happened to me, that's what!”

Daughter or no, Ermaline knew better than to try to take that bottle of spirits away from her father. Once Jigger McGee started drinking, you'd do best to let him finish on his own. Or prepare to draw back a bloody stump.

“Where's that soft bastard you aim to marry anyway?”

“He's probably at home right where he should be. Where anyone with a lick of sense would be if you and your foolish liquored-up log monkeys weren't here disrupting the lives of decent folk.”

“Oh, decent folk, is it? Pardon me all to hell.”
Glug, glug
. “I thought this here was Timber Hills, the town that Jigger's log monkeys built!”

At that moment, Slocum and Hella trudged into town, bone-tired from pushing so hard to get there on snowshoes. The first thing they saw was the cold main street of the little town beginning to fill with people, half of them loggers from the Tamarack Camp. Rising up from the center, they heard Jigger's rooster-like cackle, matched by a female version of it.

“Maybe we're not too late to save Whitaker's mangy hide,” said Hella.

“More to the point, we'd be saving Jigger's skinny neck from a rope,” said Slocum, unbuttoning his coat. Though the situation seemed an easy one to defuse, much of it comical, even, given the laughter and drunken wobblings of half the people present, he knew that those very attributes could also cause it to turn on its head with fingersnap speed.

“Hella, you try to find Whitaker. Keep him safe somehow. I'll deal with this lot.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Lady,” said Slocum, “I just handled a cave full of skoocooms. Don't you think I can deal with a few drunk loggers?”

“Ha!” she said, heading for the Bluebird Saloon and Whitaker's office. “And I never said they were skoocooms.”

“I like that you can lie to me and laugh about it!” He smiled at her retreating form, then shucked his Colt revolver and headed into the crowd.

It didn't take but a few seconds to reach the core—Jigger and his daughter. Had to be her. They bore similar facial features, and Slocum was pleased to see at least she wasn't sporting a beard. Other than that, and her long hair and dress, you could easily match them up as father and daughter.

She was also bossy. And appeared to have command of the situation, because Jigger couldn't get a word in edgewise. The rest of the gathered people, loggers and townsfolk alike, all stood close by, listening to her. “And another thing. I intend to marry Jordan Whitaker, with or without your blessing. I love him, Daddy, and that's all there is to it. I don't know a person in this town who could say he's at all like his father.”

“But it's Whitaker's son!” said Jigger in a desperate quick plea.

“And that makes no never mind to me. He's a good man. A bit . . . soft, I will admit. But he's not at all like his daddy.”

Jigger let his bottle drop to the hard-packed snow of the street, seemingly defeated. “My Tamarack . . . ” he muttered.

“Your Tamarack will be just fine, I promise. Why do you think I have been all nicey-nice with Daddy Whitaker? He is in a good situation right now, but he's not as smart as he thinks. Jordan and I, we both got educated back East and we will be running his affairs soon, and yours, too, if you'll listen to reason and let us. This whole town will be happier and richer than ever, and you won't have all the headaches that have dogged you for years. Don't you see, Daddy? I have strung Whitaker along for you, done all this for you!”

Before Jigger could quite lift his battered head and stare at his daughter with watery, twitchy eyes, the assemblage all threw up their hands and cheered. And then a gunshot, muffled, but distinct in the dead-cold air, erupted from what sounded like the Bluebird Saloon.

“Whitaker!” someone shouted.

But Slocum was already on his way there, with one person in mind, and it wasn't Torrance Whitaker. “Hella,” he whispered, thundering toward the Bluebird Saloon.

Moments before the crowd erupted in cheers, Hella rapped hard on Torrance Whitaker's office door at the back of the Bluebird Saloon.

“First one through that door I'll shoot, I swear it!”

Hella sneered at Torrance Whitaker's fat shout—even his voice sounded fat to her. “Whitaker, it's Hella Bridger. Let me in so I can explain this thing. You need to keep your head down just now, stay put, and let me help protect you. It's just a matter of time before that mob of drunken loggers makes its way over here and tries to pull you out the keyhole.”

She heard no response. “I'm coming in.” She hefted her own revolver in one hand, kept her rifle cradled in the crook of the other arm, and tried the knob. It turned and in she walked, hugging the door frame.

The office was dark, but she knew he was in there, heard his fat man breaths, quick and shallow. He even breathes fat, she thought. “Whitaker? Light a lamp, will you? We need to make plans to barricade this door, just in case Slocum doesn't have any luck in making those lunkheaded loggers listen to him.”

“Don't come any closer!”

The shout came straight from the back of the room. She heard a squawk—had to be his chair—and then there was a flash of fire and she felt a pain like she'd never felt before drive into her left shoulder, high up. It spun her half out the door frame, and she dropped the rifle and revolver.

It took Hella a few moments to come around to the full realization of the situation. “Whitaker,” she said in a voice much softer than she meant it to sound. “You bastard—you shot me . . . ” She felt cold, then warm all over, and a pulsing pain that kept growing worse. The stink of gun smoke hung heavy in the air.

Then he was standing over her. “Damn, you are a fat one,” she said, then felt herself losing consciousness.

From the street, Whitaker heard shouts closing in, drawing closer to the Bluebird. “They're coming,” he wheezed. “Oh no, what have I done? What do I do now?” He wrung his fat, sweaty hands together, then saw Hella's revolver. He grunted, snatched it off the floor, and saw her, still breathing. Good, just unconscious.

He grabbed the back of her collar, couldn't help noticing how pretty she was, even in the darkly lit, smoky office, and dragged her toward the back door. It led to the alley the businesses on that side of the street all used for deliveries. The alley itself backed right up to the near hill that the town was built up against.

Had to get out, use her somehow as a shield. Block them with her, keep them away from him until he could explain it all. That's the plan, he thought—have to get out of here, hole up. Maybe Jordan will have an idea. Have to get out of here, can't be caught inside.

He fought with the doorknob, realized it was locked, and fidgeted with the deadbolt. Finally it sprang open and he dragged the flopped woman on out into the snowy alley. It took a whole lot of doing, dragging that woman backward up the hill. He switchbacked, grunting and letting out low squeals, cursing the town, his son, McGee, everybody.

What was happening? Everything seemed to be falling apart, just like all the other towns. But this time it felt final, like he might not have another shot at money if he didn't make this work out somehow.

He heard the crowd thundering through his beloved Bluebird Saloon, figured he could make it over the top of the little hill, not once thinking that his tracks as well as those of the dragging feet of the trapper woman would be seen all the way up. He didn't care; he just had to get her away from there.

Maybe he could say he found her that way; maybe it was self-defense. Everyone knew she was a crazy, wild woman; maybe he could convince them that she had attacked him! Yes, that was just the story he'd use.

At the top of the hill he paused, flopped backward in the snow, the woman falling across his legs. He'd just wait here, let the crazy woman bleed. He didn't care a whit about her. He'd tell them all she attacked him and chased him up here, so he shot her. That was the plan, a good one. As good as he was likely to come up with anyway.

Whitaker closed his eyes as he lay in the snow, the bleeding woman still draped across his legs, and he worked to catch his breath before the crowd barreled through the Bluebird, past his office, out the back door, then on up the hill toward him.

•   •   •

A shadow fell across his face. He opened his eyes and looked up to see a face he'd never seen. And one he didn't believe was real. And then Torrance Whitaker realized in the flash of an instant that he would never have to worry about amassing a fortune ever again.

As the huge, freakish, hairy face descended on him, he screamed, screamed so loud for mere seconds that his throat shredded, began to blow out. And then the huge hairy thing lifted him high, high, high . . . and even though his voice had left him, Whitaker felt himself being ripped apart, limb from limb and limb from torso. And he kept on screaming, no sound coming from his bloody mouth. But he watched as his agony erupted in a spray of red against the high, blue mountain sky, as it colored the tops of the tall, tall trees at the very edge of his vision.