The Quest of Brady Kenton / Kenton's Challenge

by Cameron Judd

  “And do you know the way back, Mr. Evaline?”

  “I know where the mountaintop is. I know how to look for smoke plumes to tell me where the town is. The trouble with Caylee is that it’s a ghost town, and you don’t see smoke plumes from ghost towns.”

  “He’s right, Dr. Kevington,” Brown said. “If there’s an abandoned town hereabouts, you’d think we’d find more trails. And if Kenton was holed up there, you’d think he’d build a fire every now and then. There’d be smoke. But there’s been no smoke on this side of the mountain.”

  “We need to go back, sir,” Evaline said. “We’ll find Kenton a lot faster going back than going forward. If he’s here to be found at all. He’s had enough time he could have taken her a long distance. We’ve been looking out here for two days, sir.”

  “We’ve got to go back,” Brown affirmed again.

  “Go back?” Kevington said, chuckling. “So you think we would go back? Might I remind you what we left lying on the floor of that mansion? A dead body. Two days ago. That body surely has been found by now. And keep in mind that the boy got away. He fled, stabbed but alive, and fully able to talk. If we go back to Culvertown, we go back to face arrest.”

  Brown and Evaline stared at him, frowning, apparently having not thought of this before.

  Kevington looked back at them with contempt. “You were supposed to be the best, the most clever, the most persistent, the most heartless when the situation called for it. But now I must wonder. If you are representative of the best that this nation offers, then I stand astounded that the colonies managed to ever win the war.” He laughed coldly. “What do you think, Graham?”

  “Actually, sir, I’m not thinking of much at all,” Graham replied. He’d been sitting in silence on a log nearby, smoking his pipe. “I’ve been too busy watching that smoke rise yonder.”

  It took a moment for the significance to sink in. “Smoke?” Kevington stood and turned.

  Miles away, a thin line of smoke rose toward the sky where none had been before.

  Kevington smiled. “Gentlemen, I believe we just found the town of Caylee.”

  * * *

  Kenton knelt by the fireplace, slowly turning the spit upon which he had speared three rabbits. The scent was mouthwateringly good. He’d snared the rabbits during the afternoon, desperate to provide himself and Victoria with meat.

  The little bit of food they had brought with them out of Livingston’s mansion was almost gone.

  Kenton worried about the fire, though. He’d deliberately avoided building one as long as he and Victoria had been here … until now, when the necessities of cooking forced it. With any luck he would get the cooking quickly done and the fire out and no one would notice the plume.

  In the absence of such evidence as smoke plumes, Kenton actually felt relatively safe here. With much searching and great exertion, he had finally managed to find the house that Jack had used for his illicit romantic dalliances. It was quite a feat of engineering, in its way: a house that looked run-down and barren from the outside but which was actually quite livable inside. It was funny, in its way, Jack having gone to this trouble just to keep his love affair secret. It reflected his eccentricity.

  Now the place was protection for Kenton and Victoria. Kenton could only hope it was protection enough.

  He was eager to leave here, but Victoria was tired, weak, not ready for travel. And where would they go? Anywhere they went, Kevington would follow.

  For now Kenton refused to think further than the next hour or so. At the moment all that mattered was roasting these rabbits and feeding himself and his wife, who slept now on a bed in the other room of this two-room house. Then he would put out the fire and worry about the next hour when it came.

  But at some point, this had to end. He would have to deal with Kevington in a final way. There would have to be a showdown.

  But how, with Victoria to be protected? She was a woman strong of heart but not of body.

  Kenton stared into the flames, watching the rabbits roast, and prayed for guidance, for help, and for rescue.

  And he prayed that if Kevington was out there somewhere, still looking, he would not find this house.

  CHAPTER 33

  The fifteen-minute absence of Dr. Asheman had stretched to nearly an hour by the time Billy Connery put down his pen and handed the pad to Alex Gunnison.

  His work as an illustrator had given Connery the gift of a nimble pen. Despite his weak condition, he managed with succinctness and celerity to present Gunnison a written account of what had happened to him since his arrival at Culvertown. His account ended with his being stabbed and slashed by the man McCurden, who had initially presented himself to Connery as one Jim Grant.

  Gunnison read the account quickly, then again more slowly. “So we really don’t know what has become of Kenton,” he said. “You never actually saw him yourself.”

  “No,” Connery whispered.

  At that point the outer door opened. Someone strode across the room and entered Connery’s bedroom. It was a tall, tired-looking man, who was startled to see Gunnison there. He approached him with an outstretched hand and a serious look upon his face.

  “My name is Asheman. This is my clinic. I gather you’ve talked to my patient.”

  “Yes.… I’m Gunnison, Alexander Gunnison. I work with your patient.”

  “I hope you haven’t had him talking much. His throat was slashed and it’s too early for him to be using his voice. He’s lucky to have a voice at all.”

  “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ve had him writing rather than speaking.”

  “How did you know he was here?”

  “I didn’t. Finding him was a surprise. I actually came looking for you, Doctor.”

  “You’re ill?”

  “No. But there is a woman at the hotel, Miss Rachel Frye, who is fevered and in need of your help.”

  Asheman sighed. It had been a long day already. “Very well. I’ll go to her. But tell me, is she—”

  The outer door of the office literally burst inward with a crash.

  “Asheman! Doc, are you here?”

  Asheman headed out the door. “I’m here, Preacher. What’s—oh, my goodness.”

  Sammons carried in his arms the blood-crusted, weakened form of Stockton Shelley.

  “The boy’s been stabbed, Doc. But not just now.… I found him hiding in the church. He says he can’t remember how long he’s been there.”

  “Get him on the table there, and help me cut those clothes off him.” Asheman turned to Gunnison, who had also come out into the outer office. “Sir, unless that fevered woman is in the most severe condition, I’m afraid I must make a priority of this case.”

  “Indeed, Doctor. Miss Frye can wait. Perhaps, given the situation you face, I should try to bring her here rather than you go there.”

  “If you please, sir, I’ll go to her. I’ve got only two beds here, and young Stockton is about to occupy the second one.”

  Asheman turned his attention to Stockton; Gunnison turned to go back into the room where Connery was … but Connery had gotten up and had entered the front room, leaning against the wall to keep from falling.

  Asheman noticed what was happening. “Connery! What the devil … Get back in that bed before you collapse!”

  Connery staggered forward instead. He had heard it all from the back room but had to confirm with his own eyes that it was Stockton Shelley in the room. He went to the table where Stockton had been placed. Asheman continued to protest, but Connery did not even hear him.

  Stockton looked up and saw Connery. A spark of life returned to what had been a lusterless gaze.

  “It’s you.… I know you.”

  “What happened, Stockton?” Connery’s voice sounded horrible, hardly audible at all.

  Asheman swore and might have physically pushed Connery away had he not been in such bad shape. “What the devil is going on here? My patients are fraternizing now? Get back in that bed before you tear your woun
ds open again, Connery!”

  Connery turned to Gunnison. His words came out riding the crests of his weak gasps of air. “This boy … is the one … who told me where … to find Kenton.”

  “Quit trying to talk!” the doctor barked, only to be ignored yet again.

  Gunnison came closer to the table. Connery had described his encounter with Stockton in the written account he’d given to Gunnison. “Do you know where Kenton is?” he asked Stockton.

  “I must insist…” Asheworth began, only to be cut off by Stockton.

  “He was in the mansion.… Now there are men in town who are chasing him. They hurt me. And they murdered my father.” Some emotional dam broke inside Stockton, and he began to cry. “They murdered my father!”

  Now even Asheman was drawn in. “Your father has been killed, Stockton?”

  “Yes.… He’s in the mansion.… They tried to murder me, too.”

  Stockton’s wailed declarations would have sounded hard to believe except for the evidence of the wounds on his small and pale body.

  “Where is Kenton now?” Gunnison asked Stockton.

  “Who is Kenton?” the doctor asked, only to be ignored.

  “In Caylee,” Stockton replied. “I think he is in Caylee. The men chasing him were going to go there.… They were going to pay me to take them.”

  Asheman seized control again. “That’s enough, all of you!” He barked an order to Gunnison: “Help Connery get back to his bed, and for God’s sake don’t let him open his own wounds!” He turned to Sammons. “You’d best go fetch the marshal. This boy is talking about a murder having occurred, and if he’s right, I don’t think it’s even been detected yet.”

  Sammons nodded and headed for the door without a word.

  The doctor looked at Gunnison. “You may as well make yourself useful. Get that fool back into bed before he kills himself, then come help me with my patient.”

  CHAPTER 34

  By the time Gunnison returned to the hotel almost three hours after he had left, his wife was overwhelmed with worry.

  “Thank God!” she said as she embraced him. “I was afraid that Kevington had gotten you. He was here … right in this hotel, in the very room we’ve rented. At least, Rachel is sure he was. We found a handkerchief with his monogram that had been left on the dresser.”

  Gunnison, so laden with news of his own, could hardly find room in his mental basket to accommodate yet another item. But he knew there was not an immediate need to worry about Kevington, because he knew where Kevington almost certainly was.

  “Where’s the doctor?” Roxanne asked, only just then noticing that Gunnison had returned alone.

  “The doctor is very occupied with two patients he has bedded down in his clinic across town. How is Rachel?”

  “Doing better on her own, I’m glad to say. She’s sleeping now, and her fever is down. But tell me why these two patients are so important that the doctor refused to come see a sick woman?”

  “Don’t judge him harshly. From a medical standpoint he made the right decision, I have no doubt, because these patients are quite injured. One of them is a little street boy named Stockton Shelley, who has—listen to this!—been in contact with Kevington himself. And he is reasonably sure he knows where Kevington has gone … and where Kenton is. The other patient is Billy Connery.”

  “Billy! Why is he being treated?”

  “Because somebody—one of Kevington’s hired agents—cut his throat. He was left for dead in an alley, but survived, thank God.”

  “Oh, mercy! He’ll live?”

  “Amazingly, yes. The doctor said he was fortunate to fall in the way he did. The cut in his throat, maybe not as deep as his attacker thought, was held closed by the angle of his head when he passed out in the alley. Someone found him and got him to the doctor, and he’s slowly getting better.”

  “How did he manage to get into a row with one of Kevington’s agents?”

  “It’s a long story, one built of this piece and that, most of which I’ve only just learned. Billy has provided me what he knows and experienced, and the little Shelley boy has contributed what he knows—including his witnessing of the murder of his own father by an agent of Kevington.”

  “Murder! Oh, Alex! This grows worse by the moment.”

  “Yes. And it may grow worse yet. Kevington may have already found Kenton and Victoria. And he has three hired guns with him.… They wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  “I think I need to sit down.”

  “Do. Let’s both sit down, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. This is cobbled together from assorted pieces of information, like I said, and I’ll try to order it for you as, I go. Forgive me if I backtrack some; it makes it easier to give you the context of what has happened.

  “We already know from Rachel how the English side of this affair fell out: Kenton enters the house, finds Victoria but is caught by Kevington and made a prisoner, but still he manages to sneak word out to Rachel that she should flee back to the United States. She does, but her ship goes down off the coast. She is injured and goes into an extended, anonymous hospitalization in New York, unconscious much of that time, and of course is unable for a long time to contact us. When at last she does, you have also returned from your trip to Colorado, and have stumbled across that sketch that makes us realize Kenton is hiding here in Culvertown.

  “All right. So I send Billy Connery to Culvertown, and he manages to learn very quickly, mostly from this little Stockton Shelley character, that Kenton really is in Culvertown and hiding out in the mansion of Jack Livingston, who, if I recall, has family ties to Victoria. Kenton never talked much about that, but I’m sure I’m right. Anyway, Billy doesn’t realize that an agent of Kevington’s had already been sent to look for clues in St. Louis among Kenton’s professional and personal circles, and this agent, named McCurtin or McCurden or something such as that, learns that Billy has run off to Culvertown and figures out that he might be coming because of Kenton. So McCurden follows right on Billy’s heels, apparently follows Billy around town in secret, and learns along with Billy that Kenton really is holed up in the Livingston house.

  “McCurden intercepts Billy before he can get up to the mansion and leaves him for dead with his throat cut in an alley. My guess is McCurden had come up with the idea of capturing Victoria for himself and holding her hostage, making Kevington pay him high dollar to get her back. But something goes wrong, and McCurden gets himself killed up in the mansion, along with Jack Livingston. My guess is the pair killed each other. Kenton and Victoria disappear, knowing now that Kevington is very seriously pursuing them. They head across the mountain for an abandoned mining town called Caylee. We guess this, anyway, because they happened to be spotted by young Shelley, heading in that direction, and apparently Jack Livingston had a sort of secret second dwelling there, a place they might logically go to hide in.

  “Apparently McCurden must have telegraphed Kevington that he’d found Kenton, because Kevington and a couple of agents show up in town and begin going around looking for McCurden and bringing up the name of Brady Kenton, too. Stockton Shelley learns about this and decides he’ll go tell Kevington—for a price—where he can find Brady Kenton. Kevington agrees to hire the boy for a guide to get them to Caylee, which apparently is a hard place to find, and the whole gaggle of them sneak up and hide out in the Livingston house, which of course is empty at that point. Stockton told me that one of Kevington’s men was sent to find out whether one of the two men killed in the mansion earlier was McCurden. The fellow comes back and says that it was.

  “Later on, Stockton’s father goes hunting for him, and one of the places he looks is the mansion, because he knows Stockton has hid there in the past. One of Kevington’s agents kills the man, before Stockton’s eyes. Stockton attacks him, gets knifed up himself, but manages to get away. He’s hurt, weak, sick with grief over his father’s murder, and he goes to hide in a church, where the preacher found him earlier today. The preacher hauled
him to the doctor at the same time I was there, looking for help for Rachel. And of course I’d stumbled across Billy Connery there as well and was getting a lot of this information from him even as they were coming in. After the doctor finished patching up Stockton, I interviewed the boy … and that’s how all the pieces came together.”

  “It’s astonishing … but where is Kevington?”

  “Gone. I suspect he and his agents decided to go find Caylee on their own, since they lost Stockton. And they’ve had about two days to find the place … and Kenton.”

  She thought about that somberly. “Maybe Kenton and Victoria didn’t go there after all. Maybe they just kept moving.”

  “We can only hope. But I’m going to Caylee to see, Roxanne. I have to know if Kenton and Victoria are there.”

  “But Kevington is out there.… You could be in danger! You mustn’t go alone.… You have to take an officer of the law with you.”

  “That option has been explored. All this news was borne to the town marshal before I came here, and he was uninterested in anything except that there is another corpse up in the mansion. As for Kenton, the marshal believes what the rest of the world does: that he’s dead. Besides, he said, Caylee isn’t in his jurisdiction.”

  “But you can’t go alone!”

  “I won’t. I’m taking a man with me. He knows where Caylee is, and he’s a good man in a fight. Says that when he fights, God fights with him.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “His name is Sammons. He’s the preacher who found the boy hiding in his church. And he tells me that when he has to be, he can be mean as the devil for the sake of righteousness.”

  “Can you trust him? And can a preacher really be a fighter?”

  “This one can, I believe. You’ll know what I mean when you see him.”

  “Will he come here?”

  “Yes. Before dawn tomorrow. He’s bringing me a horse and saddle and rifle. At first light, he and I will ride out for Caylee.”

  * * *

  Kenton opened his eyes and sat up in the bed, drawing in a gasp of air. He stared into the darkness, unsure what had awakened him.