Free Slocum 428 by Jake Logan

that smirk.
    â€œYes, in fact. Well, I saw something, fleetingly. I also saw greenish glowing eyes, high up, maybe a couple of feet taller than me. And the sounds we heard were something else.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œIsn’t that enough?”
    â€œYes, but what happened at the camp?”
    â€œWhy do you ask?”
    â€œBecause something is always happening at the Tamarack Logging Camp. It’s Jigger’s lot in life. At least while he’s working to pay off his debt.”
    So that’s it, eh? thought Slocum. Jigger’s in debt. “Might help explain why he was in such a hurry to get to town yesterday, but not what happened last night.”
    She looked at him, eyebrows arched, ready for enlightenment. He obliged. “Something I’ve never heard or seen evidence of before ripped apart the camp’s storehouse, howling and making quite a ruckus. They did things I doubt a man—or a team of them—could have done.”
    â€œYou said ‘they.’ You think there was more than one?”
    â€œI do. I didn’t get a clear look, but the calls and howls definitely overlapped enough that it was easy to tell there was more than one.”
    â€œYou might want to check the bunkhouse before you start blaming the poor skoocoom for everything bad that happens at the Tamarack.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    â€œGotta go now, John Slocum!” She saluted him with a mittened hand and swung around in the trail, strode back the way she had come, rifle still slung over her shoulder, long, purposeful strides leading her away from him.
    He forgot his concerns over skoocooms and the riled-up, irritated, and thoroughly confusing situation at the Tamarack Logging Camp while he watched Hella Bridger’s promising feminine form, swathed as it was in bulky trapper’s garb, retreat way back up the mountainside, cutting long strides in the deep snow without rest, traversing the switchbacks and gaining high ground.
    As he watched her move gracefully up the slope, he wondered what she meant by that last remark—the one she’d not bothered to explain. It sounded to him as if she knew something about some of the men in the bunkhouse, maybe that they were up to something no good. That would verify what he suspected. That while the skoocoom might or might not exist, there sure as hell were bad elements in the bunkhouse, men who might be working to sabotage Jigger’s operation from within. But why was everyone so closemouthed about it all?
    As if she knew he’d still be watching her, just before she disappeared from sight by elevation, she turned and waved—a big, wide-armed wave. He smiled and waved back. What a mysterious woman, he thought. She spoke alternately like a mountain woman and like someone well educated.
    Hefting the axe, Slocum turned back to the next tree that needed limbing. And why shouldn’t he find a curious creature like that up here in Oregon’s Cascades? It was not like this trip hadn’t yielded any number of odd characters and situations, and perhaps even creatures, so far. He hoped he’d run into her again. She was one curiosity he’d like to see more of.

9
    In his office at the rear of the Bluebird Saloon, Dance Hall, and Eatery, the nexus of what he liked to think of as his expanding business empire, Torrance Whitaker leaned back in his desk chair, his ample girth testing the durability of the thick spring mechanism allowing it to rock. Problem was, when he kicked all the way back, his legs dangled, and unless he was close enough to the desk’s edge to grasp it with a pudgy hand, Torrance found the chair too unpredictable, not at all trustworthy, and the damnable thing would upend him, ass over teakettle. The last time, he’d gotten wedged somehow between the wall, the chair, and the desk. He’d had to yelp for his boy, Jordan, the young fool who worked for him—and also happened to be his