Manhunt

by William W. Johnstone

  Beaumont walked past another feeble punch and grabbed Whitehead by the collar. Yanking him forward, he drove a powerful knee into the other man’s groin, then again into his stomach. When Whitehead collapsed to his knees, Beaumont grabbed him by the back of his shirt and began to bash his face into the thick oak hub on the buggy wheel.

  “I thought you were going to be my real competition for her,” the little Ranger muttered long after the lolling man had turned into a limp bloody mess of bone and torn flesh.

  Whitehead moaned. His pistol lay on the ground in front of him, only inches from his shredded face.

  “Shootin’s too quick for you,” Beaumont spit and planted a boot on Whitehead’s blood-covered cheek.

  The Ranger picked up the revolver and stuck it in his waistband. He shrugged off his jacket and knelt down to cover Victoria. She tried to look around, but he gently turned her face away from her dead attackers and the wounded Whitehead.

  She shook her head and looked anyway. Her fine mouth was set in a grim line. “I’ll be fine. I’d have gladly killed them myself if I could have.” She began to sob, for the first time since the ordeal began, and buried her head against Beaumont’s chest. “Do you think he’ll live?” She nodded toward Whitehead.

  “I’m sorry to say it, but I believe he will for the time being. He won’t be boundin’ around hurting any more women, though. I aim to see him hang for this. . . and anything else he might have done.” The Ranger put a calloused hand against her hair and drew her tight against him. She smelled of soap and damp earth.

  She had tears in her eyes. “He never . . . I mean you stopped him before . . . Oh, Tyler.”

  “You’re one tough lady. You know that?” He put his arm around her bare shoulder and rocked her back and forth to comfort her.

  She didn’t pull away. Her voice caught on heavy sobs as she spoke. “You think so?”

  “That I do,” he said. “You‘re the spittin’ image of your father.” Beaumont flinched as soon as the words escaped his lips. He waited to see if she’d heard him.

  Now she pulled away, hitching the jacket around her arms. “You didn’t get here until after my father was kidnapped.” She eyed him carefully through her tears. “Have you met him before?”

  Beaumont wondered if she even had an inkling Frank Morgan could be her papa. They sure enough looked alike, but Mercy shared Morgan’s dark features as well, the same deep sadness in her eyes. Victoria had spunk, though. She’d beaten back her would-be kidnappers and chopped off Pete Crowder’s fingers in the process. She was still struggling mightily when Beaumont had come up and kicked the sheriff’s son off her. Quit wasn’t in her vocabulary when it came to fighting. If that wasn’t something she inherited from Morgan, he didn’t know what was.

  Still, the only thing certain was that if she didn’t know, it wasn’t up to Beaumont to tell her.

  “Well, did you—meet him before?”

  He smiled and shook his head, trying to look more relaxed than he really was. “Your papa’s a famous judge, darlin’. I’m a Texas Ranger. I know him by reputation, that’s all—and he’s got a reputation for being one tough customer.”

  Victoria’s gaze softened again. She appeared to buy his story. Before he could relax, she asked another hard question.

  “When you were fighting, I heard you say you thought Reed might be your competition. What did you mean by that?”

  Beaumont pulled her to him again and caressed her hair so she couldn’t see his face. “Let’s get you home, Miss. Monfore.” He smiled as he felt her nod her head against his chest.

  It was completely dark now. Half a moon hung in the night sky, but the bodies of Pete Crowder and his red-bearded companion were barely visible in the shadows of the huge pecan trees. Beaumont helped her up into the buggy and handed her the reins.

  “I need to get some rope from my saddle and tie up Whitehead. Then I’ll put my horse behind us and drive you back to town. Frank’s there now lookin’ after your mama.”

  A light of understanding twinkled in her eyes with the moonlight. “They were sweet on each other years ago, weren’t they?”

  Beaumont braced himself for a question about her parents he hoped she wouldn’t ask. “I suppose that’s true, but it was a long time back.”

  Victoria looked down at him for a long moment, then reached out to touch his face with her long, sure fingers. “I know more than you think I do,” she said.

  He swallowed hard. “Is that a fact?”

  She nodded, letting her hand slip slowly off his whiskered cheek. “You go ahead and take care of Reed and your horse. I’ll tell you this much, Tyler Beaumont—he was never any competition for you.”

  31

  Morgan slowed Stormy to a trot about a quarter mile from the Monfore house. His gut told him to hurry, but his brain told him to take things slowly and ease his way in. It wouldn’t do Mercy any good if he rushed into her house and saved her from outlaws inside while gunmen in the shadows killed them both. Frank vowed not to let anything like that happen again.

  The streets were dim and deserted, with most of the town folks inside eating an honest supper. Lights gleamed through windows up and down the street. In some of the houses, the curtains were drawn and only a sliver got through. Other places, people moved about inside their cozy homes, serving dinner, arguing, and otherwise carrying on family business seemingly oblivious to the fact that anyone on the dark street could stand and watch their every move.

  Mercy lived on the southwest side of town—the area where the well-to-do landed gentry had decided to build their fancy two- and three-story homes. It was only proper that a powerful judge should have an estate in such an area.

  Morgan had no doubt that he could have afforded to live in such a place. With the wealth he had socked away from his first wife, he could have easily bought any of the houses several times over. As well appointed as the houses were, with all their spacious rooms and sprawling porches, he couldn’t help but feel hemmed in amid such crowded conditions. Each lot was no more than an acre, and although most places had several outbuildings, including a coach house, to a person used to the wide-open expanses of prairie, the whole mess seemed crowded far too close together.

  Once, when Frank was hunting antelope out in New Mexico, he’d spent the better part of a late afternoon hunkered below a rise next to a water hole, watching a mound of red ants. He studied the way they scurried around crawling over one another while they went about their ant-business, and came away thinking that that was why he didn’t like living in any sort of town, not even a small one. He couldn’t abide crawling over someone else just to get where he wanted to go.

  The fact that Parker County, a place that used to be the jumping-off point for the frontier, was now joining the ranks of all the crowded places to the east, gave Morgan a pang of sadness deep in his gut.

  A hound howled mournfully up the street behind him, and he heard a woman’s voice instantly tell it to hush. Frank shook his head and looked down at Dog.

  “I’d not live in a place where you couldn’t howl a bit if you got it in your mind to sing.”

  Dog cocked his ear and looked up, whining softly at the attention.

  A moment later, Stormy stopped in his tracks. He gave a low snort, both ears pinned back. Dog rumbled a growl and looked off into a dark alley across the street.

  Morgan froze in the saddle. He strained his senses to try and figure out what his animals had noticed. Their instincts had saved his life on more than one occasion. Suddenly, Dog tore off in a barking frenzy toward the alley.

  Stormy continued to shuffle uneasily.

  “Let’s go, boy,” Morgan whispered to his horse. “We got places to be. The dog is a fair hand at takin’ care of himself.”

  Ten steps down the road, Stormy stopped again. The big Appaloosa nickered and threw its head back and forth, jingling the bits.

  A shiver went up Morgan’s spine as he saw the thin gleam of a lariat rope stretched out, head-high, a
cross the street in front of him. He gave his horse a pat on the neck. Someone was in the shadows. He could feel them.

  He heard the click of a hammer coming back.

  “Step down,” a voice from the darkness whispered. Morgan didn’t recognize it.

  Frank raised his hands slightly and took stock of his situation. He’d already tucked his jacket behind his pistol so he could get to it fast if he needed to, but his target was in the shadows. Dog had gone off to take care of something or someone across the street, and there could be more than one hiding on this side.

  “I told you to step down!” The voice had a little edge to it now, as if the speaker wasn’t quite sure of himself.

  “Glad to, friend,” Morgan said. “I just don’t want to get shot in the process.”

  “I’ll shoot you when it’s time and not before. Now clamber down off that horse.”

  Frank gave a slow nod. “All right then. I just wanted to get the shooting thing settled.” He stood in the stirrups and put his left hand on the saddle horn, preparing to dismount.

  “You better slow it down, mister, or I’ll blow you from here to Jehosephat.”

  Saddle leather creaked as Morgan climbed down slowly, keeping the Appaloosa between him and the shadowed gunman. There was a good moon, and Frank knew he was an easy target in the middle of the street.

  “Don’t think you’re hiding from me behind that big spotted horse of yours. I’ll easily shoot your legs out from under you, kill him, then come back and finish you off.”

  “Kind of figured that’s what you aimed to do anyhow,” Morgan said.

  Dog barked and snarled in the alley across the street. He was having troubles of his own.

  “Not unless you make me. We . . . I . . . got other plans for you.”

  Morgan gave Stormy a swat on the rump so he stepped past the neck line stretched across the street. The voice was right. If he was going to shoot, he would have done it already.

  “I’m getting mighty tired of talkin’ to someone who won’t come out in the light and show himself. If you’re not planning to kill me, then let’s get on with whatever it is you got in mind.” Morgan’s hand hovered above his pistol. His eyes sought any movement in the shadows.

  “You got an awful big yap for someone who’s about to meet his maker.”

  “So you do plan to gun me down in the street then?”

  “Oh,” the voice said, “you’re gonna die all right, but I won’t gun you down like a dog unless you make me. Anybody could do that. It’ll be a fair fight, man to man.”

  Frank had had enough talk. “Come on out and let’s get at it then. I got no stomach for cowards who hide in the dark.” There was movement in the shadows, a rustling of leaves and shuffling of heavy branches. Mercy’s house was less than four blocks away. Frank could feel in his bones: she was in grave danger.

  He didn’t have time for this foolishness.

  32

  Mercy dipped her pen in the marble inkwell on her polished cherry-wood desk and held it poised over a clean sheet of paper. She thought writing a short letter to her cousin in Georgia might help take her mind off things, but she found she couldn’t concentrate long enough to think of even one word.

  A drip of ink fell from the pen in her trembling hands like a black tear, and splattered against the stark whiteness of the paper. This was her third attempt. Crumpling the paper, she dropped it in the wicker wastebasket at her feet and gave up.

  Any other time, she would have cooked to calm her nerves. Isaiah loved to eat and she loved to cook for him. Now, with him gone, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Frank would get him back if anyone could. But even he might not be able to. Sometimes things just happened and there was no stopping them. Mercy, of all people, knew the truth in that.

  Even the chiming of her grandmother’s wall clock could set her teeth on edge lately. She worried for the safety of her husband, she worried for Victoria—and she worried about the way she felt about Frank Morgan.

  She could vividly recall the day Frank had fought Orville Muncy when he had called her names. Though Muncy stood a head taller, Frank was not the type to abide such conduct—even at the age of ten. He’d climbed on top of the larger boy and given him the thrashing of his life, bloodying his nose and boxing his ears until Orville pleaded for him to stop.

  The violence of it all had frightened her so much back then that Mercy had hardly been able to speak. But she knew from that day on she would love Frank Morgan for the rest of her life. She loved her husband and wanted him home more than anything—but even that couldn’t dispel the feelings she would always harbor for the handsome Drifter.

  The bird dog stretched on a blanket in front of the fire, groaning against the white linen bandage that encircled his belly. He looked up at Mercy with pitiful brown eyes and whined, as if to ask when his master was coming home.

  “It’s all right, Gallows,” she whispered, more to calm herself than the dog. “He’ll be all right, I think.” Her voice caught and she choked back a sob.

  A loud knock at the door caused her and the dog both to jump. She stooped to calm the animal, and he laid his head back against the blanket. The knock came again. It pounded the door hard enough to shake the china cups in the hall cabinet.

  “Who’s there?” She couldn’t control her tremulous voice. She winced when she heard how frightened she sounded, and wished she had more of Victoria’s courage.

  “It’s Ronald Purnell, Mrs. Monfore. I need to speak with you. It’s about the judge.” The voice sounded almost as brittle as hers.

  She’d met Purnell; he was a lawyer in town who practiced in her husband’s court. Peeking out the window to make certain he was alone, she turned the bolt and let him in.

  The lawyer rushed past her as if he was running from something, barely giving her a quick nod. Inside, he wrung his hands and chewed on his bottom lip. He was dressed in riding clothes, a fact Mercy found curious. She‘d never even seen the man on a horse. She knew her husband had little respect for his ability as a lawyer, and she’d always found Purnell a little odd.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Purnell?” She motioned him into the sitting room and toward a chair. She wished the man would get to the point. “You say you have information about my husband.”

  The lawyer took a tentative step toward the chair, but didn’t sit down. He paced back and forth in front of it, clutching and tugging at the mousy brown hat in both hands behind his back.

  Gallows lifted his head from his spot in front of the fireplace and sniffed the air. He sprang to his feet and broke into a fit of snarls and growls when he saw Purnell.

  The lawyer put his hand on his gun, but Mercy calmed the dog and sent him into the other room.

  Purnell’s eyes were bloodshot and wild, as if he’d been crying. “Mrs. Monfore. I don’t know any other way to say this, so I’ll just say it right out—I know where your husband is.”

  Mercy felt like someone had just thrown her a hundred-pound grain sack. Her whole body felt heavy. She should have been happy at the news, but the way Purnell presented it seemed full of danger. Instead of happiness, she was filled with a sudden sense of foreboding and dread.

  “Where?” She stood, putting a hand on her chest to try and control her breath. “Who has him?”

  “Ma’am, it’s not as simple as all that. If I could just have your word that you would cooperate, no one else has to get hurt.”

  Mercy wanted to scream, but she let her breath out slowly and bit her bottom lip before trying to speak. “Where is my husband? Is he hurt? Mr. Purnell, if you had something to do with this . . .”

  “Oh, he has plenty to do with it.” A husky voice pierced the shadows from the hallway. “He’s in this clean up to his nose hairs. Ain’t you, Purnell?” A dirty man with a lolling head and drooling mouth came in and grinned at her. She recognized him as one of the Crowder brothers. A huge oaf with greasy blond hair down to his massive shoulders followed him in. “He’s in the middle of
it all right. He just can’t get to the point.”

  “In the middle of what?” Mercy felt dizzy. She half-sat, half-fell back into her chair. “Mr. Purnell, what is he talking about?”

  “She’s finer than you said she was,” the greasy-haired giant said. He licked his lips and looked through half-shut eyes at Mercy, the way a starving man looked at a cooking piece of meat.

  Mercy shuddered. “So help me, my husband will see you all hang for . . .”

  Pony Crowder threw back his head and laughed an open-mouthed laugh. He stared at her, all the humor draining from his puffy, unshaven face. “Listen to me, lady. The last time I saw your husband he was bleedin’ out his ears. I don’t reckon he’s gonna see us do a damned thing except put a bullet in his head.” She tried to look away, but he leaned forward and took her face in his rough hand, squeezing her cheeks against her teeth and forcing her to face him while he spoke. “Not a damned thing. Comprende?”

  Mercy nodded slowly against the pressure of his hand. She could feel tears pressing out through clenched lashes and running down her cheeks. Crying wouldn’t help against such men, and she was furious at herself for doing it.

  “Now, you need to put on some riding clothes ’cause we’re goin’ on a little trip.” Pony let go of her and stood back.

  The giant leered. “That’s a good idea. Have her put on some ridin’ clothes.”

  “Where? What kind of trip?” Mercy rubbed her eyes and dabbed at her nose with the back of her sleeve.

  “To see your husband, little lady,” Pony said. “My pa seems to think you’ll be able to convince the old fool to let my brother out of jail. I ain’t the brightest star in the sky, but even I know that ain’t likely. Still, I gotta do what my pa says or there’ll be hell to pay. Comprende?”