She flashed that smile and showed those dimples now. “My horse pulled up lame, and I had to return,” Slocum explained. “Might be a day or two before the horse can walk again.” He knew that the strong liniment might fix the horse up by morning, but somehow that wasn’t what Darlene wanted to hear. Slocum found himself more and more interested in finding out what she did want.

  “We can have some dinner, then,” she said almost primly. “I ate at a restaurant down the street this morning, with Hugh, before he rode out to the maharajah’s camp.”

  They went down the street and into the small café to take seats by the window.

  “Maharajah?” Slocum asked. He thought he had heard the word before but couldn’t rightly place when or where.

  “An Indian fellow of some exalted rank. Royalty, I believe.”

  “Indian? Like a Crow or Cheyenne?”

  “No, silly,” said Darlene, reaching over and putting her hand familiarly on his. “East India, not like an Indian from these parts. He is a king or something. Royalty.”

  “Oh,” Slocum said. He was more inclined to worry over ordering dinner than he was about some foreigner who had come to Wyoming, probably to bag a buffalo or two to mount on the wall of his far-off palace.

  “He is very regal looking. I saw him when Hugh rode out with him this morning. The maharajah gave him a horse, a fine stallion that must be a thoroughbred.”

  “I prefer quarter horses,” Slocum said, working around the chicken and dumplings he had ordered. Trail victuals were all right but nothing matched freshly baked bread and dumplings straight out of the pan.

  “Well, it was a fine-looking horse worth a great deal of money, I’m sure.”

  Slocum and Darlene finished the meal in silence. He started to tell her of his hunt for the creature making the sounds that he and the Crow braves had heard but never quite got around to it. Another sip of coffee or a piece of peach pie, something always got in the way.

  Sated, Slocum leaned back and looked at Darlene. She was a good-looking woman, he decided, but he was not the kind to cut in on another man’s woman, especially one who was as good a friend as Hugh Malley. Still, from the covetous glances she gave him, he knew what was on her mind. A good meal followed by a tumble in the hay would make the end of the day about perfect.

  A sudden tumult outside brought Slocum around to stare through the window.

  “That must be your maharajah,” he said. A man dressed in what looked like cloth chased with gold thread rode in a magnificent carriage. He was swarthy, with jet-black hair and a long, straight nose. Slocum had never seen that many kings or princes, but this had to be what a prince or maharajah looked like. Fine clothing, the flash of jeweled rings on most of his fingers, a carriage pulled by two prancing white horses, and seated beside him was a woman whose beauty took Slocum’s breath away.

  “Let’s go get a closer look,” he said. Slocum fumbled in his shirt pocket and dropped a few greenbacks onto the table and went to the door just as the carriage drew past.

  The woman beside the maharajah looked his way. Slocum felt an electric surge pass through him. Then she was gone and Hugh came riding up, waving his hat and howdying with any of the townspeople who would return his greeting.

  “John, Darlene!” Hugh bent over and stroked Darlene’s cheek before straightening. “Pretty fancy, eh?”

  “Malley!” called the maharajah. “Attend, please!”

  “Gotta go.” Hugh blew Darlene a quick kiss and cantered off to ride alongside the carriage.

  “I wish we could have found out more,” Darlene said, frowning. “It was rude of the maharajah to order him about like that. He might work for him, but Hugh is certainly not his slave or servant.”

  “Royalty thinks different,” Slocum said, but he had to agree with Darlene. The maharajah wanted to make a big impression more than he wanted to show common courtesy. The Indian potentate descended from his carriage amid retainers bowing and scraping. To Slocum’s disgust, Hugh jumped from his horse and similarly bowed as the maharajah passed by.

  “Please see to buying the supplies we need,” the maharajah ordered Hugh in a haughty voice, then dismissed him with a wave of the hand, which sparkled in the late-evening light from all the gems on his rings.

  “Go on, talk to Hugh while he buys the supplies,” Slocum said. “I’ll see what this gent has to say.” Slocum couldn’t keep his eyes off the slender woman who descended after the maharajah. Her ebony eyes locked with his again, and Slocum felt the electric tingle once more.

  “Wait!” the maharajah called and motioned Hugh to him. They spoke at length, then Hugh reluctantly mounted and rode from town with only a quick, stolen glance over his shoulder at Darlene as he left. The maharajah spoke rapidly in a singsong tongue that sent other servants rushing about to buy the supplies instead of Hugh.

  “I wanted to say more than hello to him,” Darlene complained.

  Slocum and the maharajah stared at each other for a moment, then the man smiled slightly, beckoned to his entourage and walked down the middle of Hoback Junction’s main street as if he passed out handfuls of money to the citizens instead of simply smiling at them and saying a few words here and there.

  “Please, John. Can you help me see Hugh? This isn’t right, the way he chased him off like a naughty boy sent off to bed without his supper.”

  Slocum said nothing but felt inclined to go along with Darlene. Watching the Indian prince swagger along the main street like he owned it and everyone he saw caused Slocum’s hackles to rise. But the sight of the woman accompanying the maharajah caused another portion of Slocum’s anatomy to stir.

  “John, are you sure we can get into the camp this way?” asked Darlene. The woman’s nervousness increased the closer they got to the maharajah’s bivouac outside town. “There must be sentries everywhere.”

  “I know,” Slocum said. He had easily avoided the three men with the thick bushy black beards and the fierce, fanatical eyes. Whatever they looked for, it wasn’t a man and woman slipping through the shadows and getting closer to the maharajah’s camp. Slocum wouldn’t want to tangle with any of the men, but they were ineffective lookouts.

  “There’s the maharajah’s tent,” Slocum said. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure that out. The tent stood almost fifteen feet high and billowed softly in the late-night wind. The cloth appeared to be something more than the waxed canvas used in most Army tents. The symbols painted on the sides were strange and of unknown significance, but moving inside, silhouetted against the sides, were two people.

  Slocum immediately recognized the maharajah. It took a few more seconds to decide that the other dark outline moving slowly back and forth belonged to the woman who had ridden with him. The shadow robbed the woman of her subtle curves and utter, exotic beauty and reduced her to little more than a smudge in the night.

  “Where would Hugh be?”

  “Servants’ quarters,” Slocum said. Darlene looked at him sharply, but he was not joking. He pointed to an area near the rope corral. Hugh wouldn’t have been hired only to scout, a skill he almost totally lacked. The maharajah would want to get his money’s worth and make him tend the horses and any other livestock they had with them.

  He guided Darlene through the camp unobserved. She let out a squeal of glee when she saw Hugh sitting on a rock, working away at polishing a harness. Slocum thought it was a strange thing to be doing in the middle of the night but he said nothing.

  “Darlin’!” Hugh grabbed his sweetheart and spun her around. “How’d you get here?”

  “John brought me,” she said. “Why didn’t you talk to me back in town?”

  “There’s a lot I have to say and, well, that maharajah don’t like his men lollygaggin’ about.” Hugh looked over at Slocum and grinned weakly. “He wanted all this here leather shined up before the morning hunt.”

  “He won’t notice, not if he’s actually going to hunt,” Slocum said. “Buffalo?”

  “I think so. I told him there was a herd east of town.”

  “Is there?” Slocum hadn’t seen any trace of buffaloes when they had ridden into Hoback Junction the day before.

  “I think so. I was going into Hoback Canyon and felt the ground shaking. That’d be a big herd, wouldn’t it?”

  Slocum knew herds of buffalo had been counted of upward of several hundred thousand, but not recently, not after the Europeans had taken a fancy to buffalo robes and the hunters had thinned the herds almost to extinction.

  “Could be,” he allowed. “I’ll let the two of you have some time together.”

  “I can find my way back to town, John,” Darlene said, looking at Hugh with admiration in her eyes. Admiration and more than a tad of lust, Slocum saw. He got almost twenty yards off into the woods beyond the maharajah’s camp when he heard it again.

  It was the same sound he and the Crow braves had heard the night before. Only it was closer. Much closer. Slocum turned slowly and located the noise coming from a draw not a hundred yards away. He touched his six-shooter but decided there was no need for it. Whatever made the sound was too big for a mere six-gun to be of any use.

  But Slocum could find out what made the sound.

  It came again, grew louder, more insistent. Mingled with it, under its strident call, came a human voice speaking words Slocum could not understand. This time he drew his six-shooter but knew he had a target that would die if he plugged it.

  The furor died down and the normal night sounds returned to his sharp ears. He made his way through the darkness with unerring skill and found the ravine where the ruckus emanated. He stared for a moment, then laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. He holstered his Colt Navy and brushed the tears away.

  “What is so funny?” came a soft voice from his right. Slocum turned and saw the woman who had ridden with the maharajah standing in shadow and wrapped in a dark brown cloak that completely hid her body. Her eyes sparkled as she stared at him. “Is our elephant so funny that you laugh at him?”

  “Folks in these parts think it is a ghost or some Indian spirit.”

  “Perhaps they are right. We are Hindu and believe in reincarnation. The elephant might be possessed of the spirit of someone from a former life.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, but elephants are circus creatures,” Slocum said. “They shouldn’t be the cause of so much commotion. The people in Hoback Junction might take it into their heads to organize a hunt.” He knew this was the furthest thing from their minds. The citizens of that fine small town were terrified, but when they found out an elephant made the sounds that frightened them in the middle of the night, they might turn nasty with anger.

  “You do not fear the elephant,” the woman said. She moved toward Slocum, gliding rather than walking. She stopped a few feet away, and he caught the scent of an exotic perfume. From this distance he got a better look at her face and saw that she wore a bright red dot between her eyes. The thought flashed through his mind that it was like a bull’s-eye, but he said nothing.

  “You are different from others of this continent we have met.”

  “My name’s John Slocum. You are?” He politely touched the brim of his hat.

  “I am called Lakshmi,” she said.

  “You married to the maharajah fellow?”

  She eyed him for a moment, then turned away without answering. Lakshmi stared at the elephant in its pen.

  “It is a very powerful beast, but very gentle, unless provoked.”

  Slocum knew a warning when he heard one. He wondered why she thought it necessary to caution him as she had. Before he could ask, a heavy hand clamped on his shoulder. Slocum turned, his six-shooter half out of its holster as he came around. He recoiled when a knifepoint lightly pricked his belly.

  “Ali is my protector,” Lakshmi said. She spoke rapidly in Hindi to Ali, who drew back but kept his hand on Slocum’s shoulder.

  “If he doesn’t let go of me, I’ll beat him to death with his own arm.” Slocum saw Ali react and knew the man spoke English, or at least understood it enough to know he had been threatened. Lakshmi hurriedly spoke. Ali backed off, releasing his grip.

  “It is not wise to anger Ali,” the woman said. “He is a fierce, formidable enemy.”

  “Cemeteries are full of the fierce and the formidable,” Slocum said.

  “You are either very brave or very foolish,” Lakshmi said.

  “Which do you think?” asked Slocum.

  “Foolish,” the woman answered without hesitation. She pursed her lips as if pronouncing a death sentence. “Very foolish. Now leave or Ali will feed you to the elephant.”

  “And here I thought they ate hay and not meat.”

  Lakshmi turned and stared at him. A tiny smile came to her lips. The smile faded quickly as Ali stepped between them. She drew her heavy cloak around her trim shoulders and drifted silently into the night, Ali following closely. Slocum turned from the impenetrable darkness where Lakshmi had vanished back to the elephant in its pen. He shook his head in disbelief and wondered if the banker might pay him the hundred dollars for discovering what made the strange nocturnal noises.

  Slocum shrugged it off. Let Hugh Malley collect his due. He was probably going to earn every penny he made from the haughty maharajah and deserved a bonus for putting up with such insufferable behavior. Slocum fetched his horse and rode back to town, vowing to get back on the trail at first light.

  4

  Slocum examined his horse’s bruised leg and decided it was healed enough to push on. The night before, as he rode back from the maharajah’s camp, he had worried that he had thrust the horse back into service too soon, but the valiant roan had not hobbled or even missed a single stride along the trail. Still, Slocum worried. He did not want to be in the middle of nowhere and have the horse break a leg because he had pushed it too far too fast.

  “We’ll be on the trail soon. No hurry,” he said, patting the horse’s neck. Slocum tended his gear while the roan fed. He took special care of his two six-shooters, the one he carried slung at his left hip in a cross-draw holster and the other wrapped in oilcloth stashed in his saddlebags. He had learned the value of keeping a second pistol handy back during the war.

  Thoughts of blood and death fluttered through his mind. He had ridden with Quantrill and had never been one of the wallflowers when it came to killing. The Raiders would gallop into a Yankee town shooting at anything that moved. Like the others, Slocum had been festooned with six-guns, firing until one emptied and then switching to another and another. He often carried as many as ten six-shooters, which gave him the firepower of an entire squad of soldiers. The rest of Quantrill’s Raiders were similarly armed.

  Since those days, he had carried only two six-guns and those had served him well, when added to his trusty Winchester.

  He was almost finished oiling his rifle and making certain the cartridges fed smoothly into the chamber when he heard a flurry outside the stables. He glanced up to see Darlene looking around wildly. Her hair was in disarray as if she had ridden through a tornado, and her brown eyes were wide and frightened.

  “John!” she called. The woman rushed into the stables and grabbed for him. “You’ve got to help!” She clung to him like she was drowning and he was her only hope for salvation.

  “What’s wrong?” Darlene wasn’t the hysterical sort. She might nag a man to distraction but during the trip from Colorado Slocum had never seen her get anywhere near this upset.

  “It’s Hugh. He’s dead!”

  For a moment Slocum stared down at the woman. Her words came as if from a distance and in some foreign tongue he only vaguely understood. Then his mind snapped free and began to work. He had left Darlene in the maharajah’s camp with Hugh not twelve hours earlier, and now his friend was dead.

  “How’d it happen?” Slocum asked.

  “We, you left me, and we went off to—” Darlene turned even paler, and her hands trembled as she lifted a handkerchief to her lips. She sucked in a deep breath, composed herself and started her explanation again. “After we had enjoyed one another’s company, I started to leave to return to town when someone called to Hugh.”

  “Someone? Who was it?”

  “I don’t know who it was. I never saw him. He was some distance away and barked out the order from behind a tent for Hugh to follow him. Only a couple words. ‘Come. Now!’ No more’n that. I thought he might have meant someone else since I couldn’t see him, but Hugh seemed to know that he was the one being ordered around.”

  “Was it the maharajah?” Slocum remembered how bossy the Indian prince could be.

  “I . . . I honestly cannot say. It rather startled me, and I didn’t pay any attention, Hugh and me just having—” Darlene swallowed hard and dabbed at her teary eyes. “I went to ride off when I heard that horrid noise. Hugh had told me it was an elephant. I saw one once back in Illinois at a traveling circus, but never saw the one the maharajah keeps. Until then. After he screamed, I raced to the elephant pen. It was Hugh, but the scream wasn’t a word or a call for help. It was just a . . . scream!”

  “Did you find him? Hugh?”

  “I heard the trumpeting and then one last shriek of pain and rode to the pen where they keep that nasty beast and saw blood and Hugh on the ground and—”

  “Calm down,” Slocum said. He knew it was difficult for the woman to lose her lover and find his crushed body, but he wanted to get the details. He owed it to Hugh to be certain it was an accident. The way Darlene posed it, Hugh Malley might have been the victim of a murderer in the maharajah’s camp. Hugh knew nothing about elephants, and anyone luring him close to the beast could easily have sicced it on him.

  “What did you do when you found him?”

  “I tried to get someone in their camp to help, but they all ignored me. I rode right back to find you, John. I knew you’d know what to do.”