Slocum's Breakout - Jake Logan [1]
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1
“No talkin’ !” A rifle butt struck John Slocum in the shoulder and knocked him to his knees. He clanked the chains on his wrists and balled his fists as he looked up at the blue-uniformed guard. The man towered over him. Seeing the hatred in Slocum’s green eyes, the guard stepped away and leveled his rifle. His finger tightened on the trigger. For two cents he would put a slug into Slocum’s head and not think twice about it.
“I’m getting up,” Slocum said. He put his hands down in the dry California dirt and levered himself erect. It was harder than he’d anticipated because the chains connecting the shackles on his ankles allowed only eighteen inches of play. Walking was impossible; he had to shuffle.
“Hurry it up. You’re keepin’ the wagon waitin’.”
“Wouldn’t want that, now would we?” came a voice just loud enough for the guard to hear. The prison guard swung around, his rifle hunting for a target.
“Who said that? Who’s talkin’ when I tole you all to shut yer pie holes?”
Slocum shuffled forward with the other ten men, all shackled and looking as if they could chew through their chains and kill, given the chance. Slocum snorted. Most of them had killed somebody. That was how they had ended up in the line of prisoners being herded into the bed of a wagon.
The guard helped Slocum along with another hard blow to the shoulder. Slocum winced but kept walking, head down. This seemed to appease the guard because he hurried on to another prisoner who refused to show any humility at his condition. From the beating the man received, he might not make it to the prison alive.
One prisoner already in the wagon reached out his manacled hands and helped Slocum up.
“Thanks,” Slocum said, then shot a quick look back to be sure the guard hadn’t heard.
“He’s too busy havin’ his fun with poor Gordon. But you got the right instinct. Do what those bastards tell you, and you’ll get along all right.”
“You been in before?” Slocum studied the man seated across from him in the wagon. The pallor gave him away as someone who ventured out but little when the sun was high. That might mean he was a gambler, but his stubby fingers didn’t have the dexterity Slocum associated with cardsharps.
“Wasn’t out but two weeks ’fore they got me on trumped-up charges. The sheriff don’t like me none, the dirt-eatin’, mother—” He clamped his mouth shut when the guard hoisted Gordon and threw him facedown into the wagon.
Satisfied he had all the prisoners loaded, he bellowed for the driver to make good time. Slocum watched the guard recede and finally disappear in a cloud of dust as the wagon rattled along the rocky road. The drought had hung on for the entire year. The usual rain in January hadn’t come down south, and Slocum had drifted up to San Francisco. As the wagon bumped along, he looked up and saw the foreboding gray stone walls of San Quentin getting closer by the minute.
“Ain’t named for a saint,” the man opposite him said. “Named after some Injun what was captured on the spot.” He shook his head. Slocum saw the sunlight shine off a couple lice migrating through his greasy hair, working their way down to his beard. The man didn’t take much notice. “ ’ Magine that, an Injun named Quentin. Belonged to the Miwok tribe. Was a fighter fer Chief Marin back in the day.”
“How’d you come to know so much about the history?” Slocum asked. He was growing increasingly apprehensive as he studied the thick stone walls and the alert blue-uniformed guards in the towers at the corners. He was sorry he had agreed to such a crazy scheme as—
“They call me Doc,” the other prisoner piped up, interrupting Slocum’s growing worry that he had dealt himself into a game that couldn’t be won. “I was a professor at a college ’fore I got myself in bad.”
Slocum doubted it but said nothing about the man’s background. Instead,