“What I need to discuss I’ll do so with your commander.”

  “Over here, Captain,” called a private, waving his hand.

  “The colonel’s in his office.”

  The captain dismounted and handed the reins to Slocum. “Take care of my horse. If you know how.”

  “I do, Captain,” Slocum said. He turned and handed the reins to the sergeant who had ridden immediately behind his captain. “The stable’s yonder,” Slocum said. “Your officer wants the horse taken care of. Proper-like.”

  The sergeant grabbed the reins from Slocum’s hands. If there had been hostility in the captain’s look, there was outright hatred in the sergeant’s. The feeling rippled back down the line of troopers when they saw that Slocum couldn’t have cared less what their officer or noncom felt.

  Slocum trailed the captain to the colonel’s office but ran into Davies, who shoved him back away from the office. Slocum started for his six-shooter but held back. This wasn’t the time or place to have it out with Davies.

  “They got things to talk over, Slocum,” the sergeant said. “You can give your report later.”

  “I haven’t seen the captain here before. He come this way often?” Slocum saw that this question needled Davies more than if he had drawn his six-gun and buffaloed the soldier. It was satisfying, but not quite as good as it would have been to lay the barrel of his Colt against the man’s head.

  If Slocum had heard loud arguments before, now there came a thunderstorm of cursing. From what Slocum could make out, there was little being said on the colonel’s part. It all came from Captain Wilson.

  Almost as soon as the thought came to him that the captain was delivering a dressing down to the colonel, Wilson stormed from the office. He paid no attention to anyone but those in his patrol as he ordered, “Sergeant, prepare the column. We’re moving out now!”

  The sergeant handed Wilson the reins to his horse. With a single bound the captain mounted, wheeled about and galloped away.

  “What put the burr under his saddle?” Slocum asked aloud. He turned to Davies, but the sergeant had disappeared back into the colonel’s office. Slocum followed but bumped into the sergeant as he came rushing back out, almost as fast as Captain Wilson had.

  “Outta the way, Slocum. I got to get into the field.”

  “Need a scout?”

  “Go to hell,” Davies snarled. He barked orders as he went. Slocum saw that the sergeant’s two cronies came running. In a few minutes, Davies had assembled four other troopers, and all rode out at a trot. Slocum leaned against a post at the edge of the boardwalk in front of the colonel’s office, weighing his choices. He shoved himself erect and hurried to the barracks, where he took the belongings of the dead soldiers, probably in Atkins’s patrol, and returned to the colonel’s office. He didn’t bother knocking but just barged in.

  Colonel Holman sat bolt upright in his chair, white as a ghost and staring at the wall. Slocum glanced in the direction the colonel stared, but saw nothing but bare wood.

  “I’ve got this for you,” Slocum said.

  “Your scout,” Holman said in a dead tone. He shook himself and came more alive, but the whiteness didn’t leave his face. Slocum had seen men with legs blown off who had the same complexion.

  “This is from Sergeant Atkins’s patrol. I can’t identify the troopers, but you can. You need to notify their families.” Slocum laid out the small items he had taken from the slain soldiers.

  “You found these?” For the first time, Holman looked more alert.

  “I was up near Red Spur and found them. Three men, all murdered. There was a running battle. I found spent cartridges all the way up the slope to a pass, then lost the trail there.”

  “What’d you do with the bodies?”

  “Buried them where they fell. Can you identify the men from all this? They might be from some other post.”

  “Some other post?”

  “I hadn’t realized the patrols from Fort Douglas ranged this far, but I was wrong. Captain Wilson has been in the field for a spell, from the trail-weary look to his men.” Slocum was prodding and finally hit a nerve. Colonel Holman turned on him, eyes flashing and color flooding back to his cheeks.

  “You will have nothing to do with that man. He is a disgrace to the Army and knows nothing of proper procedure.”

  Slocum started to ask about Davies’s mission, then held back.

  “You can notify the next of kin,” Slocum said, pointing to the few items on the colonel’s desk. He had not added to the pile the locket that might have belonged to Joshua Atkins. Something told him that it was too soon to claim that Sergeant Atkins had died, too. It might have been his distaste for giving such bad news to Laurel, but he didn’t think so. The locket had been purposefully hidden and there hadn’t been a body.

  “Dismissed,” Holman said. As Slocum went out the door, he saw the colonel sweeping everything off the desk so hard that it smashed against the side wall.

  Slocum never hesitated as he went to the stables, saddled his horse, slung more supplies over its rump, mounted and headed for the gate. The same sentry waved him through.

  “You’re gonna have to ride hard to catch up with Sergeant Davies,” the guard told him. “Never seen that man in such a hurry.”

  Slocum put his heels to his horse’s flanks and broke into a trot. He was still tired from the long ride back from Red Spur, and his horse needed rest also, but Slocum knew whatever had been simmering at Fort Crumpland had finally come to a boil. Holman worried over something, and Davies had the look of a man ready to kill.

  After a half-hour ride, Slocum found a Y in the road, one branch going south toward Newsome and the other due west. From the way the dust had been kicked up and other small signs alongside the road, Slocum saw that the western road had seen the most traffic. He kept riding for a spell longer, wondering what he would find when he sighted the riders ahead. The way Davies and the others had lit out, it seemed they intended to overtake Captain Wilson’s squad. The only reason Slocum could come up with was to fill the other soldiers full of lead. Wilson might have discovered how Davies and the others were killing robbers and keeping their loot. And from what Slocum had seen firsthand, Davies and his partners weren’t averse to doing the stickups themselves.

  As the sun died and left red smears across the sky, Slocum saw the bobbing heads of troopers riding dutifully ahead. His horse faltered now and again, so tired it couldn’t maintain a steady pace, but Slocum pushed it. He wanted to warn Captain Wilson that Davies was likely to ambush him. As he neared the tail end of the column, Slocum saw that he hadn’t found Sergeant Davies as he had worried about the detachment from Fort Douglas.

  He slowed and eventually drew rein, but the captain’s alert scout had spotted Slocum. Captain Wilson and two soldiers backtracked to where Slocum stood in the middle of the road.

  “You, what do you want?” Wilson peered at Slocum in the twilight, then said, “The impudent scout from back at Fort Crumpland. What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for Sergeant Davies, from the post. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  Wilson sputtered, then rasped out, “Get back to that ersatz fort and hope for the best.”

  “How’s that, Captain?” Slocum wasn’t sure what the officer meant.

  “I will arrest your Sergeant Davies and anyone else I happen across. Is that clear?”

  “You know what’s going on at the fort?” Slocum wasn’t too surprised. He had stumbled across it during a robbery, but the captain must have been ordered to put an end to the rampant holdups occurring and reached the same conclusion as to who was responsible.

  “I’m no fool. Such a charade cannot be carried off for long. I don’t know if you have any knowledge of it, and it does not matter. Everyone on that post is culpable. I will see every last one of you in prison!” With that, the captain put spurs to his horse and trotted off.

  Slocum rested his hand on his six-shooter, not sure if the soldiers the officer had left behind were intended to arrest him. They sneered at him and one spat in his direction; then they joined the commander. Slocum sat astride his horse as he watched the column disappear into the darkness.

  Thinking hard failed to produce any answers. He had expected to run into Davies first. He had expected Davies to rush after Captain Wilson and ambush his entire column since everything the officer had just said meant the cat was out of the bag. The days of hiding behind U.S. Army uniforms and thieving and murdering were gone. If Davies had slaughtered the captain and his men, the charade, as Wilson had called it, might continue a while longer.

  But where had Davies gotten off to? The terrain wasn’t hilly enough for Slocum to have missed the sergeant and his cronies on the ride west.

  “West,” Slocum said, a light dawning. “Wilson rode west with his soldiers. Davies went south toward Newsome.” He had no idea why Davies had gone in that direction, but he had seen evidence of recent travel along both roads. Slocum had followed the traces showing the greatest number of horsemen. But Davies had gone south.

  Slocum wheeled his horse about but could not get much more than a walk out of the exhausted animal. He angled off the road, intending to cut across country and catch up with Davies, but the horse slowed even more, picking its way over the countryside, wary of prairie dog holes in the dark.

  Eventually giving up, Slocum dismounted and walked, leading his horse to give it a chance to rest while still covering ground. He chafed at the delay, but he could only push the horse so far, and it had shown great heart over the past two weeks of hard travel into the Wasatch Mountains and back. More than an hour had passed by the time Slocum reached the southern branch of the road and turned toward Newsome.

  He doubted Davies was heading there, though he might be, since it was now the closest town. More likely, something else along the road had drawn the sergeant’s attention. Slocum had guessed wrong about what had lit the fire under Davies’s tail feathers, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have told Captain Wilson about Atkins’s patrol and everything else he had witnessed in the past few weeks.

  Slocum shrugged that off. Wilson knew. Why he hadn’t done anything at the time he spoke to—shouted at—Colonel Holman was a mystery. Having so few men with him might have dictated a return to Fort Douglas for reinforcements in case Davies had considerable support. Still, Slocum failed to see why Holman wouldn’t have ordered Davies into his office. And Tartaglia. Slocum could not forget Tartaglia. The lieutenant was as corrupt as the sergeant and might be the mastermind of the gang.

  His horse stumbled and almost fell.

  “Whoa, boy,” Slocum said, patting the gelding on the neck to calm it. “You need a rest and so do I.” He led the horse to the side of the road and let it crop at grass growing there while he hunted for water. He found a small stream, filled his canteen and washed the trail dust from his face, then started back to where he’d left this horse.

  The steady clop-clop of hooves warned him. He ran back to his horse and grabbed the reins, tugging to get the tired animal out of sight of the road. He led the horse down into a ravine. Its head still poked up above ground level, but Slocum thought the darkness would hide that. He worked to keep the gelding from making too much noise.

  The horsemen came closer. Slocum had worried that the approaching horses were ridden by Davies and his men, but they came from the direction of the fork in the road. From his vantage he saw the silhouettes of an officer at the head of a column. He almost called out, thinking Captain Wilson had decided to go after Davies; then he saw more soldiers behind the officer.

  Lots more soldiers. A full company of soldiers, all headed southward.

  Risking being seen, Slocum pulled himself up the dry bank and crawled a few yards closer, until he identified the soldiers.

  Colonel Holman rode stiffly at the head of a full company of men from Fort Crumpland. Slocum almost called and waved to attract the officer’s attention, but he stopped when it came to him that he had no idea why the colonel had fielded so many troopers. He might be following up on Captain Wilson’s accusations about Davies—or it might be something else entirely.

  Slocum waited until the company had disappeared into the night, their dust rising to hide the stars in an otherwise cloudless dark sky. He sat beside his horse, trying to puzzle out what was going on. He fell asleep with thoughts of Davies, Holman, Wilson, Joshua Atkins and Laurel swirling chaotically in his head.

  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. Rejoined, actually, since he had been a soldier during the war. He had been decorated for bravery, so they took him back to help train recruits. He knew everything there was to know—where’d you find it?” she asked suddenly. “Did you find him, John? His body?” Laurel’s own body quaked as she pulled her shoulders back and bravely faced him for the bad news.

  “He might not be dead,” Slocum said, hating himself for sugarcoating what he had found. He was starting to think that maybe Joshua Atkins really was dead, but Laurel had to keep going. Slocum didn’t stop to consider that giving her false hope was crueler than simply telling her there was no hope.

  “Tell me everything, John. Please.” She took his hand in both of hers. Her touch was icy cold as she led him to the fire and sank down. He sat beside her on a log, their legs pressed together, as he related to her everything he had found.

  “Only three bodies?” she said when he had finished. “None of them sounds like my father. So you think he is still alive? Really?”

  Slocum hesitated lying to her again but couldn’t bring himself to say anything more than “Yes.”

  “Oh, John, thank you so much. You’ve done more than I could have hoped. Short of bringing my father back, you’ve done everything for me, and I have nothing to give you.” She drew back a little. The firelight cast soft shadows on her face, but Slocum saw how her eyes gleamed brightly with unshed tears.

  She closed those shining blue eyes and tipped her head back slightly. As her lips parted just a little, Slocum could no longer resist. He kissed her. The kiss became more passionate as Laurel scooted closer to him on the log. Her arms went around his neck and pulled him down powerfully to her.

  Their lips crushed together and then parted enough so their tongues could dance and dart about, entering one mouth and retreating so the other could follow. Soon enough, they were both gasping for breath. Slocum reached down and pressed his palm into her breast. Beneath his hand, under her crisp white blouse, he felt her heart hammering fiercely. Against his chest, she did what he was doing.

  “You’re excited,” she said.

  “Go lower and you’ll find out exactly how excited. You’re one beautiful woman.” Slocum caught his breath when Laurel obeyed his command. Her hand slipped down his chest, fingertips dancing lightly until they reached his gunbelt.

  She quickly freed him of his cross-draw holster and Colt, but that wasn’t what brought his sudden intake of breath. Laurel pressed hard into the mound growing at his crotch. Lightning flashed throughout his loins, forcing Slocum to work hard to keep from embarrassing himself like some young buck out on his first hunt.

  Laurel slid off the log and dropped to her knees in front of Slocum. She worked diligently to get the buttons on his fly open. He sprang out, long and tall and proud. He was out in the night air for only a moment. Laurel pounced on him like a dog on a bone. She took him in both hands, stroking all around, going through the tangle of the hair surrounding his manhood, then bent down. Slocum expected a sudden surge of tongue and lip.