Benedict and Brazos 26

by E. Jefferson Clay

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  To fill their empty pockets, Benedict and Brazos turned bounty hunter, their mission to bring in a kill-crazy maniac called Billy Quinn, dead or alive. All the signs suggested that Quinn had taken up residence in a dead-end town called Babylon.

  But there was more to Babylon than met the eye. The law was administered by Bourne Murdock and his three brothers, and some said they enforced it a mite too heavily.

  There was also a rumor that Bourne had framed a man named Tom Sudden five years earlier, and had him packed off to the State Penitentiary … leaving Bourne himself free to romance Sudden’s girl and eventually marry her.

  Few people knew the real truth. All the townsfolk knew right now was that Sudden’s sentence had run its course, he was free again, and heading back to Babylon for a final showdown … and he was bringing four of the toughest gunmen right along with him …

  BENEDICT AND BRAZOS 26: WEAR BLACK FOR BILLY QUINN

  By E. Jefferson Clay

  First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  © 2021 by Piccadilly Publishing

  First Electronic Edition: November 2021

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

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  Chapter One – Winchester Welcome

  THE HARDEST PART of the day for Old Boomer the woodcutter was getting up and getting himself dressed in the morning.

  It was at that time of day in the chill black hour before dawn, that his rheumatics were at their worst. The demons grabbed at his old knees, locked his hips, sent shooting pains down his stringy arms as he struggled into his ancient buckskin jacket.

  But because Old Boomer had an invalid wife and a widowed daughter with a clutch of ginger-headed offspring dependent on his labors, he never tarried in bed till a later hour when the morning warmth might have been kinder to his old bones. Each morning before dawn he rose to do battle with Old Man Rheumatics and he licked him today like always and was driving his two-mule wagon down Babylon’s silent, mist-shrouded main street well before sunrise.

  By then, the task of harnessing up the mules and giving them their daily cussing out had banished the last fogs of sleep and the woodcutter was fully alert when, approaching the bridge a mile from town, he heard the distant whicker of a horse somewhere ahead.

  On hearing that small sound, the woodcutter did a strange thing for a leathery, fierce old man who still loved to boast that he was “Feared o’ nothin’,” at sixty-five years of age. He stopped his team on a dime, swung the wagon around then drove swiftly back to Babylon’s law office where thin chinks of yellow light showed from behind the drawn shades.

  For a man “Feared o’ nothin’,” Old Boomer looked uncommonly white around the gills as he hustled into the jailhouse to raise the alarm.

  Duke Benedict’s gray eyes were mocking, his smile scornful as he glanced across at his hulking saddle partner.

  “Henry Houston Brazos,” he scoffed, “famous idealist, rescuer of maidens in distress, champion cowpuncher and barroom brawler, now assuming yet another role as psalm-singing moralist.” He shook his handsome head as he swung his gaze ahead through the chill Wyoming morning. “Providence protect me from the pious!”

  Benedict was not at his best in the cold, dark hour of dawn, but who was?

  Riding ahead of the dashing Benedict as they approached the bridge strung across Bad Blood Creek in this wide sweep of the Valley of the Teton Sioux, Henry Houston Brazos, otherwise known as Hank, scowled heavily. Most of Benedict’s ‘ten dollar words’ went right over the Texan’s unschooled head, but he still got the drift. Benedict was again dismissing his protests concerning the line of work they were engaged in, just as he had done yesterday, the day before that and all the days stretching back to Archangel, where against Hank Brazos’ better judgment, they’d accepted the assignment to hunt down Billy Quinn.

  “But hell burn it, Yank,” he protested, the term of address dating back to the terrible days of the War Between the States when they had first met as enemies on the battlefield; “you know bounty-huntin’s low! Real low!”

  “There’s one thing worse than bounty-hunting.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Starving.”

  “There you go stretchin’ the string again. We wasn’t nowhere near to starvin’ and you know it.”

  They had drawn up on the bridge approach, peering ahead through the ghostly mists. Duke Benedict shivered beneath his frill-fronted shirt, watered silk vest and immaculately tailored broadcloth coat. But Hank Brazos as usual, with his faded purple shirt unbuttoned to the waist to reveal a slab of bare bronzed chest, seemed immune to physical discomfort, only vulnerable to Benedict’s nimble tongue.

  “To a grits-eating brush-popper,” he drawled, reaching for his silver cigar case, “starvation comes only when there’s no bark left to be chewed from the trees. Me? I’m starving the moment I can’t afford Shrimp Louis.” He touched a match to his Havana and nodded emphatically in the direction of the town they knew to lie across the creek. “And Shrimp Louis it’s going to be when we lower the boom on Mr. Quinn.”

  Brazos’ bottom lip stuck out. It was as much due to his superb trailsmanship as to Benedict’s clever sleuthing that had enabled them to reach the outskirts of Babylon, virtually certain that the town harbored the youthful mass killer who had eluded the combined efforts of the law for many months. But he still didn’t like what they were doing.

  He fired a final shot. “My daddy always said as how a bounty hunter’s low as whalebones—and they’re at the bottom of the sea.”

  A smile touched Benedict’s mouth. “Your daddy? You mean the famous turkey herder and draft dodger? Well then. I expect he’d—”

  “Now look, Benedict—”

  “No, you look, Texan, for I’m about out of patience with your constant complaining about this assignment. Either accept the fact that we’re obligated to see this thing through, having come so far, or you quit. One or the other.”

  Resentment showed in Brazos’ craggy, saddle-brown young face. That was always Benedict’s big gun, he thought bitterly—the threat to bust up the partnership. He’d used it many times during their violent association that had taken them from the bloody battlefields of the war through the two adventure studded years since peace came. On every occasion, Brazos had come to heel, reluctant to wind up a partnership that somehow worked amazingly well, despite the undeniable fact that Harvard educated, ex-Captain Duke Benedict and illiterate ex-Confederate Sergeant Hank Brazos were about as opposite as two men could be.

  Brazos worked his wide shoulders under his shirt as Benedict started across the bridge. He thought of Billy Quinn, the killer who had cut down seven people in the horrific bloodbath in Trailtown, Colorado. Benedict was the equal of any man with a Colt, on even terms. But would he be a match for Mad Dog Quinn?

  A faint smile touched Benedict’s mouth as he heard the Texan’s appaloosa start across the bridge behind him. He’d won again, but then he was luc
ky by trade ...

  Benedict was impatient again, when starting up the long slope towards the dark and sleeping town, Brazos halted to check the fresh sign in the trail. Though a far cry from being a trailsman, even the city-bred Benedict could see that a wagon and pair had rolled down this slope then, turned and gone back up again, and not too long ago by the look of the tracks. But he refused to concede that it might have anything to do with them.

  Brazos disagreed. He turned from studying the tracks to look up at the outline of rooftops and false fronts etched against the slowly lightening sky. His dog, Bullpup, was sniffing the tracks suspiciously and Hank Brazos came down with the sudden hunch that despite the early hour, Babylon suddenly seemed too quiet.

  “Could be we’re expected, Yank,” he conjectured warily. “Could be somebody sighted us comin’ in ...”

  “And it could be you’re starting to spook at shadows, mister,” Benedict reproved him.

  Brazos considered. Quinn was a loner, a bloody-handed killer on the dodge, he told himself. It didn’t add up that he would have friends to watch out for him in a fine, law-abiding town like Babylon. That just didn’t figure at all.

  “Could be at that, Yank,” he agreed, and together they started up the slope.

  The eastern sky was faintly lighted by the rising sun and a restless breeze stirred the three great trees that stood like watchful sentinels on the crest. No lights showed in the town and tumbleweed rolling ahead of them as they swung their weary horses into the main street gave the central block a deserted look.

  Babylon was bigger than they had expected; big, solid and prosperous-looking. And still uncommonly quiet.

  Resting a hand on gun butt as they passed the darkened front of the blacksmith’s, Hank Brazos didn’t say anything about the tingle he felt down his spine, nor did he remark on the fact that Bullpup kept stopping and sniffing suspiciously like he was moving through snake country. The Texan had already expressed his uneasiness and been reproved for it. But now he saw Benedict beginning to stiffen up some as he turned his sleek head this way and that, saw his slender right hand also move to gun butt as he finally checked his black gelding and turned to him with a frown.

  “Johnny Reb—”

  That was as far as he got as the jailhouse door opened inwards and a deep, authoritative voice cut across the street.

  “Reach!”

  Their reaction was typical of men who spent their lives living cheek by jowl with danger. They drew, Brazos displaying the workmanlike action of a reliable gun hand, Benedict exhibiting the lightning speed of the true gun artist.

  But they didn’t shoot. For as they slowly turned their heads this way and that, they saw gun barrels protruding from every window and doorway. Hunched, rifle-toting figures leant menacingly over roof parapets, materialized in alley mouths, ghosted into sight on the upper galleries of the Hardcase Hotel and the ornate Longhorn Saloon.

  Peaceful, law abiding Babylon was alive with riflemen, more riflemen than they’d seen assembled in one place since Chancellorsville!

  And as two Colt six-guns slid slowly, reluctantly back into leather, four tall, dark-garbed men wearing lawman’s badges and toting rifles crossed the jailhouse porch and strode towards them.

  “Blink once and you’re in big trouble, outlaws,” warned the man wearing the sheriff’s star.

  “Blink twice and you’re dead,” supported the deputy at the sheriff’s shoulder.

  It seemed a good idea not to blink at all.

  The sun was well clear of the rugged spine of Black Range when Sheriff Bourne Murdock appeared in the jailhouse doorway to disperse the crowd. The citizens had rallied loyally to the lawman’s call earlier, but now the sheriff felt it was time they went about their business.

  Most started off readily enough despite their curiosity about Babylon’s dawn arrivals, for obedience to the Murdocks had become an automatic thing in this man’s town. But Nero Nash, though he had taken no part in the earlier proceedings, hung back.

  “Are they the men we thought they were, Sheriff?” he asked. He was a stout, impressive man with a high color, dressed in a flashy check suit.

  “Move along, Mr. Nash,” came the terse reply.

  Nero Nash flushed. As proprietor of the Longhorn Saloon, chairman of the Railroad for Babylon Committee, and the town’s leading businessman, Nash had been largely responsible for the hiring of Sheriff Bourne Murdock and his gun-toting brothers back in the days when Babylon was rightly regarded as a hell-town. Over the years, Murdock law had imposed itself relentlessly over Babylon and the entire Teton Sioux Valley, but Nero Nash’s gratitude to the man responsible had long since burnt out. It was Nash’s belief that Bourne Murdock had become too strict for the town’s good. Babylon knew there was no love wasted between its two most prominent citizens.

  “We have a right to know if those men are scouts for the Sudden Gang,” Nash insisted. “This business affects every citizen in town as well as you, you know.”

  “I’m the last man who needs reminding of your rights, Mr. Nash, having protected them diligently for five years.” The sheriff’s dark eyes cut at the fat man sharply. “Move along, mister.”

  Biting down on the hot words that came to his lips, Nash strode away down the walk, big boots plucking loud sounds from the planks. The lawman nodded in satisfaction as he surveyed his now empty porch front. Bourne Murdock liked things neat.

  The air was thick with tobacco smoke as the sheriff turned back into the office. Duke Benedict sat on the corner of the desk with a Havana cigar angling from his lips, while towering in a corner wearing a brooding scowl, Hank Brazos was halfway through a Bull Durham cigarette.

  Benedict, in his flamboyant gambling man’s rig, and the giant Texan in his faded purple shirt, shotgun chaps and wreck of a hat, provided a colorful contrast to the four peace officers who were questioning them. Conservative was the word for the Murdocks’ mode of dress. Behind their backs, the more irreverent of Babylon’s citizens referred to them as ‘the undertakers.’ In their uniformly sober black suits, dark hats, string ties and heavy half-boots, the brothers might indeed have passed for a quartet of unsmiling funeral directors—but for two things. The eyes and the guns. No undertaker had those sharp, unblinking eyes, no respectable embalmer would be seen dead with double cartridge belts and thonged down .45s such as the Murdock brothers wore.

  Bourne Murdock hooked his thumbs in the slash pockets of his waistcoat and nodded fractionally.

  “All right,” he said, betraying no emotion or impatience, “let’s hear it again.”

  “Jumpin’ Judas!” Brazos said disgustedly, but fell silent at a gesture from Benedict. Having already repeated their story several times, Benedict was every bit as impatient as Brazos—but less prone to resent having his word questioned.

  So, carefully and concisely, Benedict went over his story yet again. The two, he said, had been granted permission by Marshal Tor Jackson of Archangel to hunt down Billy Quinn for the five thousand dollar bounty on the killer’s head. They had been on Quinn’s trail three weeks and information laboriously gleaned made it seem almost certain that their man had come to Babylon and quite probably was still here. Then, because he sensed it was expected of him, Benedict reiterated their previous denial of the charge that had been levelled at them following their arrest, namely that they were members of an outlaw gang led by Tom Sudden.

  After hearing him out in silence, the Murdocks drew aside to confer in low tones, leaving Benedict and Brazos to cool their heels a little longer, to ponder some more on what was still an uncertain situation.

  They still didn’t know the full story behind their Winchester welcome to Babylon, but they knew enough not to take either the situation or the lawmen lightly. They had gathered that a local hardcase named Tom Sudden, sent to the State Penitentiary by Sheriff Murdock several years earlier on a rustling charge had been released from the pen and was supposedly on his way home to even the score with the man who had put him away. They guessed,
rather than knew, that Babylon had been nervous for a week now, expecting Sudden’s return, and it was this fear that had prompted the old woodcutter to alert the lawmen when he’d heard a horse on the town trail so early in the day.

  Their timing, it seemed, left something to be desired, while the Murdock lawmen were not reassured by their style. The way Benedict had cleared his Colt in Front Street had convinced Bourne Murdock that he was a gunfighter and the inflection Murdock had put on the word ‘gunfighter’ had been little different from the way he’d said ‘outlaw.’ It was plain that gunfighters and outlaws were not welcome in this Murdock-tamed town right now.

  At length, the lawmen reached a decision and turned to confront them again. Lean-faced Virgil, the Herculean Morgan and the youthful Stacey stood back in respectful silence as Bourne delivered their verdict. It was always so. There were three deputies but only one sheriff in Babylon, and Bourne Murdock never let anybody forget it.

  He said, “I intend telegraphin’ Marshal Jackson in Archangel to check out your stories. I’m still not convinced you’re not in some way connected with Sudden and until I am, you’ll be under close watch.”

  He held up the wanted dodger on Billy Quinn that Benedict had presented to him, frowned at the sunny, smiling tintype of the boyish mass killer, then passed it to Benedict.

  “I can tell you now that this man isn’t in Babylon. I don’t allow murderers in my town.”

  Benedict folded the dodger and tucked it away. “I guess you won’t object if we satisfy ourselves on that score, Sheriff?”

  Murdock’s dark, brooding eyes went from one man to the other. “You’re not prepared to take my word when I say Quinn isn’t in this town?”

  “It’s not that,” Benedict replied. “But you’ve a big town here, and we know Quinn’s a clever, crafty man who’s been known to use disguise before.” He shrugged. “No reflection on your ability, Sheriff, but he could be here without your knowing.”