Benedict and Brazos 19

by E. Jefferson Clay

  “I’ll buy,” he croaked, trying to salvage something. And then, with a reproving look at the bouncer who’d failed so miserably he led the way into the saloon.

  Hank Brazos, Troy Ridge and Duke Benedict had whiskies at the long bar. Then Troy Ridge, still looking a little shaken, excused himself and vanished into his office, leaving Benedict free to calmly inspect the Can Can.

  The saloon was big and well-furnished. The whisky was good. There were faro layouts, a roulette wheel, and half a dozen poker games—plus a pretty girl named Jenny who rolled her hips provocatively as she walked up to Benedict to tell him quietly that she “just loved” the way he had handled things on the porch.

  Feeling better by the minute, Benedict bought another whisky and chatted with Jenny for a time, then he made his way to a poker table when a chair became vacant. Producing a healthy roll of banknotes, he asked if he might join the game and a chorus of voices replied in the affirmative. With a broad grin, he flicked up his coat tails, took his chair and rubbed his hands together briskly.

  “Now, gentlemen, what are the rules of this game?”

  Brazos, leaning against the bar with a beer in his fist, watched his partner become quickly absorbed in the game, then he began to look around. Though the smell of danger was gone from the Can Can, he could still feel hatred in the air—hatred directed at a tall man with silver hair whose only crime seemed to be that he refused to wear the sackcloth and ashes of the defeated.

  Brazos shook his head and lifted his glass. Hell, the damned war was over. Or wasn’t it?

  Chapter Four – Out of the Past

  The Jubilee trail led west and the Holloways followed it from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to the Mississippi River and then into Missouri. They’d travelled a lot of miles and had experienced a lot of hardship, but they kept on because Ma Holloway recognized no obstacle as insurmountable, and she capitulated to no enemy, be it brigand, redskin, disease or hunger.

  Though the rush westward had been gaining momentum throughout that spring and summer, the Holloways were the first from the Blue Ridge Mountains to undertake the great trek. The time to attack the journey westward, they said back in the poverty-stricken hills of home, was when you saw the first swallows heading south; that way you avoided the terrible western heat. Ma Holloway had sold up the old place in early spring and had struck west with dire warnings in her ears. They would use up all their money buying water from the human buzzards that preyed on the wagon trade, long before they reached the Mississippi. And if they did reach the Mississippi, they wouldn’t be able to get passage across the river. As always, Ma Holloway relied on her own judgment. Now here they were in Southern Missouri, and she had yet to see her first southbound swallow.

  Not that the journey had been easy, far from it. They had lost cattle in spring-flooded creeks in Ohio, had been set upon by a band of ex-Civil War marauders in the Green Hills country of Indiana, and had grappled with a yellow fever epidemic in Illinois. When they finally reached the Mississippi, they couldn’t afford the exorbitant charges demanded by the ferry captains, so they’d been forced to cut down trees and build a barge to float horses and wagons across, ma’s youngest son Billy almost drowning in the process.

  “She’s one part woman and nine parts stubborn mule,” folks used to say about Ma Holloway in Virginia. She was from a tough hill country breed, the kind that had produced Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Stonewall Jackson. Some people of the hill country, hard and strong and proud, made it to the top, most never got beyond a hillside cabin, a herd of scrubby cattle and little food for their offspring.

  Ma Holloway came from the latter class, but she meant to force her way into the thin ranks of the former. Ambition had always been part of Ma Holloway’s makeup, something she’d never shared with her husband. But then she had lost her husband and a son in the War Between the States, and now she drove grimly westward to forge a new life for herself and her three sons.

  Ma Holloway’s sons were worthy products of her breed. Race, the eldest, was twenty-five; next came Big Sam, twenty-three; and Billy was the youngest, just turned twenty-one.

  The brothers were alike in many ways. They all wore rough wool clothes, sweat-rimmed hats and heavy mountain men boots. They had the same sandy hair and the same kind of skin, so hardened by sun and wind that it had long ceased to look like skin. All had eyes of the palest washed-out blue; Race’s cruel and intelligent, Sam’s mild and dreamy, Billy’s with heat and passion in their depths. All looked alike, but the similarity was only on the surface. Underneath they were three very different men.

  Young Billy was the least suited to the life of a rancher, despite his athletic build and the big gun riding his hip. Billy dreamed of the easy life, of plush carpets, cutaway dresses, the shine of poker chips under green baize lights, the ease and luxury of a sleep-till-noon life. He would have made a good gambler for he had quick hands and steady nerves. Billy had shot a man in Virginia, which was one reason why his mother had decided it was time to move west.

  Big Sam saw things nobody else did. He saw galleons in the sky and heard music in the rain. He could wrestle a steer and brawl with the best, but he was essentially a gentle man who became dangerous only when drunk. He had courage of a sort but he bowed to his mother’s authority and he was afraid of his older brother.

  Race was the heir apparent to the family crown, taller, wider in the shoulders and narrower at the hips than his brothers. In him the Holloway strain had run true. Not for him the plush ease of towns or saloons; and no visions disturbed his dreams. He believed in what he could see and feel and master. He was a living replica of his father, whom he’d idolized. He could face any danger without blinking and he was a born leader. It was Race who broke the trail west.

  And Race Holloway was the first to reach the leaning signpost that said:

  RESURRECTION 10 MILES

  The tall man checked his travel-stained buckskin and let the others catch up. It was Monday morning and the horses were fresh after the day’s rest yesterday. Ever since leaving the Blue Ridges, they had rested every Sunday. The Holloway boys had no more religion in them than the mules that drew the wagons, but Ma was a praying woman and she insisted that they rest on the Lord’s Day.

  Billy rode up to the signpost and licked his lips when he realized a town was so close. Next came the battered, overladen wagon driven by Ma. The second wagon, driven by Sam, was a long way behind. Sam was dreaming again.

  The dust settled slowly and Ma Holloway read the sign. A big woman with an impressive bearing, her figure was swallowed up by a shapeless gray dress. The big hands that could flick a bullwhip with deadly accuracy or cuff a son dizzy, rested on her knees.

  “Well?” she said after her moving lips had laboriously worked out the letters on the sign. “We need salt and flour.”

  “We need more’n that, I can tell you,” Billy put in. “We ain’t seen a town in three weeks.”

  “And you got drunk as a skunk last time we did,” Race reminded him. “What do you say, Ma?”

  Ma Holloway rubbed her face and looked southward in the direction of the pointing sign. “Towns mean spendin’ and sometimes trouble,” she announced finally. “We’ll do without flour and salt until we come to a trail store.”

  “Judas Priest!” Billy Holloway complained bitterly to Sam when they were underway again. “You’d think a man was gonna start shootin’ saloon gals and settin’ fire to jailhouses, the way we’re skirtin’ everythin’ with more’n six lousy people in it.”

  “Ma knows best, Billy.”

  “Says who?”

  Sam had to think about that. “Ma, I guess,” he came up with finally.

  “Why don’t you bite your big dumb ass?” Billy shot at him, then spurred ahead, using his horse up in a way that brought a swift reprimand from Race and soured the boy’s mood even further. The trail west was hard on them all, but hardest of all on Billy.

  They nooned under a big stand of cottonwoods two miles farth
er on, settling down in silence to a meal of dried meat and beans. Around them the Winchester County range country was tinder-dry under a scorching sun. The Holloways stared out at the hard country with their washed-out blue eyes and thought about the cold, tree-clothed mountains of Virginia and of the rich green place where they would finally stop when Ma said it was time to settle.

  Coffee was brewing when Race glanced westward and grunted, “Rider comin’.”

  The solitary horseman approached slowly, his figure shimmering in the heat waves. As he drew near, they saw he was an odd-looking character with a doorknob head and a mouthful of prominent teeth that flashed in a grin as he turned his mount off the trail and reined in.

  “Howdy, folks,” he greeted amiably. “Mind if I step down and rest a spell?”

  Race Holloway grunted in a way that could have meant anything. But the rider took it as an affirmative reply and, seemingly oblivious to the Holloways’ icy indifference, introduced himself as Lin Peters, on his way to Resurrection with some bunting for the ball. They were all out of bunting in Resurrection, he informed, looking thirstily at the simmering coffee pot, and his boss, storekeeper Con Ardmore, had sent him across to Sodaville to collect some.

  “Ball?” Billy Holloway said, breaking the stony silence. “You mean a dancin’ ball?”

  “Correct,” replied the handyman, resting back on his bootheels. “Foundation Day ball, Wednesday night. Biggest turnout of the year in Resurrection.” He paused to look over the tired and battered wagons, then added, “If you folks are travellin’ hard, you might do worse than stop over and enjoy yourselves. Only twenty cents admission, and there’s a ten-piece band and waltzin’ competitions and—”

  “And girls?” Billy asked eagerly, his blue eyes bright.

  “More gals than you can poke a stick at,” Peters supplied.

  “Painted saloon harlots,” growled Ma Holloway with a disapproving glance at her youngest son.

  “Well, not rightly, ma’am,” Peters felt obliged to correct her. “Sure, we’ve got our share of them sort of gals. But we got some real fine, handsome Missouri gals, too. In fact I’ll wager some of ’em’d stand up against anythin’ you’d see anywhere.”

  “I’ll bet,” Race growled, but without much force. For Lin Peters had conjured up images of ease and relaxation and pleasure that made him painfully conscious of how long it had been since he’d relaxed.

  Peters bridled a little, feeling that the quality of his hometown was somehow being impinged. “You can believe it, mister,” he insisted, then began to enumerate on his fingers. “There’s Elly Mae Wallace, the schoolmarm, mebbe a little old for a single girl, but dances like nobody’s business. The there’s Cassie Belle, old Tom Belle’s youngest with a shape like ...” He was about to make curves in the air with his hands but something in Ma Holloway’s stony stare held him back. He dropped his hands, but kept going. “And then there’s the prettiest gal in the whole darn county even if she is ... well, that don’t make much never mind I guess. But Emma Claiborne is closer to an angel than any mortal gal I ever seen and—”

  Peters stopped as he realized his indifferent audience was looking anything but indifferent now. In truth, the way they were all staring at him made Peters uneasy and he ran a finger inside his shirt collar.

  “Heck, did I go and say somethin’ out of place, folks? Mr. Ardmore is always tellin’ me that I—”

  “Claiborne,” Race Holloway broke in. “Is that the name you just said, mister?”

  “Why, yeah.”

  “That isn’t a common name,” Ma Holloway said. “This girl got folks?”

  “Why, sure enough,” Peters said, uncomfortable now. “Her pa runs the Shiloh Ranch south of town.”

  Ma Holloway was on her feet now and Lin Peters just couldn’t understand what he had said to make this big, rough-looking migrant woman look so mean.

  “What is this man’s name?” she demanded.

  They were all getting up now, so the handyman followed suit. “Why ... why, it’s Stanton Claiborne, ma’am.”

  Nobody spoke for a long, frozen moment, and with four pairs of blue eyes boring at him like drills, Lin Peters broke into a sudden sweat.

  “Shucks, I’m sorry if I said somethin’ to rile you folks—”

  “Tall man with silver hair?” Race Holloway snapped at him. “Ex-Confederate colonel?”

  Peters’ Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “That’s the party right enough. You ... you folks know him?”

  Race Holloway turned to stare at his mother. Then, without looking at the man, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Get!”

  They didn’t have to tell Peters twice. The man had just stopped off for a little company, to relieve the boredom of the trail, but suddenly the trail was enormously inviting.

  “So long, folks,” he called back from the saddle. “Hope you make it to—to wherever you’re goin’.”

  Nobody spoke; nobody watched him ride away. In that dramatic moment, the Holloways ceased to be aware of Lin Peters, the sun washed Missouri landscape, and the dusty cottonwoods over their heads. In that moment they were back in the Virginia of 1864 with gray-garbed cavalrymen pouring through the Blue Ridge Mountains leaving death and destruction in their wake.

  Then the black memories faded and tall Race Holloway spoke.

  “What do we do, Ma?”

  Ma Holloway stood unmoving. Then she shook herself and looked at her sons with haggard eyes. When she spoke her voice, normally flat and forceful, had a tremble in it.

  “We’ll turn about and go to the town,” she said. She started slowly for the wagon, then halted and turned as if feeling they needed something more. “I want to look into the face of the man who murdered your brother and your father.”

  Chapter Five – Bitter Legacy

  “So there my daddy was in the recruitin’ office of the Texas Brigade on the day the war started,” Hank Brazos told his absorbed audience. “He mistook the office for another saloon, but that didn’t make no never mind ’cause he was drunk six times over as it was ... bald, pot-bellied and nigh to fifty, but ready to take on the North or South—singly or together; it was all the same to him.

  “‘What can you do?’ the recruitin’ sergeant asked him.

  “‘I’m a hoss wrangler,’ my pappy told him. ‘You got hosses in this man’s outfit?’

  “‘That we have, Mr. Brazos,’ the feller said.

  “‘How many?’ my daddy wanted to know.

  “‘Five thousand.’

  “Well, that pulled old Joe up some, but not for long. ‘I can do it,’ he boasted, thumpin’ his skinny old chest. ‘String ’em up.’”

  Lonnie Claiborne roared and slapped his knees, and the girl’s laughter was like silver bells in the clear afternoon air. Even Benedict, standing a little distance away smoking a cigar, had to smile. He knew the story was pure fiction, but that didn’t detract from the fact that Johnny Reb could spin a good yarn when in the mood.

  It was late afternoon on the Shiloh Ranch and the four were relaxing on the wide, sweeping lawns before the house. The mansion stood on a gentle rise with the lawns curving away on three sides. Twin rows of poplars lined the curved carriageway, and young dogwoods and old oaks formed a dark, contrasting backdrop to the white house. The Claiborne two-story house was of colonial design with imposing colonnades and huge windows that reflected the gold of the setting sun. It was exactly the sort of mansion that the blue-coated men whom Benedict had fought with had so often left in smoldering ruins during the war, and whom the men of Brazos’ Confederacy had fought so bravely and stubbornly to defend.

  “Tell us another one, Hank,” urged Lonnie, sprawled at his sister’s side on a white-painted garden bench.

  “Yes, please, Hank,” the girl said. Emma was radiant in crisp gingham, her long tresses spilling over her shoulders like gold.

  Like all storytellers, Brazos loved an appreciative audience, but even so he shook his big head.

  “Sorry, f
olks, but my daddy, who was a better tale spinner than I’ll ever know how to be, always told me to leave ’em wanting more.”

  “A wise man, your daddy,” Benedict drawled. “However, I think it only fair that your audience should know, the five thousand horses notwithstanding, that your daddy never got inside a uniform.”

  “True enough, true enough, Yank,” Brazos replied mildly. “But, talkin’ as a man who did get to wear a fine officer’s uniform and saw it all, don’t you reckon my old pappy was smarter than most?”

  Emma laughed and hugged her knees. “I love the way you two talk to each other. At first I thought you were really squabbling, but then I realized you both enjoy it. It’s like a game.”

  “Oh we’re as playful as they come,” Brazos drawled, but Benedict just looked at the girl, marveling afresh at how anybody could be so lovely.

  “Just one more story, Hank,” insisted Lonnie.

  “Tomorrow, kid,” Brazos told him, tugging out his Bull Durham sack. “Too many tall tales in one day plumb stretches a man’s imagination.”

  “Will you still be here tomorrow?” Emma asked eagerly.

  “Possibly,” said Benedict.

  “Do you think you might stay for the ball Wednesday night?” Emma asked. “It would be marvelous if you could, wouldn’t it, Lonnie?”

  “Great,” the boy said. “Last year’s ball was the best fun I’ve had since we came here.”

  “You’re all goin’ to that shindig?” Brazos asked, and when they nodded he frowned. “Your father, too? I wouldn’t have figured the colonel would be much of a one for dances and suchlike.” He hesitated and then added, “Particularly with things bein’, well, like they are.”

  “You mean the way the town feels about us?” said Lonnie. He grinned. “Well, I guess that’s why the old man just can’t stay away. He figures folks would think he was scared to show up or something.” The boy’s gaze turned to Benedict. “But there’s nothing to be scared about after the way you put them in their place yesterday, Duke.”