Slocum and the Grizzly Flats Killers (9781101619216) Read Online Free PDF

Georgia, his parents dead and his brother, Robert, killed during Pickett’s Charge on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. All he had wanted was to find peace. Instead he found a carpetbagger judge who had taken a fancy to the farm. The Reconstruction judge probably thought it would be easy to force a debilitated man like a wounded veteran off his property with a bogus unpaid tax lien.
    In one respect, the judge had been right. Slocum didn’t stay on the farm. And the judge did. In a grave. Next to the gunman he had ridden out with to seize the farm. Slocum had ridden west and never again considered becoming a farmer, preferring to live by his wits and quick gun. Wanted posters for federal judge killing dogged his steps, but if he kept moving, he stayed ahead of the law.
    He nodded in the night clerk’s direction. This was good enough for the young lad to smile broadly, showing a broken front tooth.
    Slocum trudged up the steps to the second story, turned at the landing, and went up to the third floor. Every stair was increasingly rickety so he watched how he stepped. Halfway up to the third floor and his room, he paused and looked at the stairs. Then he looked up ahead and slipped his pistol from its holster. He wished he had reloaded, but only a round or two would be adequate.
    He reached the top floor, which should have been empty. The damp spots on the stairs and the floor leading to his room warned him someone had preceded him. Stopping in front of the door, he carefully turned the ceramic doorknob, then shoved the door open. His six-shooter came up and centered on the dark figure sitting on the side of his bed.
    â€œI’m not armed,” came a tiny voice. “I saw you kill him.”
    Slocum stepped into the room and kicked the door shut with his boot heel. He was slower to holster his six-shooter. He fumbled in his vest pocket, found his tin of lucifers, and lit a coal oil lamp on the table holding a small washbasin and pitcher. The resulting soft yellow light after he trimmed the wick bathed his unexpected guest.
    It was the woman he had momentarily seen standing in the storm earlier. She looked like a drowned rat. Her brown hair hung in wet strands. Her dress had seen better days, being torn as well as wet and plastered against her thin body. Slocum doubted she had been eating regularly from the way her cheeks were sunken, and her eyes had a dark, haunted look about them.
    â€œDo you always break into strangers’ rooms?”
    â€œI didn’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t have much.” She reached down and ran her finger around something in her dress pocket. Slocum couldn’t tell what it was but it was small and round and not a hideout gun.
    Somehow, he didn’t think he had anything to fear from her. If she had been the dead gunman’s lady out for revenge, she would have shot him down from ambush. Even if she had wanted to watch him crawl, have him apologize, somehow make amends for the two bullets in the gunman’s body, back shooting him was an easier road to travel. After all, she had to know how good he was with his six-shooter.
    â€œLet’s start over,” Slocum said, perching against the washstand. His body ached and he wanted nothing more than to stretch out on the bed to get some sleep, but he felt that making her move might spook her. For some reason, he wanted to find out what her story might be.
    â€œI saw you kill him. If you hadn’t, I would have. I would have tried,” she amended. From the set to her jaw and the way she shook all over—and not from the cold—Slocum believed her.
    â€œWho was he?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Slocum thought he was past being surprised about anything that happened around him. He was wrong.
    â€œYou don’t know who he was but you’d’ve killed him yourself? I don’t even know why he tried to gun me down.”
    â€œPure cussedness,” she said with a