“Possible but not likely,” Kate said.
She was all used up and her horse was tired.
Hope was fading in her, but she was determined not to give up the chase.
“We must check it out,” Davis said. “I’ll go if you’d rather scout to the south again.”
Kate shook her head.
“No, I’ll go.”
“How are you holding up?” Davis said.
“Not well. You?”
“Fine,” Davis said. “Just fine.”
But his exhausted face gave the lie to that answer.
Kate nodded.
“Then let’s ride, Brock. I’ll see you back at the cabin when . . .”
“When this is over and Ivy is safe.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “When this is over.”
“Farley!” Hagan called. “Come here and take a look, and tell me I’m wrong—because this time I want to be wrong. Is that Ivy Kerrigan in the saddle with that man over there? You remember her? The little daughter of Kate Kerrigan with a brother the same age?”
A far-sighted man, Farley took the field glasses and looked for himself.
Hagan saw the man’s jaw set into hard iron. He lowered the field glasses and looked at his boss.
“Well?” Hagan said. “Tell me man, is it her or not?”
“You ain’t wrong, boss. No sir. That’s her, that’s Miss Ivy, and I don’t think that man’s supposed to have her like that.”
Farley looked again and knew he might be studying the face of a man he was soon to kill.
It was obvious that Ivy was not where she was willingly, nor happy to be undergoing such a crude pawing by a bear of a man.
Though he’d sometimes found the child to be a bit of a grouch, Farley had developed a protective affection for Ivy during the time she had been at the Hagan house.
The girl had often helped him attend to the huge oxen, the very ones now yoked to the wagon.
“We’re going to have to forget breakfast for now, good as it smells,” Hagan said.
“I know, boss, I know. You got your shotgun in the back?”
“I do.”
“You’d best fetch it. We may be facing a gun trouble this morning.”
With that, the six-foot-six Farley reached into the storage compartment beneath him, replaced the field glasses, and in its place drew out a sawed-off shotgun, and a gun belt and holstered Navy Colt.
He buckled the belt around his lean waist as Hagan got back into the wagon.
Then Farley did an odd thing.
He jumped from the wagon, fetched the Dutch oven, and clambered back up to his perch with it.
He sat the oven at his feet and got the wagon rolling, turning it toward the horsemen to the east.
Steel Chandler looked past the long, westward-stretching shadows he and his companions cast in the rising sun, and watched the suddenly changing situation out on the plains.
“Take a look, Bodine! They’re a-coming our way with some kind of huge wagon.”
“What the hell you reckon?” Bodine said.
He leaned down and gave Ivy a little kiss on the face with his hairy lips.
He’d caught a distant whiff of frying bacon a few minutes earlier, and it had made him drool, so his whiskers were wet where he kissed Ivy. It sickened her and she leaned to one side and dry heaved. Her empty stomach had nothing to give up, but it tried hard.
One of the horsemen behind Bodine saw this and laughed.
This was a man Bodine despised above all his usual cohorts, a weasel with a high-pitched, cackling laugh that grated in Bodine’s ears and was always loudest with the joke was at Bodine’s expense.
“Wilton, that’s the last from you,” Bodine said.
He reached to his holster, drew his Colt and shot Wilton through the heart.
Wilton’s high-pitched laugh changed to an equally high-pitched yelp, and he slumped leftward, his head landing on the lap of the rider beside him.
The man frowned, made a sound of disgust, and pushed Wilton away.
Wilton dropped between the horses, his left foot remaining in its stirrup. The horse, startled by Wilton’s fall, stepped to the right, and then walked away from the others, dragging Wilton by the leg.
“Laugh now, Wilton!” Bodine said, and then he delivered a scornful imitation of Wilton’s cackle.
Farley drove up to the group and halted. The horsemen wheeled sufficiently to face him.
“Pretty morning, gentlemen,” Farley said in his best imitation of a British accent, something he pulled off quite well, and which he’d used several times in the past to make Ivy laugh.
Only at that moment, hearing it, did Ivy realize who had just arrived.
“Mr. Farley!” she declared, lurching upward and bumping the top of her head against Bodine’s bearded chin. It caused him to clamp his mouth shut and bite his tongue.
He swore foully at Ivy, grabbed her by the face and twisted her head to look up at him, and cursed her again.
With his bitten tongue tasting its own blood, Bodine shoved Ivy off the horse. She squealed and fell hard on the ground, the wind knocked out of her lungs.
Farley sighed. “Bad mistake, sir,” he said. “I know that young lady and now I’ve got to kill you.”
He retained the fake British accent.
Bodine glared at him. “You hear that, boys?” he said to his companions. “Got us one of them fancy colored boys here, talking all special! Says he’s going to kill me! I don’t think so.”
Bodine lifted his revolver and leveled it at Farley.
Down the length of its barrel he saw Farley reach under the wagon seat and come up with a shotgun.
Bodine, unnerved by the scattergun, fired too quickly and missed.
The shotgun in the black man’s hands roared. Bodine’s big belly exploded as the buckshot hit and he screamed.
He stared at the blood and guts oozing from him then at the man who’d killed him.
“Many apologies, my good fellow,” said Farley. “As I mentioned, I know the young lady.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Stunned by the violence that had descended on them, the men with Bodine did not react right away.
The first to break out of his shock was Steel.
He pulled the machete from the scabbard hanging on his saddle and charged at Farley.
A .44 bullet from Kate Kerrigan’s Henry crashed into the side of Steel’s head.
With the last of his draining strength, the man threw the machete at Farley.
The black man dodged the spinning blade easily and Steel died with a look of bitter disappointment on his face.
The remaining riders went for their guns, their entire focus on the grinning black man.
Farley fired, missed, and threw down his shotgun.
He skinned his Colt.
Farley fired and a man and horse went down.
A shot grazed his shoulder and drew blood.
Now it was close work and Farley was not known for his skill with a revolver.
He was embroiled in a gunfight he could not win.
But then Kate Kerrigan, like an avenging angel, was among them.
Her horse at the gallop, she leaned away from Bodine’s men and fired from the hip.
She killed a man, then, as the two others fought to regain control of their spooked horses, fired again. A clean miss.
But now both Farley and Hagan were back in the fight.
Hagan’s shotgun blasted a man’s arm off below the elbow and Farley scored a chest hit on the second.
And then it was all over.
Kate trotted back to a scene of carnage and swung out of the saddle.
She ran to Ivy, dropped on one knee, and held her close.
Only one horseman remained, a small man with the face of a vicious ape.
“I’m out of it,” he said. “None of this was my doing.”
“Wait here, Ivy,” Kate said, getting to her feet.
“But Ma . . .”
/> “Wait here. Don’t move.”
Kate racked a round into the Henry’s chamber.
Farley gave the little man a fake look of sympathy, dropped the British inflections, and said, “Get off the hoss and come here, friend.”
Farley reached down and opened the Dutch oven. He selected a biscuit and handed it to the small man.
“Enjoy, Rain Horse,”
The bandit leader sniffed the biscuit.
“Did your hands make this, black man?” he said.
“Sure did,” Farley said.
Rain Horse threw it away.
He looked at Hagan.
“I have surrendered,” he said.
“Not to me you didn’t,” Kate said.
The bandit turned his head slowly in Kate’s direction.
“I want you,” he said.
“Too bad,” Kate said.
Her .44 bullets tore great holes in the little man’s body and coldly she watched him drop dead to the ground.
“No one harms mine,” she said, gunsmoke curling around her.
Farley climbed down from the wagon and hugged the sobbing Ivy close.
The girl clung to him, her head on his shoulder. Her slender body shuddered, as the terrible events of the morning caught up to her.
“It’s all right, honey child,” Farley said. “I’m here, and everything is all right. They’re gone now.”
“Thank you, Farley,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Why, tally ho and all that,” he said, putting on again the false accent that so amused her. “Would you fancy a biscuit, milady?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d love one.”
Ivy was eating her second biscuit when Trace Kerrigan arrived.
He rode in slowly, staring at the dead men scattered on the prairie grass.
Ivy seemed alive and well, eating a biscuit, beside someone who should not be here at all, Hagan’s employee, Farley. And not far away, Hagan himself.
One big, bearded man lay a little away from the others. Trace was standing over him, looking down.
“Ma,” Trace said. “This one’s still alive.”
Bodine’s chest was moving a little, lungs partially visible, inflating and shakily deflating, in the great bloody cavity where his belly had been.
Kate walked over and looked down at the fleshy, pallid face of a dying man. Ivy joined her, slipping her hand into her mother’s. The sight of Bodine’s ruined form was nothing a little girl should experience, but Ivy was fast growing adept at dealing with things a child had no business experiencing.
“His name is Bill Bodine,” Ivy said. “He was the one who grabbed me and kept me with him. He was going to do . . . things to me. I don’t know exactly what, but I know it was going to be bad.”
Bodine’s eyes fluttered open and he looked up at Ivy, then at her mother. “Please,” he managed to whisper to Kate. “I don’t . . . want to die . . . help me, please. I’m not ready to die! Not ready . . .”
Kate nodded.
“No, I’m quite sure you’re not.”
Trace pulled his Colt from his waistband, cocked it, and aimed it at Bodine’s forehead.
“You’re a bad man, Bodine,” he said. “Some men just don’t deserve to live.”
The sound of Trace’s shot brought it all to an end.
They returned to the wagon and the process of putting the pieces together began.
Brock Davis met them on the trail home, a man almost completely in the dark as to what had and was happening.
He was greeted warmly, and was fully puzzled to see Hagar and Farley there.
“What brings you, Brock?” Farley asked. “You’re running a little late, as usual.”
Brock tried to find words, and at first could only shrug.
“I smelled biscuits,” he said at last.
“You’re in luck, my good man,” Farley said, and he reached for the Dutch oven.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Kate Kerrigan finished her story and Hiram Street was silent for a while, then said, “And then what happened, Ma’am?”
Kate smiled and rose to her feet.
“Hiram, that’s a story for another time,” she said.
The young cowboy stood, as manners demanded.
“Will you tell it to me some time, boss?” he said. “I mean, everything that happened afterward?”
“Some time, Hiram. Now this old lady is heading for bed and you to the bunkhouse.”
Street glanced out the parlor window.
“Look at the sky, Ma’am. Ain’t it purty?”
The new aborning day was coming in clean, under ribbons of scarlet and jade cloud. Over by the barn a little calico cat yawned and stretched then went about her business.
“Miz Kerrigan,” Street said, “I’m a man who never took a serious view of things, but I reckon maybe I’ll change. You went through much.”
“Hiram, what I told you was only the start,” Kate said.
She beckoned the cowboy to the window.
“You see the rock ridge to the north, by the wild oak?”
Street nodded.
“There’s a grave up there, ain’t there, Ma’am?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “It doesn’t have a marker because I wanted it that way.”
“Who lies there?” Street said.
“A man, a terrible man that nowadays the people who write stories call a gunfighter. His name was Jack Hickam and he was fast, lightning fast on the draw and shoot. He’d killed eighteen men, or so they said.”
“How did he end up there on the ridge?” the cowboy said.
“He was killed on the ridge in the summer of 1878 and we buried him right where he fell. In the rain. Then I spat on his grave.”
“You done for him, boss?”
Kate smiled and said, “As I told you, Hiram, that’s a story for another day.”
After the cowboy left, Kate stepped out of the house, stood on the porch and leaned a shoulder on a soaring white column, one of four that fronted the Kerrigan mansion.
In the distance, the bunkhouse cook carried an armload of firewood to the kitchen. Kate waved and the man grinned and waved back.
She gazed out at her land where her cattle grazed. Wild, proud and magnificent, it was a land Kate had never tamed.
But she had learned to live with it and adapt herself to its ways.
Trace and Quinn would ride in soon, eager for coffee and breakfast.
Kate yawned, fatigue finally catching up to her.
She went back inside, changed her mind about seeking her bed and changed into a morning dress.
When her sons arrived, she had another story to tell.
J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone
“When the Truth Becomes Legend”
William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.
“I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”
True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences, which planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.
“They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”
; After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, which would last sixteen years. It was there that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.
Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy the Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing brought a certain immediacy to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. In that respect, I often find myself saying, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)
Always steps ahead of the political curve, Bill’s recent thrillers, written with myself, include Vengeance Is Mine, Invasion USA, Border War, Jackknife, Remember the Alamo, Home Invasion, Phoenix Rising, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and the upcoming Suicide Mission.
Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty Page 19
