Benedict and Brazos 19

by E. Jefferson Clay

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  During the War Between the States, landowner Stanton Claiborne had served the Confederacy with distinction. And though the South had lost that conflict, Claiborne moved his family smack into the heart of Union country at war’s end. The Northerners there – supposedly the victors – were living a hand-to-mouth existence. They didn’t take kindly to a rich Southerner coming into their domain and lording it over them.

  So the stage was set for war … a war that Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos unwittingly rode straight into.

  But the trouble wasn’t all Claiborne’s doing. There were unseen forces at work in the town of Resurrection who were determined to make the Southerner and his family suffer for their own gain. And before peace was declared again, men would die … and one in particular would die a death that was both shocking and tragic.

  BENEDICT AND BRAZOS 19: ECHOES OF SHILOH

  By E. Jefferson Clay

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

  © 2021 by Piccadilly Publishing

  First Electronic Edition: April 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 - Of Blood and Gold

  Two miles south of the great Shiloh ranch house, the Chad River ran deep and green. Even at night the water was warm, for it had run wide and shallow over miles of yellow sand in the Missouri sunlight before reaching the timber country. On one side of the river, the bank gave way to a smooth slope that climbed to the high mesa, but on the rangeland side the water was lined by trees, bleaching now in the summer’s heat, their thick branches meeting across the stream. It was a shadowy place where wild animals came to drink, and where fat river bass waited for feed to come with the current.

  It was the lone magnolia tree, the only one of its kind on the ranch, that brought young Lonnie Claiborne and his twin sister Emma to the Chad River that night. The magnolia reminded them of their home in pre-war Tennessee, and this was their secret place.

  Hand in hand, they came lightly along the deer pad, dappled moon shadows falling across their blond heads and slim shoulders. They were laughing, the girl from the sheer pleasure of the silvery night, and the boy because this was his one refuge from the iron domination of his father, Stanton Raintree

  Claiborne, master of Shiloh.

  When they reached the small patch of yellow sand near the flowering magnolia, Emma Claiborne released her brother’s hand and started to dance. But Lonnie Claiborne didn’t join her, his mood sobering now as he stared up at the magnolia with wide blue eyes. It was always this way when he first came to what he referred to as “The Old Place,” for the tree and the hushed silence conjured up vivid images of the original Old Place, the Claiborne Ranch near Shiloh, Tennessee ... before the Civil War’s four years of hell and thunder, before the blue hordes came flooding south, before his mother died at the end of a Yankee bayonet as he watched ...

  “Lonnie?” Emma had stopped twirling. Now concern showed in her face as she saw the familiar look in his eyes. She approached him hesitantly and placed a hand on his arm.

  “Lonnie ...”

  The distant look left the boy’s eyes, and suddenly his reckless smile flashed as he plunged a hand inside his jacket.

  The girl gasped when she saw the bourbon bottle.

  “Lonnie, what are you doing with that? You know you aren’t supposed to drink. Father would be furious if he—”

  “Father?” the boy cut her off, drawing himself to his full height and adopting an imperious pose that told the girl an impersonation of her father was coming. “My dear, sweet child,” he went on in Stanton Claiborne’s cultured tones, “why should I concern myself about the indulgences of that rascal, Lonnie? The whole world knows the fellow was never any good and shall certainly never amount to a cuss. Be damned with him, I say, and if the blackguard wishes to drink himself to death before he reaches maturity, then let us encourage the wretch, not discourage him.”

  The impersonation was so scathingly accurate, so daring, that Emma Claiborne placed her hands across her mouth in a vain effort to suppress her laughter. Encouraged, the boy took a pull on the neck of the bottle and then strode up and down the clearing, fingers hooked in the fob pocket of his waistcoat and back ramrod-erect.

  “A great disappointment that boy, Miss Emma.” He cleared his throat noisily. “In fact, one might even go so far as to say he’s a total disappointment. No sense of responsibility, no regard for custom, and much given to spending his time daydreaming and wallowing in the past.”

  Giggling but worried at the same time, Emma snatched at the bottle again. “Lonnie, you mustn’t,” she admonished, serious now. “You know liquor doesn’t agree with you.”

  The boy laughed, then he held the bottle over his head and stood on his toes to make her reach for it. Suddenly he flicked it over his shoulder. The bottle landed in the deep pool, gurgled once, and vanished. In response to his sister’s puzzled look, Claiborne slipped an arm around her shoulders and, watching the wide rings lapping across the water, spoke soberly.

  “I don’t need that stuff, sis ... except when he’s badgering me. I only took it tonight because I knew how wild it would make him if he knew ...” His voice faded and for a moment his handsome young face wore the hostile expression his sister feared most. Then, abruptly, for he was a boy of mercurial moods, he smiled and squeezed her shoulders. “Come on, sis, let’s sit down and talk about home, huh?”

  The “home” Lonnie Claiborne referred to was not the great mansion that stood two miles east of this bend in the Chad River, but the house it had been modelled upon down to the last detail: the Claiborne mansion in Shiloh, Tennessee, as it had been before Grant’s armies had torn the South apart. They always reminisced about “home” when they visited their secret place, Emma seated at the base of the flowering magnolia and Lonnie squatting with his back to the gnarled trunk, lost in memories. Emma knew how he liked to hear about the cottonfields, the negroes singing as they worked, the smell of magnolia on summer nights such as this, and all the rich sights and sounds of a world and a way of life that had seemed as permanent as anything man could build, but was now only ashes and memories ...

  She told him all the things she knew he wanted to hear, and Lonnie was quiet and at peace. As Emma spoke she toyed with fallen magnolia blossoms and watched the play of the moonlight on the water. Lonnie smiled every now and then, nodding to himself, seeing it all, feeling it once again. There were some on the Shiloh ranch and many in the town of Resurrection who believed Stanton Claiborne’s son was wild and even a little dangerous. The things they said may have been true, but the boy who sat quietly listening to his sister’s voice that night beside the deep-running Chad River was at peace with the world as his sister conjured up images—images that faded suddenly as he realized Emma had broken off.

  The boy blinked back to the present. Emma knelt before him, holding her hand close to her face, frowning at something in her palm that glittered in th
e moonlight.

  Irritated, Lonnie Claiborne said, “What are you fooling with there, sis? Come on—you were telling me about ma and that day she went to Atlanta for—”

  “Lonnie,” Emma broke in with a puzzled frown, extending her hand towards him. “What is this? I saw it shining amongst the leaves. It ... it looks like gold dust.”

  “Gold?” He grinned. “Sis, I know this place is magic, but we’re not about to find—” He broke off, suddenly sobering as he fingered the yellow substance. His eyes widened. “This is loco, Emma,” he breathed. “It is gold dust. Where did you find it?”

  She pointed to a spot some six feet away, near the fringe of a buck weed thicket. “There, Lonnie,” she whispered. “And, look—there’s more.”

  Wide-eyed, Lonnie Claiborne and his sister got to their feet and stared down at the thin, erratic line of gold dust that angled towards the water’s edge from the timber near the clearing. The trail of gold dust thickened at the spot where the faint imprint of a man’s boot showed at the water’s edge, then wound its way into the buck weed ...

  Where the killer lay in hiding.

  He’d been there when they had come laughing down the wild animal pad, this hunted desperado with the canvas sack of gold dust that had cost the lives of two men and a woman in the border town of Broadman’s Bend. Deep in the buck weed, he’d watched and listened without seeming to breathe, only his cold yellow eyes moving. Part-Cherokee, part-negro and the rest white, Brady Monk had more than once been likened to an animal. The description was apt enough.

  Brady Monk’s heart had jumped at the mention of the word “gold.” Until that moment, Brady Monk hadn’t known that the canvas sack tied to his belt had been bullet-nicked when Benedict and Brazos had shot his horse down, back at Cree Canyon, hadn’t realized he’d been leaking something more vital than blood all the way to this bend in the Chad River. i Now he fingered the hole in the sack and swore under his breath. Three people dead, a one-hundred-mile chase through wild hill country, a bullet in the leg and a ten-mile flight afoot ahead of relentless pursuit—for what? The gold dust was gone.

  “Emma!” Lonnie Claiborne pointed. “Look, the dust leads into the buck weed. Let’s follow it and see what—”

  “No, Lonnie,” the girl begged, clutching at her brother’s arm. “Lonnie, let’s go home. People don’t just find gold on the ground like this. There’s something wrong. “I—I’m frightened, Lonnie.”

  The boy frowned at his sister, but he finally nodded. “Could be you’re right. But we’ll get to the bottom of this. Maybe we could roust the boys who didn’t go to town and have them come down here with us and—”

  “We’ll discuss it when we get back to the house, Lonnie,” the girl broke in, drawing him away from the thicket. “Please let’s hurry, for I really am frightened.”

  “Smart kid,” Brady Monk breathed to himself, easing his cocked six-gun forward. And then he heard the sharp crack of a twig in the heavy belt of trees. The twins had heard it, too, and now they began to back away from the deer trail.

  “Most likely it was just a deer,” Lonnie said.

  But no deer had made that sharp sound in the night. A man had stepped on a dry twig. Lonnie Claiborne sensed this and thought of the hardcase drifters who sometimes passed through Shiloh country, but the killer with the yellow eyes narrowed down the field of possibilities to just two men—a giant Texan in a faded purple shirt and a flashy gambling man reputed to be one of the finest pistol shots west of the Mississippi. Either or both represented big trouble for bloody Brady Monk. But there was one way out ...

  Lonnie Claiborne and his sister didn’t hear the stealthy approach of the blocky figure from the thicket behind them. Their first intimation of danger was the sudden stench of a long-unwashed body. The next instant, a powerful, hairy arm whipped around Emma’s slender waist. She gasped and Lonnie Claiborne whirled about.

  Lonnie’s cry was cut off as the six-gun barrel slashed across his forehead, dropping him to the sand. Emma screamed, then broke off as the cold hard muzzle of the Colt was rammed into the small of her back.

  “Freeze or you’re dead meat, sister!” the killer snarled. Then he bellowed, “Benedict! Brazos! Show yourselves with empty hands or I’ll blast this pair—and by hell I’ll do it fast.”

  There was no response from the trees. The only sounds were the rush of water across the sandy river bottom and the stir of a night bird in the magnolia tree overhead. Frozen with fear, Emma Claiborne stood motionless, staring down at her unconscious brother. Over her shoulder, the killer’s face shone like beaten copper in the moonlight. His lips were skinned back and his skin was tight over high cheekbones. A vein throbbed above one yellow eye.

  “You got five seconds, you bastards!” he raged. “After that I drill the boy. Another five seconds and the jade gets it. You want me to start my count? All right, here—”

  Brady Monk broke off as a man emerged from the trees some thirty yards off. He was a towering young giant in shotgun chaps, a faded purple shirt and a battered hat: Texan Hank Brazos.

  “Where’s the other one, you overgrown son of a bitch?” the killer snarled, pushing the barrel of his Navy Colt .44 barrel under the trapped girl’s arm. “Where’s your high-steppin’ dude partner with his fancy white-handled guns?”

  “In the ground, Monk!” was Brazos’ deep-chested reply. “You sacked Benedict’s saddle at Cree Canyon.”

  Hope filled Brady Monk’s face. He’d triggered off a lot of bullet lead back at Cree Canyon, where they had ambushed him. Maybe Duke Benedict was dead. Maybe there was only this empty-handed Texan between himself and the far reaches of Missouri, where a man could lose himself forever.

  Monk thumbed back the six-gun hammer. Emma struggled desperately but Monk’s arm was like a bar of iron around her slender waist. Hank Brazos stood unmoving, a huge target. Up came the six-gun as Brady Monk shifted his living shield fractionally to face Brazos more squarely—and in so doing exposed part of his left side to the gun waiting in the trees.

  The small target was big enough for Duke Benedict. His finger stroked the trigger gently, then the roar of the Peacemaker rocked the clearing. Brady Monk spun away from Emma Claiborne, his gun stabbing fire at the sky and a crimson stream spouting from his open mouth. Emma’s legs gave way. As she fell, Benedict opened up with both guns. Brady Monk’s powerful body danced to the impact of the slugs and he was dead before he hit the ground.

  A film of cold sweat sheened Hank Brazos’ forehead as he and Benedict converged on the clearing. It had been Brazos’ idea to draw the killer’s fire while his partner got into position, for the huge Texan had total confidence in Benedict’s gun skill. But it had been close.

  “You all right, Missy?” Brazos asked the girl who knelt at her brother’s side.

  Emma waited until Lonnie’s dark eyelashes began to flutter before looking up. She glanced uncertainly from one tall figure to the other for a long moment, then came slowly to her feet.

  “Thank you, I am fine,” she said in a surprisingly calm voice. “I am Emma Claiborne ...” Her voice shook a little then. “You ... you just saved my life.”

  “A small thing for one so lovely,” Benedict said, removing his low-crowned gray hat. “Permit us to introduce ourselves, Miss Claiborne. This is Mr. Henry Brazos from Texas, and I am Duke Benedict.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Brazos and Mr. Benedict,” she replied, still self-possessed, still calm. Then she turned to look down at the outlaw’s body and her composure shattered.

  Benedict caught her as she fell.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, man,” he snapped at the Texan as he lowered the slim figure gently to the ground. “Get water!”

  Hank Brazos grunted and shook his big head ruefully as he headed for the river. Somehow Duke Benedict always ended up with his arms around a beautiful girl while Hank Brazos did the carrying and fetching. Mumbling under his breath, he scooped up a hatful of water.

  As he turned from the river
he heard the shouts of ranch hands coming from the direction of the big house.

  Chapter Two – Master of Shiloh

  Stanton Claiborne, seated at the table with his son and daughter, was sipping his second cup of breakfast coffee when his two house guests entered the big, oak-paneled dining room of the Shiloh ranch house.

  “Gentlemen.” The rancher’s manner was polite but reserved, exactly as it had been last night after he’d been told what had happened at the river. Claiborne snapped his fingers and the maid appeared. “Miss Rogers, ask the gentlemen what they would like for breakfast.”

  “Just coffee thanks,” murmured Duke Benedict, immaculate in dark broadcloth, polished dress boots and four-in-hand tie. He nodded soberly at the rancher and the boy, but he smiled at Emma as he took a chair on Claiborne’s left.

  “Reckon I’ll have coffee, too, ma’am,” drawled Brazos. Then, peering across at the servery, “And mebbe a few hot biscuits and a smidgen of steak, a dob or two of hot butter and just a couple pancakes. And, if you’ve got some of that side ham to spare, then I reckon I’ll—”

  “We could save some time here I feel,” Benedict cut in, spreading a table napkin on his lap. “Give him a large helping of everything, Miss Rogers.” He lifted an eyebrow at Claiborne. “My partner, as they say in his home State, is a ‘good doer’.” The twins laughed together and the maid smiled discreetly, but the cattleman’s classically handsome features remained expressionless.

  “You refer to Texas, I believe, Mr. Benedict?” Claiborne asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Claiborne lifted his cup to Brazos. “To the Lone Star State, Mr. Brazos, a true daughter of the Glorious South.”

  Taking his coffee from the maid, the Texan returned the salute. “I’ll drink to that any time, Mr. Claiborne.”

  The maid handed Benedict his cup next, but he pointedly set the coffee aside, making no attempt to drink. The significance of his action wasn’t lost on the man seated at the head of the table.