Rakeheart

by Rusty Davis

  RAKEHEART

  RAKEHEART

  RUSTY DAVIS

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Copyright © 2019 by Rusty Davis

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Davis, Rusty, author.

  Title: Rakeheart / Rusty Davis.

  Description: First Edition. | Farmington Hills, Mich. : Five Star, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018044047 (print) | LCCN 2018045919 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432857332 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432857325 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432857318 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5733-2

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Western stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.A9755 (ebook) | LCC PS3604.A9755 R35 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044047

  First Edition. First Printing: July 2019

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5733-2

  Find us on Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website—http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star Publishing at FiveStar@cengage.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 23 22 21 20 19

  RAKEHEART

  CHAPTER ONE

  Death waited at the crossing.

  Through the screen of bushes, he could see twenty men guarding the ford, standing between him and the sparkling water that reflected the Texas sun. Armed. Ready. Confident. They had won the race. Now they were predators hoping for prey. Waiting. Knowing they held the edge.

  Death traveled on the road.

  The dozen horsemen he had left behind in the darkness would find his trail sooner or later. Likely sooner. This was their part of Texas, not his. Now that the sun was full up, his trail would be visible. All trails led to death. The last turnoff from the main road that took him to the river was miles back. He might make it before his pursuers. Likely not.

  Jaws were closing. They had not swallowed him yet.

  There were only so many of Colonel Harlan Delacroix’s Knights of the Golden Empire in Red Rock County. Maybe if he got upriver, away from the ranches and towns Delacroix controlled—used to control—he’d be safe. Time to find out. Stayin’ and dyin’ didn’t seem like a good plan.

  He tied the stolen horse to a tree. He had a Colt and a Winchester, maybe fifty shells extra for the pistol and what felt like less for the rifle when he dug into the saddlebags. He could send the horse into the waiting men. A distraction that might create an opening. No. A death was a death, and there were enough of those already. There were men who needed killing. Horse didn’t ask for this. Only men did fool things like that.

  He reached up to stroke the horse’s face, scar from the manacles that held his wrist still livid after three days on the run. He hoped the animal would find a better owner. At least it would get a rest.

  Death might be waiting up the bank. He paused. There ought to be a thought, a memory—something to recall if it ended here. There wasn’t. He moved out.

  Two miles later, the trees moved away from the river. He was still. A fly buzzed loudly. Could it be forded? Lazy flow and white ripples meant stones not far beneath. Had to be. No one visible, but the river bent the wrong way for him to see very far. Might be a better chance later. Might not. Lay down the cards. Time.

  He limped as fast as he could, knowing from that feeling that had been honed over too many years that once he cleared the safety of the trees he was heading into a trap. Too late! They had beaten him here. Panic rushed through him as he tried to fight it down and think.

  He felt the hooves pounding before he saw the men. Men who try to outrun horses die. He turned. Two riders. The Winchester was not the beloved Spencer he carried until they caught up with him, but it was what he had.

  They were bouncing in the saddle as they fired. He was rock steady. One bullet slammed the right-hand rider in the chest. As he jerked back, the horse reared. The second rider dismounted as two shots went wide and used his horse as a shield.

  “Kane!”

  “Connolly.”

  “Should have shot you.”

  “Too late now. Give it up. Look at you hidin’ behind a horse with your knees knockin’ rather than face me.”

  “Colonel’s wife wanted you hung for what you done. Only reason we didn’t kill you already.”

  “Too late now.” A half-drunk guard and a little luck. Or he would have been dead the morning he escaped.

  “Delacroix deserved it.”

  “He was a good man!”

  “Says your law. Private army. Hangin’ freedmen. Killin’ anyone who thought the war was over or just plain got in his way. Nope. He earned what he got. Sorry I didn’t get her, too. She killed as much as he did. Never shot a woman, but I’d break that rule for her. Law will make that right.”

  “Coward. Got the sand to face me straight up?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Connolly held his own rifle by his side as he swatted the horse away. Kane had lowered his. Waiting. There were rules between men. Even here.

  Most of the men who followed Delacroix were cowards, hangers-on who were brave against the defenseless. Connolly was their spine. More brute than brave. No gunman, but an animal whose survival instincts were keen and who had absolute loyalty to his fallen leader. Whatever he was doing, he expected to win.

  He sidled toward Kane, watching. Wary.

  A distant crow complained as the wind whined. Connolly’s head jerked as his eyes flicked away downstream.

  Kane realized that Connolly was stalling. Nice game. Almost worked.

  He shouldered the rifle and fired before Connolly even had the chance to aim. The man crumpled as he was bringing his rifle to the ready.

  Cautiously, he moved closer. Connolly was writhing from the bullet that had smashed his right ankle. Kane had aimed for his gut. Great shooting.

  “I’ll find you,” Connolly seethed at Kane.

  Kane kicked the rifle away. He took from Connolly’s shirt pocket the small leather-bound notebook Kane had stolen from Delacroix on the night Kane killed him, before Connolly and his fellow goons cornered him. He knew Connolly kept it to gain power now that the colonel was dead.

  “Army gets this, you and the rest of your bunch gonna be too busy running to do anything else.”

  Hate glared back.

  “Always liked that stallion of yours. ’Preciate the loan.” He walked away toward Connolly’s horse. The animal had come to know him in the past few months. That was not why he waited before mounting.

  The sound he strained for was barely audible over the wind.

  Connolly was sitting with his pistol drawn. Kane still had the rifle in his hands as he turned. He wasn’t fast. Just fast enough. Two shots echoed at the same moment, followed by two more
that exploded in the same rhythm.

  One shot went true.

  Kane looked at the lump that had burned and looted until even the army could not ignore the work of him and his fellow cutthroats. Sherman wanted army justice to send a message that the government was in control, complete with trials and hangings.

  “Not this time, Cump.”

  He imagined he heard hooves. He walked over to where the horse, which knew far too well the sound of guns, had walked when Connolly started firing. He swung up in the saddle, wincing at the pain from the leg where he was wounded the night they caught him. He felt worn. A job done, a bad man dead, and ten thousand more like him waiting to take his place. Reconstruction was hard on the ones reconstructing. Made a man wonder why.

  Think later, live now.

  “C’mon horse, we got ridin’ to do.”

  They rode.

  The headquarters clerk was uneasy. Men waiting to see General William Tecumseh Sherman, the commander of the army and ruler of everything he decided to command, which included anything that came to mind, were often uneasy. They were supposed to be nervous. Sherman did that to a man.

  Few were this impatient and ill-tempered at being told to wait. Fewer still were so clearly trail-worn they appeared caked in dust and blood and just plain smelled bad. The man’s boots had dropped mud on the polished wood of the floor until the man sat and drummed long, tanned fingers on the arm of a worn chair. Everything he wore was patched; much of it had old stains that bespoke violence.

  He had stomped over to the silt-stained window and looked out for perhaps a minute before sitting again. Then rising again. He thumped unevenly, mud falling with each boot heel as he limped and paced, staring at the door and tapping his foot in the few moments he was otherwise still.

  “He will see you when he can,” reminded the clerk as the man sat, then rose and limped back and forth again, reminding the clerk of a prowling wild animal. The glance he got in return made him vow to keep silent.

  Kane met Sherman after every mission. Every time there was a new clerk. Kane wondered whether it was Sherman’s demanding ways, his eruptions of temper, or the cloud of smoke from the foulest, cheapest cigars on earth that chased them away. He wanted to laugh at the mental image of a pyramid of Sherman’s dead secretaries stored in some war department building somewhere.

  “Whazzat?” said the man, who pointed to the window and lurched that way and then past the clerk’s desk with speed the clerk was sure he did not have, opening the door with its opaque glass and slamming it behind him, making the glass rattle.

  Sherman might not have moved in the five months since Kane saw him last. A blue haze around his head; intensity and malice glaring at the world the man fought daily. Sherman’s red hair and scruffy beard were moving glacially to gray; his hawk-sharp features adding lines each year, but the vitality and energy in the man had not dimmed.

  The bane and core of Kane’s existence did not seem to notice the invasion of his office as he scratched something on the piece of paper before him and then tossed the pen on his desk. Kane watched the ink splatter.

  “Took long enough,” Sherman grumbled. He waved a hand at his desk, where the report Kane had hand delivered two hours ago lay strewn in disorder. Kane knew every word he had written had been read. Sherman was thorough.

  “It got complicated.”

  The assignment had been simple. Infiltrate a gang disrupting the law in east Texas and making Reconstruction a sham. Find proof. Get it to Sherman. Let the army come in, arrest the guilty, and try them all legal-like before hanging them. Then the army would get the credit, so people would believe in law and justice and Reconstruction.

  It didn’t work out quite that neatly. Kane recounted what Sherman had already read, a ritual that was designed for Sherman to see if the report was close enough to the truth that a man could repeat it. Sherman put his feet on a windowsill as Kane talked and puffed a vast cloud in anxious silence until Kane was done.

  “You killed six people.” Sherman paused. He knew Kane. “That you listed in this report.” He rattled the papers as if dead men would be shaken out of the sheaf of writing.

  “You was gonna have to kill ’em anyhow. Saved you the rope and all the time and fuss. You still get to hang the widow. You send for me to complain?”

  Sherman lowered his feet from the windowsill and looked out toward the east, toward the despised capital he had fled a year ago to move army headquarters to St. Louis, and whose politicians he hated with a fierce passion. He then faced Kane.

  “No.” He walked to the door.

  “Cooper. Coffee. Now!” The rattling of the glass that followed was even fiercer than Kane’s work.

  Sherman sat in the chair next to Kane. He inspected the man before him. Kane was still young, twenty-five or something like that, but his face was weathered from outdoor living, with a fresh, livid, pink scar along his left cheek. Kane was lean, with a face that was always almost cavernous. His black hair always looked in need of a haircut, and his brown eyes always had deep, dark circles surrounding them. Kane’s nose might have been average before it was broken. Always clean-shaven in a world of men with beards, Kane still managed to look trail worn but also very, very dangerous. With a hundred like him, Sherman thought, he could have marched to the sea and back and then taken Mexico for good measure.

  Kane was also loyal. Sherman saved him from a wrongful hanging in ’68, and the man had gone to work for him after that. No man in his service had been more faithful in doing what could not be done in public. Kane had no interest in the rights and wrongs of causes and politics. His loyalty was as personal as it was fierce. He rarely spoke. His work screamed volumes.

  Something burned deep in Kane—that Sherman knew—but what it could be was as deep a mystery to Sherman as how a man could drink something like tea. If Kane had a life apart from his missions for Sherman, he never spoke of it. Sherman asked once. The answer he got convinced him never to ask again.

  Cooper came with the coffee and managed not to spill it, despite his obvious fear of Kane. Sherman watched him leave. Kane, wise in the general’s ways, rose and pushed the already-shut door to be sure, then returned to his seat.

  Sherman downed most of the cup in a swallow. He puffed, like an engine building up a head of steam before tackling a steep grade.

  “No more Texas. Wyoming. Hall County. Town called Rakeheart. At least it is not another named for Lincoln.” Kane waited. Sherman was tightly wound. He got to the point in his own way. “Man was murdered. I need to know who. I need justice. Your kind. I need to know why. Not a gang running wild, although there are some out there. Can’t chase them all. Plain murder, this was. So I am told. Not a range war or a gunfight. No sense in what they tell me. You tell me straight.”

  “Wyoming.” Kane had never been there. Cold. Way up north. Indians up there, still fighting hard to keep something of their lands. Comanches had mostly accepted that the whites would never leave. Shame in a way. Half his childhood Kane wanted to be one of the wild Comanche riders who rode the skylines on wild horses. But Texas was mostly settled now. Wyoming was a different story. Sioux up there. Montana, maybe there was a reservation. Cheyenne, too. Black Hills? No, that was Dakota, mostly. Crow Indians were somewhere up there. Or was that Colorado? He never could keep the territories straight.

  Wyoming. Cow and horse country. That he knew from the men who rode the trails up there. Long way to go. Must be important.

  He’d worked for Sherman for about seven years, more or less. Reconstruction was a hard pill for the South to swallow. The army was the law, but the army had rules. Sherman needed a man who got things done, so Kane worked outside them. For Sherman to want the justice Kane preferred meant this was personal. That never happened.

  Sherman, having sat for almost a minute, was back on his feet, reminding Kane again of an engine going up a steep grade as clouds of blue emerged with every step. The remaining coffee in the cup sloshed across the floor as Sherman gestured wit
h the hand that held the cup. Words spilled; no, they spewed. The army. Black Hills. Gold. Thieves. Indians. Politicians who didn’t give him enough money to guard gold, guard Indians, and stop fools from starting wars. They got an extra dose.

  “Thompson has a summary written for you,” Sherman said. “Neat man. Too nervous. See him before you go. Maps. He finds good maps. Let me tell you the most important things. Jared Wilkins was a captain on the March to the Sea. Good man. Illinois regiment. Always wanted land. Went to Minnesota for a while; stayed in the army, then left. Moved way out there after the war. Family man. Named his son Sherman. We kept in touch. Widow wrote me once when he was sick . . . oh, a year or more ago. Not much of a letter. Inadequate spelling. I do not know much of her. Rachel. My daughter’s name, also.”

  “This is him.” Sherman handed him a small carte de visitesized image of a man and a young boy. The man was full of face and beard, trying to look important for the camera. Past forty and getting very round. Looked like a big man. Not very distinctive; neither handsome nor ugly, from what could be seen around the bush of dark whiskers. He was wearing an old uniform and trying to look solemn and dignified, which Kane sensed was an effort for the photographer. Much darker complexion than the boy, whose hair looked nearly white in the picture as it spilled out from under an oversize cavalry hat. Clearly a picture meant to curry favor with Sherman.

  Sherman now loomed above him.

  “Wilkins went to his barn one night. Someone shot him. No accident. Told her I would send someone. The widow. Not sure about her. Something . . . well, it’s your job to tell me. Fort Laramie wrote me that they have no idea what happened. Man there who investigates these things had no answer. Didn’t think much of him. Commander said he was reliable. Some of them drink too much out there. Flat land. Drives some men mad. You go. I can arrange a special train. You can be in Fort Laramie in four days. Town he lived in is a day west. Thompson has money. Buy anything else you need. Make sure you have money. Not much out there. Train will leave early. Be on it.”