Ralph Compton Slaughter Canyon (9781101559499) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - A Challenge in the Night

  Chapter 2 - Sinister Forces

  Chapter 3 - An Army of Gunmen

  Chapter 4 - Lost Souls

  Chapter 5 - “Mr. President, This Is Blackmail.”

  Chapter 6 - The Quitter

  Chapter 7 - Cold-blooded Murder

  Chapter 8 - A Great Enterprise

  Chapter 9 - Blacks and Jews

  Chapter 10 - The Question

  Chapter 11 - The South Will Rise Again

  Chapter 12 - Two Tons of Gold

  Chapter 13 - Teetering on a Knife-Edge

  Chapter 14 - An Ace in the Hole

  Chapter 15 - Of Blackjacks and Brass Knuckles

  Chapter 16 - At the Royal Arms Inn

  Chapter 17 - A Ravening Sea Wolf

  Chapter 18 - El Dorado

  Chapter 19 - Brass Buttons for a Mad Dog

  Chapter 20 - Treasure!

  Chapter 21 - A Great Secret

  Chapter 22 - The Death of a Captain

  Chapter 23 - A Terrible Warning

  Chapter 24 - Council of War

  Chapter 25 - Matt Battles Takes a Hand

  Chapter 26 - A Dangerous Invitation

  Chapter 27 - Death of the Albatross

  Chapter 28 - The Fuse Is Lit

  Chapter 29 - A Clash of Steel

  Chapter 30 - A Ship of Ill Omen

  Chapter 31 - The Rocket’s Red Glare

  Chapter 32 - At the Slave Port

  Chapter 33 - The Iron Handmaidens

  Chapter 34 - At the Admiral Duperre

  Chapter 35 - Murder and Hostages

  Chapter 36 - Warful Pens a Letter

  Chapter 37 - The Iron Cage

  Chapter 38 - A Desperate Plan

  Chapter 39 - A Daring Escape

  Chapter 40 - The Saracens Head

  Chapter 41 - Shark Bait

  Chapter 42 - Betrayed!

  Chapter 43 - A Sea Chase

  Chapter 44 - Slaughter on the Deck

  Chapter 45 - Battles Struggles with His Conscience

  Chapter 46 - Durango’s Warning

  Chapter 47 - A Pact with the Devil

  Chapter 48 - Toucey Turns a Deaf Ear

  Chapter 49 - Butcher Blanchard

  Chapter 50 - A Thunder of Gunfire

  Chapter 51 - Vive La France!

  Chapter 52 - The Jewish Doctor

  Chapter 53 - Broken Dreams

  Chapter 54 - The Last Good-bye

  Afterword

  Teaser chapter

  SUSPICIOUS

  Durango stared at Battles. He was a swarthy man in his late twenties with lank black hair and a great beak of a nose overhanging a thin pencil mustache. His eyes were a startling green, inherited from the Irish laborer father he never knew, a striking contrast to the Mexican bandito costume and wide sombrero he affected.

  “I don’t believe you hid it,” he said finally. “I think you being here is a setup and there never was any money, or any killing either.”

  “You saying I’m a liar, Durango?” Battles said.

  The man nodded. “Yeah, I’m calling it.”

  Battles had run out of room on the dance floor. The last thing he wanted was a gunfight, but to let Durango’s insult go would’ve marked him as a coward and a man not to be trusted. He’d blow any chance he ever had of penetrating Warful’s group.

  Besides, he wasn’t near sure he could shade Durango....

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, January 2012

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2012

  All rights reserved

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN : 978-1-101-55949-9

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  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  Ch
apter 1

  A Challenge in the Night

  Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Battles sat his horse and studied the rain-lashed railroad siding. Under his slicker, his right hand rested on the worn walnut handle of the Colt tucked into his waistband.

  A man born to vigilance, Battles’s hard, clear blue eyes scanned the railroad car drawn up just a few feet from the end of the rails. A chuffing locomotive made up the rest of the train, there being no other cars but the big Pullman.

  Four soldiers wearing rubberized ponchos stood guard outside the car, their bayoneted rifles gleaming in the downpour. One smoked a pipe, his hand over the glowing coal to keep it alight.

  Battles shifted in the saddle and then winced as pain gnawed at his left thigh. Carson City Tom Sanchez had put lead in there three years before. It had not been a serious wound as wounds go, but a hurt like that does pain a man in rainy weather.

  Battles lifted his head as lightning scrawled across the night sky and thunder rumbled, still distant, but coming his way.

  “Well, Matt,” he said aloud, the habit of men who ride lonely trails, “let’s get the damned thing over with.”

  He kneed his buckskin forward and rode down a shallow, grassy rise to the gravel flat beside the tracks.

  The sudden appearance of a tall man riding a stud horse drew an immediate response from the soldiers.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” the smoking man challenged, talking through teeth clenched on the pipe stem.

  Battles drew rein, then said his name.

  The soldier’s proper response should’ve been “Pass, friend, and be recognized.”

  It wasn’t.

  “Come in slow and keep your hands where I can see them,” the soldier said. “I got faith in this here Springfield.”

  Battles rode to within three feet of the soldiers and stopped. They faced him in a bayoneted semicircle, neither hostile nor friendly, just ready and aware.

  The four men had the lean, tough look of old Apache fighters and had probably been handpicked for this guard detail.

  A careful man himself, the marshal kept his motions to a minimum and none of them were quick.

  “State your intentions,” the pipe-smoking soldier said.

  Battles’s amused smile erased a dozen years from his face and softened the hard, tight planes of his jaw and mouth.

  “My intention is to follow my orders and present myself to the president of the United States,” he said. Then, as a clincher: “I have a letter of introduction from Governor Roberts.”

  “Wait there,” the soldier said. “I’ll talk to the colonel.”

  He vanished inside the Pullman and appeared a few moments later, followed by a beautiful officer wearing an impeccable dress uniform, gleaming in blue, silver, and gold. A black spade-shaped beard, trimmed, combed, and scented, spread across his breast and he wore a crested signet ring on his left pinky finger.

  The officer stayed under the shelter of the car’s platform and beckoned Battles closer. He stretched out an arm and was visibly irritated as raindrops spattered his uniform.

  “I’m Colonel James Sinclair,” he said. “Show me your bona fides.”

  Battles reached under his slicker, a move that tensed the soldiers, and produced two pieces of paper. One he passed to the colonel, the other he again stuffed under his slicker.

  As Sinclair read, thunder rumbled across the sky and lightning flashed.

  Fretting over the delay and his growing discomfort, Battles peered through the downpour at the Pullman. All the car’s windows were lit up, rectangles of orange in the rain-needled darkness. He thought he heard the chink of glasses from inside and a man’s laughter, but because of the dragon hiss of the storm he wasn’t sure.

  The beautiful officer looked up from the letter he was holding and looked at Battles.

  “Come inside, Marshal,” he said. He motioned to the soldiers. “One of you take the marshal’s horse and see if you can find a place for it out of the rain.”

  Battles swung out of the saddle and followed the colonel into the Pullman.

  He found himself in a small office with a couple of desks. A sergeant orderly sat at one of the desks and rose to his feet when Sinclair and Battles entered.

  “Take the marshal’s coat and hat, Sergeant,” the colonel said. He managed a smile that was neither friendly nor amused. “And try not to drip all over the damned rug.”

  After Battles shrugged out of his slicker, Sinclair stretched out a hand.

  “Please, Marshal, you won’t need the firearm,” he said.

  It was useless to argue the point, and Battles surrendered the Colt.

  “It will be here for you when you leave, I assure you,” the colonel said, placing the revolver in his desk drawer.

  Sinclair had very white teeth, the canines large, wet, and aggressive, and the marshal pegged him as an ambitious career soldier who had fought all his battles in Washington.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  Sinclair opened the door that led from the office into the main interior of the car and closed it quietly behind him.

  The sergeant, a grizzled man with a deeply lined face, had regained his seat behind his desk. He smiled at Battles.

  “The colonel can be brusque,” he said.

  “Some men are,” Battles said.

  “Officers mostly, the brusque ones.”

  After a few moments of silence, the soldier said: “You’ve been through it, Marshal.”

  “Some.”

  “You’ve got the scars. Inside, where they don’t show.” He smiled again. “But I can see them plain.”

  Battles studied the man, his hard eyes measuring him. “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “You could.”

  The sergeant lapsed into silence again, and then said: “Know what I think?”

  Battles said nothing.

  “Too many dead men in our pasts, friends and foe alike. All that dying weighs on a man after a spell.”

  The marshal’s smile again held that amazing warmth and youthfulness. “You’re a philosopher, Sergeant.”

  The old soldier nodded. “Uh-huh, nowadays it’s about all that’s left to me.”

  The door opened and Colonel Sinclair entered and looked at Battles.

  “The president of the United States will see you now,” he said.

  Chapter 2

  Sinister Forces

  President Chester A. Arthur, a waxy-faced man who sported bushy sideburns and a magnificent mustache, sat behind a vast mahogany desk. To his left a thin, long-fingered clerk held a sheaf of papers and affected a worried look. Colonel Sinclair stood behind the president.

  Arthur waved Battles into the chair that fronted his desk. He studied the lawman for a few long moments, then said: “Are ye sharp set?”

  Battles shook his head. “No, Mr. President, I ate earlier.”

  “Then a glass of brandy with you?”

  “Please,” Battles said.

  The clerk put his papers on the desk and crossed to a campaign table that held several decanters and a collection of glasses.

  He poured brandy for Battles and passed him the drink.

  Battles looked at Arthur over the rim of his glass. The president was a sick man that spring of 1882, already suffering from the kidney disease that would kill him five years later, and it showed on him.

  “The brandy is to your liking, Marshal?” he said.

  Battles nodded. “It’s excellent, sir.”

  “Good, good, very good.” Arthur hesitated, then said: “I read your letter of introduction from Governor Roberts. He thinks very highly of you.”

  Battles smiled. “Then my thanks to the governor.”

  “Roberts is a good man, but a loyal Democrat,” Arthur said. He waved a hand. “It is his one big failing, I’m afraid. Such a pity.”

  The marshal, wary of politics and politicians, nodded, but said nothing.

  “Did Roberts tell you why you’re here?” Arthur said, after another pau
se.

  “All he told me was that it has something to do with the letter and map I found on Green River Tom Riley.”

  Sinclair looked alarmed. “Where is this Riley person now?”

  “Nowhere. He’s dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  “He was notified,” Battles said.

  “We want no loose ends, Marshal,” Sinclair said.

  Arthur flashed irritation. “Yes, yes, Colonel. I’ll make that clear to Marshal Battles later.”

  The president leaned forward on his desk.

  “We remember President Garfield, Marshal, do we not?” Arthur said.

  “Your predecessor, yes, sir.”

  “Shot by a damned anarchist.” Arthur shook his head. “Garfield, that poor, doomed bastard, it took him almost three months to die and him in agony most of the time.”

  Arthur turned to the clerk and, his voice slightly unsteady, said: “James, brandy. And refill the marshal’s glass.

  “There were sinister forces at work in this country the day Garfield was assassinated,” Arthur said, “and I fear they are still in operation today.”

  The president downed his brandy and immediately demanded another.

  “Look around you, Marshal,” Arthur said. “What do you see? An ordinary Pullman railroad car? Let me assure you it is not.”

  He turned to Sinclair. “Tell him, Colonel.”

  “The Pullman has two emergency escape hatches,” the officer said, “one in the ceiling of the observation lounge, the other in the presidential bedroom at the center of the car.”

  The colonel tapped on the window beside Arthur’s desk. “Three inches of bullet-resistant glass, made by laminating twelve sheets of quarter-inch glass into one piece.” He pointed to the walls and ceiling.

  “Nickel-steel armor plate, its method of manufacture still a secret, is riveted to the sides, floor, roof, and ends of the car, and the armor is undetectable from any distance.”