“Why, Arthur, I thought I would just stay here with you!”
“But I’m not stayin’ here,” Preacher said. “The high lonesome’s callin’ me. I got to go back to the mountains. You know how it is. Us old-timers just can’t stay away.”
“Are you going fur trapping?”
“I durned sure am. There’s a whole heap of beaver pelts just a-waitin’ for me out yonder.”
“I could come with you—”
Preacher shook his head and said, “No, the high lonesome ain’t no place for a woman. You go on back with George, and when I get done with trappin’, I’ll come see you there. I give you my word.”
She smiled and nodded, said, “All right, Arthur. If that’s the way you want it.”
He hugged her, patted her on the back. George DuBois had moved over to where Preacher could see him as he looked over Adelaide’s shoulder. The man mouthed the words thank you.
Preacher nodded slowly and held on to Adelaide, clearly not wanting to let go.
The Sugarloaf, 1902
Denny leaned over and punched her cousin Ace hard on the arm.
“That’s terrible!” she said. “What a horrible way to end a Christmas story!”
“Not really,” Ace said. “Everyone was together, and even though Adelaide and Preacher didn’t get married, they were able to spend a little more time together before she went back East with her grandson.”
Louis asked, “Did she really kill all those other men she was married to?”
“There was never any proof one way or the other . . . but later, Sally found a letter hidden in the room Adelaide had been using. It was from another of Preacher’s old friends, telling him about the deaths of those men and warning him to be on the lookout for Adelaide. She must have intercepted it somehow, and the fact that she kept it from him seems to indicate that she might have felt guilty.”
“Did she . . . pass away?” asked Denny.
Ace nodded and said, “Less than three months later. And Preacher went back to visit her grave, just like he’d promised.”
Denny frowned and muttered, “I still think it’s terrible.”
“Life’s always a mixture of good and bad,” Ace said. “The trick is trying to keep the scales tipped to the good side.”
Louis said, “I’m curious about something else. Did anyone ever find the money from that train robbery? The loot that Bill Malkin hid?”
Chance laughed.
“That wild yarn Doc spun was closer to the truth than anybody guessed at the time,” he said. “Tom Nunnley, who was the undertaker in Big Rock then, actually did find some letters in Malkin’s saddlebags. They were addressed to a woman who had been married to Malkin. He was trying to win her back, and he’d told her where the loot was cached. She didn’t want any part of it and gave it up to the law. If Thackery had just listened to Doc—”
“I’d be dead,” Ace pointed out.
“Well, yeah, there’s that to consider.”
Denny said, “It sounded like the two of you didn’t get along very well with Luke. I thought everything was fine with all of you.”
“It is,” Ace said.
“It just took a while to get there,” added Chance. “You’ve grown up knowing who your father is. We had to get used to it.”
“I suppose that makes sense.”
The sound of a horse’s hooves came from nearby. The four of them looked around as Smoke reined up on the creek bank a few yards away. He rested his hands on the saddle horn and said, “Denny, I thought you rode out here on the range to work, and instead, I find you lollygagging around with your brother and your cousins.” Then he grinned to show that he wasn’t actually scolding her.
Denny stood up, brushed off the seat of her trousers, and said, “I’ll have you know you’d have one less calf now if I hadn’t pulled it out of a mudhole at considerable risk to life and limb.”
“And even more risk to her dignity,” said Louis. “You should have seen her, Father, covered in mud from head to foot.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Smoke said as his grin widened.
“Ace and Chance were just telling us about the Christmas when they found out that Uncle Luke is their father,” Louis went on.
Smoke thumbed back his hat and nodded.
“That was a pretty eventful holiday, all right,” he said. “Lots of things happened, good and bad.”
Louis asked, “Are there ever any Christmases in the Jensen family when all hell doesn’t break loose?”
Smoke chuckled as he turned his horse and lifted a hand in farewell—for now.
“It’s a family tradition,” he said. “See you back at the house!”
Keep reading for a special preview of the first book
in an all new western series
by WILLIAM W. and J. A. JOHNSTONE!
HAVE BRIDES, WILL TRAVEL
In this rollicking new series, the Johnstones cordially invite you to the biggest, baddest, bang-up event of the season—one that gives a whole new meaning to “shotgun wedding” . . .
Here come the brides. And the bullets . . .
Bo Creel and Scratch Morton aren’t the settling down types. They’re lifelong drifters who keep one eye on the horizon, one finger on the trigger, and one foot out the door. Roaming the West is what keeps them young, or so Scratch tells Bo. But when they save the life of Cyrus Keegan—the owner of a matrimonial agency—they receive an unexpected proposal that’s hard to resist. Keegan needs to deliver five mail-order brides to a mining town in New Mexico Territory. All Scratch and Bo have to do is get these gals to the church on time—and alive, if possible . . .
For better or worse, they agree. The job seems easy enough—and the brides-to-be are even easier on the eyes. Cecilia, Beth, Luella, Rose, and Jean all need good husbands. But their prospects look bad when the journey to the altar includes Mexican banditos, scheming silver robbers, and one overbearing rancher who won’t take no for an answer. Bo and Scratch promised to keep the ladies safe—and keep their hands to themselves—but it could be the last vow they’ll ever make . . .
Look for Have Brides, Will Travel
wherever books are sold.
CHAPTER 1
The two men reined their horses to a halt. Below them to the left, at the bottom of a grassy bluff, a river meandered along between steep banks. Ahead of them, perched atop the bluff, were the buildings of a good-sized town, dominated by a big stone courthouse at the north end.
“Fort Worth,” Scratch Morton said as he leaned on his saddle horn. “Reckon we’ll see the panther?”
“I’m not sure there’s any truth to that story,” Bo Creel replied. “And even if there was, Fort Worth isn’t a sleepy enough place anymore for a panther to curl up in the middle of Main Street and go to sleep.”
That was true. Even from a distance, Bo and Scratch could see that the town was bustling. Off to the northwest, on the other side of the Trinity River, lay a broad stretch of cattle pens, over which hung a faint haze of dust. Fort Worth was no longer just a stopover on the cattle trails that led north. It was an important shipping point in its own right these days.
Scratch grinned. Like Bo, who had been his best friend for more years than either of them liked to count, he was at the upper edge of middle age. He was far from being ready for a rocking chair on a shady porch, though, as he would emphatically tell anybody who even hinted at such a thing.
“Next thing, you’re gonna be tellin’ me there’s no such place as Hell’s Half Acre,” Scratch said.
“No, it’s real enough, I reckon. We’ve been there, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, it’s been a while, and last time we were in Fort Worth, we didn’t really have a chance to enjoy ourselves. We were on our way somewhere else, weren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Bo said, “but I disremember where.”
“With a couple of fiddle-footed hombres like us, I ain’t sure it matters.” Scratch straightened in the saddle and heeled his horse into mo
tion again. “Come on.”
The two of them were the same age and about the same size, but that was where any resemblance ended. Scratch was the more eye-catching of the duo, with silver hair under a big cream-colored Stetson; a ruggedly handsome, deeply tanned face that usually sported a grin; a fringed buckskin jacket over brown whipcord trousers and high-topped brown boots; and a pair of ivory-handled Remington revolvers in fancy tooled-leather holsters attached to an equally fancy gunbelt.
Folks always noticed Scratch first, which was just fine with Bo, who never craved attention. He wore a flat-crowned black hat on his graying dark brown hair. The hat matched the long coat and trousers he wore. He’d been accused more than once of looking like a circuit-riding preacher, but not many preachers carried a Colt revolver with such well-worn walnut grips.
They had become friends as boys during the Texas Revolution, in what came to be known as the Runaway Scrape, when the Mexican dictator Santa Anna and his army chased thousands of Texican settlers eastward after the fall of the Alamo.
Yeah, Santa Anna chased them, all right . . . until they came to a place called San Jacinto, where they rallied under General Sam Houston’s leadership, turned around, waded into battle against overwhelming odds, and whipped that Mexican army up one way and down the other.
That was the birth of the Republic of Texas, which eventually became part of the United States, and now, more than forty years after that history-making day, Bo and Scratch were both still proud they had fought side by side in that battle, despite their youth.
They had remained friends ever since. They had gone through tragedy and heartbreak, danger and hardship, and for a big chunk of that time, they had ridden together, drifting from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, from the Rio Grande—sometimes below the Rio Grande—to the Canadian border. They had seen mountains and deserts and forests and plains.
But despite all that, something still drove them onward in search of new places to see and new things to do.
If they ever stopped moving, Bo had reflected more than once, they might just wither away to nothing.
In recent times, a visit to the ranches where they had been raised down in South Texas, after the revolution, had gotten prolonged to the point where it seemed like they might actually settle down and live out their lives there. It would have been easy enough to do. They had friends and relatives and special ladies who would have been glad to settle down with them there.
Then one morning Scratch had shown up, trailing a loaded packhorse behind his mount, and had said to Bo, “You ready?”
“I am,” Bo had replied without hesitation as he reached for his hat and his gun.
That was how they had come to be riding into Fort Worth on this warm late spring day. Any thoughts of putting down roots were far behind them and could stay there, as far as the two pards were concerned.
They rode along the top of the bluff until the trail they were on became an actual street that followed a tree-lined course between rows of big, impressive houses where the leading citizens of Fort Worth lived. They took that street to the part of town known as Hell’s Half Acre, which was famous—or notorious—for its saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, and houses of ill repute. Most of those enterprises were clustered within an area of just a few blocks, and businesses that were more legitimate thrived all around them.
At the moment, Bo and Scratch weren’t interested in legitimate businesses. They needed something to cut the trail dust from their throats.
Scratch looked along the street, pointed, and laughed.
“There you go, Bo,” he said. “That’s the perfect place for us to do our drinkin’.”
Bo’s eyes followed his friend’s pointing finger and saw on the front of a building a sign that read THE LUCKY CUSS SALOON.
“We’re lucky cusses if anybody ever was,” Scratch continued. He angled his horse in that direction. “Let’s try the place out.”
“I expect one place is as good as another,” Bo said as he followed Scratch’s lead.
The hitch rail in front of the Lucky Cuss was full, and while Bo and Scratch might have been able to wedge their horses in with the others tied there, neither of them wanted to do that. Horses could get skittish and start to fight when they were forced up against other horses they didn’t know.
Instead, they swung down from their saddles and looped the reins around the rail in front of the business next to the saloon, which, according to a cardboard sign propped up in the window, was Strickland’s Domino Parlor. Judging by the horses tied up there, it wasn’t as busy as the Lucky Cuss.
Bo and Scratch had to walk past the mouth of an alley to reach the saloon, and as they did so, Bo heard something that made him pause.
“What was that?” he asked Scratch.
“What was what?” the silver-haired Texan wanted to know.
“Sounded like somebody yelling for help back there in that alley somewhere.”
Scratch cocked his head to the side in a listening attitude, then, after a moment, said, “I don’t hear a thing.”
“Well, it stopped kind of short, like somebody made it stop.”
Scratch frowned and said, “What you heard was most likely a cat yowlin’. There may not be panthers sleepin’ in the streets of Fort Worth anymore, but I’d bet a hatful of pesos there are still plenty of cats in the alleys.”
“This wasn’t a cat,” Bo said as he turned and started toward the narrow passage between the domino parlor and the saloon.
“What it ain’t,” Scratch said as he followed, “is any of our business. We don’t know anybody in Fort Worth.”
“That doesn’t matter. We’re not in the habit of turning our backs on folks in trouble.”
“Yeah, and that’s how come we wind up in trouble more often than you’d expect for such peaceable hombres. Don’t forget, there are beers with our names on ’em waitin’ for us inside that saloon—”
A cry of pain from somewhere not far off interrupted him. It was on the high-pitched side, but definitely human, not feline.
“Shoot,” Scratch said. “That sounded like a woman, or maybe a little kid.”
“I know,” Bo said as he increased his pace. He didn’t see anything ahead of them in the alley except a rain barrel and a few pieces of trash. The cry had come from somewhere past the end of the alley He and Scratch were both trotting by the time they got there.
Both of them were still keen eyed in spite of their age. As soon as they emerged from the back end of the alley, they spotted several men to their right, in a dusty open area between the rear of the Lucky Cuss and the back of the buildings on the next street over.
Four men, Bo noted after a quick count, had surrounded a fifth man. The four hombres were roughly dressed in range clothes. From what Bo could see of their faces, they were cruel and beard stubbled.
The fifth man was dressed in a black suit and had a derby on his head. A fringe of mostly gray hair ran around his ears. Spectacles perched on his nose, and judging by the way they made his eyes look bigger, they had to be pretty thick. He was short, a little on the stocky side, and clearly no physical threat to anybody.
In a high-pitched voice, he said, “I’m telling you I don’t have any money other than what I already gave you. Please, just leave me alone—”
“Two dollars,” said one of the men surrounding him. “Two measly dollars. You’re lyin’, mister. Fancily dressed little pissant like you’s got to have more dinero than that.”
The man in the derby shook his head and said, “I swear I don’t.” He flinched as one of his assailants reached for him. “Please don’t hurt me again.”
“Mister, we ain’t even started hurtin’ you yet.”
They shoved the little man roughly back and forth, so hard that his head jerked from side to side. He made another mewling sound, confirming that the noises Bo and Scratch had heard hadn’t come from a woman or a child or a cat, but from this unfortunate victim of these would-be robbers.
“Well, this just puts a burr under my saddle,” Scratch said quietly.
“Mine too,” Bo agreed. “We taking cards?”
“Damn straight.”
At that moment, one of the men roughing up the little fella in the derby hat noticed them and stopped what he was doing. He said, “Hey, Birch, look there.”
The man called Birch turned and saw Bo and Scratch standing about ten yards away. He laughed and said, “You old geezers go on and get outta here now. This ain’t none o’ your business.”
He turned back to the others, as if confident that Bo and Scratch would do what he had told them, and motioned to two of his companions.
“We’ve wasted enough time,” he went on. “Grab his arms and hang on to him. I’ll wallop him a few times, and he’ll stop bein’ so stubborn.”
Bo raised his voice and said, “Hold on a minute.”
Two of the robbers had grabbed the little man’s arms, like Birch had told them to. They hung on, and the fourth man stood just off to the side as Birch swung around again with a look of annoyance on his scraggily bearded face.
“Are you still here?” he said. “I told you to skedaddle!”
Bo ignored him and said to the man in the derby, “Mister, what’s your name?”
“M-Me?” the man managed to say.
“That’s right.”
“I . . . I’m Cyrus Keegan.”
“Well, I have a question for you, Mr. Keegan,” Bo said.
Birch glared and said, “I didn’t tell you, you could ask any damn questions! I’m fast losin’ my patience with you, you mangy old pelican—”
Bo held up an open hand to stop him. “Mr. Keegan, who’s the law in Fort Worth these days?”
“The . . . the law? Why, M-Marshal Jim Courtright.”
Bo nodded solemnly and said, “All right. When Marshal Courtright shows up here in a little while, you just tell him the truth about how these fellas tried to rob you. Can you do that?”
A Jensen Family Christmas Page 34
