The Slavers Read online

  Traders in Indian slaves did big business in the New Mexico territory. The Mexicans had been slaving Indians for hundreds of years, and though it was supposed to be against the law, ruthless men were still getting rich on human misery with the help of crooked judges and greedy politicians. The big ranchers wanted cheap labor and slaving was an open secret in the Territory, with the law and the Army looking the other way. Carmody knew it was none of his business. He just wanted to free one Indian family—he owed them his life—and then ride out. But it wasn’t that simple. The slavers held all the aces, and thought they could run him out. Carmody showed them how wrong they were.

  Contents

  One ~ Two ~ Three ~ Four

  Five ~ Six ~ Seven ~ Eight

  Nine ~ Ten ~ Eleven

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About the Series

  About Piccadilly Publishing

  Chapter One

  I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, to see a man about some criminal enterprise he had in mind. He didn’t show up. Later I heard he was caught, minus pants and gun, in a hayloft with a farmer’s wife. The farmer killed him with a pitchfork.

  Instead of that man I met another man who got me into much trouble.

  A week was long enough to wait and I was walking from the hotel to where my horse was stabled when a well-fed gent in a black suit, coming from the other direction, punched me good and solid in the belly. He was thirty-five, maybe even forty or fifty, one of those chunky men who look the same for years, with a quarter inch of graying black whiskers hiding most of his face. A cigar stub stuck out of his mouth, a dirty white handkerchief was stuffed inside his stiff collar. This feller poked me in the gut and stood back, saying around the cigar: “By God and the Merciful Jesus—I knew I was right.”

  The knock in the belly didn’t hurt much, but I didn’t like it. Still, he hadn’t tried to kill me and so far he hadn’t called me any names. Maybe he thought I was somebody else. When I showed him how hard my hand looks when it’s made into a fist, he backed away laughing and shaking his head. Maybe he didn’t know who I was and maybe he was crazy.

  Another time I might have used time and effort to show him that it wasn’t nice to go around punching strangers. But now I wanted nothing more than to get out of Santa Fe. I had wasted a week and the money was running low.

  I tried to walk around the bulky man with the cigar. “Only one punch,” I informed him. “Those are the rules—my rules. Now step aside.”

  He didn’t take the hint. I walked this way and he walked that. A few steps later I called off the dance. I crooked my finger and beckoned him to come closer. The funny thing was, he didn’t look like any kind of dangerous man. “You’re doing it wrong,” I said, tired, a little dull in the head after the week of waiting and drinking and womanizing. “Come up close, citizen, and I’ll show you all the latest steps.”

  He spat the cigar out of his mouth and roared at me. “Carmody, you dirty dog, don’t you know me?”

  Now it was my turn to call on the Merciful Jesus. I didn’t say that, but I thought it. The man with the hairy face was grinning and so was I. It was close to seven years since the last time I’d seen Elbert Masters; and that last time was a bad time for both of us.

  “You got fat, Elbert,” I said. What else could I say? He wasn’t fat yet but pretty near—and that was all I knew about him. I guess he wasn’t on the dodge any more, not in that suit, with that lard on his bones. Besides, he didn’t shush me when I spoke his rightful name.

  Masters, grinning hard, tried to whack me again. This time I was ready for him and I got out of the way. “You dirty dog,” he kept saying. “Many’s the time I thought about you these past seven years. What in hell are you doing in Santa Fe?”

  I grinned back into his whiskey face. “Visiting, Elbert,” I said. “You know me. I got kin all over.”

  “Carmody,” Masters said, sticking out his hand, “it’s awful good to see you. By Christ, man, we’re going to have ourselves a drink. No, a big drink. A drunk.”

  Well, you know, I was downright glad to see old Elbert again, alive and fat and sweating in the hot morning sun in a store suit. That was fine, but I still wanted to get out of Santa Fe. You have a friend or two in the whole big world and then you get separated and when you meet again after a lot of years you can’t expect—or want—things to be the same.

  The last I’d heard of Elbert Masters, six months after we split up, was that some judge told him he would have to stay in the Territorial Prison for not less than ten years. I didn’t want to ask any questions about that.

  “You look good, Elbert,” I said. “The fat suits you...”

  Masters always had a loud voice, especially when he was feeling good. Now it was as loud as a man yelling down a well. He tried to get me in a bear hug and I had to step lively to get out of the way.

  “You dirty dog,” Masters roared. “Fixing to say howdy do, nice seeing you, and slope off. Why, man, I been thinking on you just this very day. Now who says the Lord ain’t good to a man pure of heart and Godly of thought?”

  “That couldn’t be you, Elbert.”

  “Bullcrap,” Masters said. “Us fellers are going to have a drink and talk. Only way you can say no is to use that gun. You wouldn’t do that to an old pal, would you, Carmody?”

  I didn’t think I would ever shoot Elbert Masters except for one or two special reasons. Liking people doesn’t come easy to me, but I would do a thing or two for Elbert Masters. And maybe I’d do more than that.

  “Lead the way, Elbert,” I said. “Your treat.”

  The Delgado Hotel I’d just come out of was the closest place with a bar. We had to go past the front desk to get to the bar. The room clerk stared at Masters, then at me. I had been there for a week and I think this was the first time he really looked at me.

  It was early in the morning and the bar was empty except for the day bartender, a German, and a youngish city-looking gent with an old face trying to get last night’s pink elephants back in their cage. The drunk had no interest in us, but the German bartender did.

  “You still favor tequila?” Masters asked me. “One place you sure as hell can get tequila is Santa Fe. Now me, I can’t face the day without my glass of rum. Used to be you could get good Newbury-port rum, but not anymore ...”

  We had our pick of the tables. The German polished glasses that had already been polished. I guess it passed the time for him. I noticed that he didn’t say the usual good morning when we walked in. That and some other things had to mean something.

  We sat down near the window to catch what breeze there was. Masters was wearing a gold ring I knew from the old days. He used the ring to rap for service, not a busy, edgy rap—a polite rap. The square head barkeep couldn’t seem to tear himself away from those glasses. I decided to let it go for a while.

  Masters turned in his chair. “Bartender,” he called. “Bring two bottles. Rum, tequila. If you don’t mind.”

  The bartender sounded a cross between German and New Mexican—a funny sound. “The waiter ain’t here yet,” he said, polishing the glasses after he blew his breath on them, a thing I don’t like.

  Masters looked at me and grinned. When he did that he looked more like the Elbert Masters I had known seven years before.

  As if it had just come to him, the German said, “I tend bar, the waiter waits table.”

  “You want to coax him, or do you want me?” I asked Masters.

  “Forget it,” Masters said. “I’ll get the drinks.”

  I thought the barkeep set down the bottles and glasses kind of hard, but that was all right, almost, with me. It was Masters’ treat and Masters’ business. I figured to stay on in Santa Fe no longer than half a bottle. We helped oursel
ves and now Masters was quiet. He filled his glass and said, “Looking at you, Carmody.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “What else?”

  Masters downed his drink and fished for a cigar. I gave him a match. “Still the same old Carmody, huh? Ask no questions. Ask no favors. Ain’t even going to ask me what I’m doing out of jail. How I got out of jail and got to be a lawyer.”

  Well, that was something. “All right, Elbert,” I said, grinning. “I’m asking. How did you get out of jail and get to be a lawyer? You read law in jail and you were a real good boy and the Governor heard about it and gave you a pardon?”

  Such things had happened before. One such thing had happened with John Wesley Hardin in Texas. And John Wesley was a bigger outlaw than Elbert Masters could ever hope—or want—to be.

  “Something like that,” Masters said. “Plus the fact that my Uncle Zack finally got a job in Washington. You dirty dog, Carmody. You knew all the time.”

  I shook my head and had more tequila. The bartender was halfway over the bar trying to hear what we were saying.

  “That’s how it happened,” Masters said. “I did five years and here I am.”

  “How’s the law business?” I asked.

  Masters smiled a hard smile. “Pretty bad the first six months I hung out the shingle, pretty good the six months after that. Then pretty bad again. Maybe you noticed I’m not too popular?”

  “You don’t say? What did you do, Elbert? Win a big case against the wrong people?”

  “Right again, friend. Against the wrong people and for the wrong clients. Indians. Indian clients. I took up for some Indians didn’t have anybody else to take up for them.”

  I shrugged. “Your business, Elbert.”

  Elbert Masters always did have a quick temper. He had held back on the bartender, but now he let fly at me. “Maybe it is your business, Carmody.”

  “No,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s not my business.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. You decide that. You remember a man, an Indian, named Diego Sandoval? You ought to remember him. That wasn’t the name he was born with, but he called himself that when you knew him. When I knew him.”

  I knew him all right. I remembered Diego Sandoval, his wife and his daughter. The wife was called Dolores and I couldn’t remember the daughter’s name. Seven years before she had been a little girl. The Sandovals were Christian Indians—Navajos, farmers—who lived near a place called Anton Chico not so many miles from where we were sitting now. A priest at the old mission there had baptized them, given them new names, and they were everything the Office of Indian Affairs said it wanted Navajos to be. We—Masters and me— were trying to dodge a posse and not doing such a good job of it. I had a hole in my back that wouldn’t heal up. There was a reward out for both of us, and the Sandovals were poor as dirt, but they took us in and hid us until we were ready to ride.

  “I remember,” I said. “What about it? It was a long time ago.”

  “Not so long, Carmody. How long is long?”

  “I offered them money. They wouldn’t take it.”

  Masters scratched his bearded face and his eyes and his voice were hard. “And that squares it. Like that. You offered them money and that squares it?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “Diego Sandoval is dead,” Masters told me. “Murdered. No, pal, not just murdered. Disposed of. Put out of the way.”

  I said something I don’t remember.

  “And his wife and girl sold as slaves. That’s right, Carmody. As slaves. The woman and the girl. Only the girl isn’t a little girl any more. Maybe you don’t remember how the little girl used to feed you stew when you were too sick to get up off your back?”

  I nodded, thinking back. The Sandoval girl had been pretty, kind of shy. “You sure you got the facts straight?” I asked Masters, still thinking of all the Sandovals.

  They had lived in a split-log house on a creek with cottonwoods for shade. The look of the house, different smells, came back to me.

  “I thought the Indian slave trade was finished and done,” I said to Masters. “I thought after Sherman cleaned out the slavers way back in ’68 ...”

  “You thought the Indians lived happily ever after. No, sir, Carmody, the slavers are back. In fact, some of them never really stopped slaving, just did it under cover. Even when Andy Johnson sent Sherman down here with troops, some of the big ranches never were touched. Sherman’s been long gone from these parts and now there’s another general, General Brewster C. Waycross, who can’t see making a fuss about seven or eight hundred no-good Indians. The General likes New Mexico Territory—he keeps saying that every fair chance he gets—and so he should. He’s got himself a fine ranch near here, raises blooded stock, plays the landed gentleman for all it’s worth. The local gentry may consider him nothing but a jumped-up jackass from the poor end of Illinois—Waycross was only a cavalry sergeant when the war broke out—but they’re always ready to shake his hand. He’s been covering up for the slavers and the slaveholders since he was posted here six years ago.”

  “What about the Sandovals?” I asked.

  “What I told you,” Masters said. “I thought I’d ride up and see how they were doing after all these years. A bit late for gratitude. Much too late to help them. I found what was left of their house on Persimmon Creek. A squatter, a white man, was building himself another house in their front yard.”

  “That was when you took up for the Indians?”

  Masters said no. “A coincidence, Carmody. The thing with the Sandovals happened only a month ago. I’d been working against the slavers long before that. It started when a Dutch farmer and his wife, poor people, came to me looking for help. They live between here and Pecos, and they had taken in a runaway slave girl, a Pueblo. Seems the girl belonged—her word—to a big rancher, Thatcher McKim. McKim’s lawyer worked up a writ of habeas corpus demanding that the Pueblo girl be returned to McKim as his property. Now that was, on the face of it, kind of stupid, since Congress passed a law years ago abolishing and prohibiting any form of peonage. But maybe it wasn’t so stupid. The local courts, territorial courts, have a way of going along with the powers that be. Likely as not, Judge Gratz would have ruled in favor of McKim, if I hadn’t been there to represent the van Dalens, the Dutch people. Since then they’ve tried to do everything to wreck me. Now I hear they’re getting up a petition to have my pardon revoked.”

  “Elbert,” I said, “you know that no good deed goes unpunished. But don’t tell me all this spite work is because of one case. I know lawyers got off child killers and still have supper with senators.”

  Masters gave a sour grin. “Yeah, there were other things. After I made my own two-bit investigation I knew I had to do something about it. Christ, man, twenty years after that actor killed Abe Lincoln they’re still making slaves of people. I know the Spaniards and then the Mexicans bought and sold Indians for two hundred years, but this is 1885.”

  Masters was getting worked up and I filled his glass to keep his mouth busy. I didn’t have to be told the rest. Elbert had started sending reports to the Governor, letters to Washington, to the newspapers. Maybe he had used his own funds to travel to Washington, buttonholing fat-bellied politicians in the halls of Congress. A lot less than that could make his name poison in Santa Fe and all over the New Mexico Territory. Elbert Masters always was a man to get his facts straight; still I was surprised to hear that slaving Indians was big business again. Before the War a healthy Indian woman, or child —men were too much trouble so they killed them —fetched from seventy-five to a hundred and fifty dollars at auction. Later when the Doolittle Committee was sent west to have a look, the slave trade dried up for a while. At that time, with slaves getting scarce, a strong-backed Indian went as high as four hundred dollars. When the politicians—many of the local windbags held Indian captives themselves—failed to stop the traffic in red flesh, President Johnson sent Sherman and the troops. But, as Masters said, that was a long time ago
.

  Masters looked at me, shaking his head. “You know, Carmody, they got light by electricity and the telephone back east. In France a man called Daimler has invented something—the horseless carriage. And here—slavery all over again.”

  “Yeah, Elbert,” I said, not in the mood then, or ever, to ponder the ways of the world. “It’s a rotten shame how things go, but there you are.” Indians, wild or tame, good or bad, didn’t mean a whole lot to me, but I did owe the Sandoval family something. “You know where the woman and girl are? Tell me and I’ll go fetch them back. If it takes time, all right. Just keep it simple.”

  Masters said he didn’t know. “All I was able to learn, a party of slavers, white men, some Mexicans, raided around Anton Chico, then started them south.”

  “Elbert,” I said patiently, “that was a month ago, you say. They could have walked them half way down through Chihuahua by now.”

  I thought that was a reasonable statement. Favor or no favor, I wasn’t ready to start down into Mexico after a woman and girl I might never find. A man could use up his whole life searching just one corner of the Southwest or northern Mexico.

  “They could be in Mexico,” Masters said, “or they could be right around here.”

  I put the cork back in the bottle of tequila. If I got started now I could make some distance by nightfall. Up in Colorado the mine owners around Cripple Creek were hiring gunmen to fight the miners, and that was where I figured to go.

  Getting up from the table, I said, “They could be climbing Pike’s Peak, for all you know. You get a line on where they are, send a telegraph. Cripple Creek, Colorado. After that I don’t know where I’ll be.”

  Masters, feeling the rum, got up, too, and walked out with me after paying the bartender. The bartender looked after us and so did the room clerk. Outside, the sun glared white and hot. I liked Santa Fe. It was a nice town, but it didn’t have anything for me. The week I was there, I looked around for something to do—a bank, a payroll office—but nothing turned up that wasn’t likely to get me killed.