The Fastest Gun in Texas (A Dusty Fog Civil War Book 5)

by J. T. Edson

  ‘Everybody does,’ he finally got out.

  ‘Not everybody knows me, or’s heard of me,’ Dusty pointed out.

  A chuckle ran around the crowd. The men were from an area where gunfights were not common and did not know what this apparently harmless talk was leading up to.

  ‘I don’t reckon you’re fast at all,’ Frank spat out, riled by the chuckles of the other men in the circle.

  ‘You want to know something, friend,’ Dusty answered, wishing the other men had not chuckled, reading the anger in Frank Holman’s face as a result of it. ‘I don’t think I’m fast, either.’

  Tracy Wade knew the signs, knew what this was leading up to and knew how little Frank Holman had if he went for his gun. He moved forward to try and stop the trouble.

  ‘This’s another man’s fire, Frank, and you’re not invited to it.’

  By the code of the wagon trains a man’s fire was classed as his home and no other man could come to it without asking for and receiving permission to do so. The youngster knew the rule but broke it, sure his gun speed would protect him.

  ‘You keep out of this, Wade,’ Frank hissed. ‘This’s between me and the short man here.’

  ‘Hold hard now, Holman!’ Evans barked. ‘Cap’n Fog’s my guest and I ain’t having you coming here unasked and insulting him—’

  ‘What’s wrong, small man?’ Frank interrupted. ‘You scared or something? Hiding behind the big man here. You yeller or something?’

  ‘Call it that if you like, boy,’ Dusty replied, but there was a harder edge to his voice now. ‘All right, you’ve called me down, run your bluff. Now just drift along and leave us to our talk.’

  ‘I go when I’m good and ready!’ Holman hissed out the words. ‘There’s nobody here can make me go.’

  ‘You’re that fast with a gun?’ asked Dusty.

  ‘The fastest there is.’

  ‘Shouldn’t need to go round proving it then, should you?’

  The Ysabel Kid was by nature a suspicious man, it was what kept him alive in the dangerous scouting duties he took on for the OD Connected. So he was not giving his full attention to what was happening near at hand. Ole Dusty could handle three of that boy’s sort, happen both his arms weren’t busted, and they weren’t. So the Kid looked around. In one of his constant glances around the camp he’d seen the thin man talking to the Major’s cook. He’d watched Joubert go to the Holman wagon, enter, then the youngster came out. Then he’d seen Joubert emerge and caught a glimpse of the gun in the man’s hand. The Kid read danger in all this and his right hand palm out, thumb hooking into his belt to hover over the worn walnut grips of his old Dragoon gun.

  ‘I’m fixing to see how fast you really are,’ Frank Holman warned Dusty, standing with legs bent slightly and fingers spread over the butt of his low-tied gun.

  ‘Waal, I’ll tell you friend, I’m not fast at all. It’s just that every man I had to kill was slower than me.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘I’ve not met you—yet.’

  Holman gulped down something which seemed to have blocked his throat. ‘Draw—!’

  ‘Not until you do.’

  Suddenly there was no longer a small man before Holman. Dusty Fog was now a big man, a man who loomed higher and wider than any other man in the crowd. Fear hit Frank Holman and it was fear which drove him to yell, ‘Draw!—’ once more.

  Tracy Wade caught Frank’s arm and tried to shove him away from the fire. ‘Get away from here before you wind up being killed!’

  Frank Holman’s temper snapped, driven by fear. He pushed Tracy away and spat in Dusty’s face, his hand dropping towards his gun.

  Dusty moved forward, there was something in his face which scared Holman more than any amount of screaming curses would. His right fist smashed into Frank’s stomach even as the youngster’s hand clawed at the butt of the gun. Frank gave a croaking gasp and doubled over, his gun was out but did him no good. Dusty’s left fist came up, smashing into the youngster’s jaw and lifting him erect, then the right shot across. The crack of the blow sounded loud, Frank Holman’s head snapped to one side and he crashed down to the ground.

  Turning to Evans Dusty was about to offer his apologies for the incident but Frank Holman was not done. The youngster came to his hands and knees. He shook his head and through the roaring pain which fogged his brain saw the Colt laying on the ground. He dived forward, scooping the gun up and rolling over to come to his knees with it in his hand. Evans saw the move and yelled a warning which brought Dusty spinning around. Dusty saw his danger and acted on it, his left hand leaping across his body to the white-handled butt of the Colt in his right holster.

  All his life Frank Holman wanted to see a real fast man in action. Right in front of him was the fastest of them all, but he never knew it. Half a second after Dusty’s left hand started to move Frank Holman was dead.

  The long barreled Army Colt came out and lined. There was no time to think of crippling Frank, sending a bullet through his shoulder, not when he was lifting his gun, cocked and ready. Dusty shot for an instant kill, shot for the one place which would give him that result. The bullet smashed in between Frank Holman’s eyes and shattered the back of his head as it came out. The youngster was almost lifted erect by the force of the heavy .44 ball. For an instant he was almost held erect, then he went down as if he’d been boned.

  Dusty felt a push which sent him staggering, heard the crash of a shot and the slap of a bullet passing over his head, going off into the darkness. Then he heard the dull boom of the Kid’s old Dragoon and twisted to see what was happening.

  The Ysabel Kid was watching the pale man by the Holman wagon. He saw the fast lift of the gun, lined shoulder high. It was a move which showed the man was more than just casually acquainted with handling guns. The Kid made his draw as he shoved Dusty, but even so he was almost too late.

  Joubert saw this first shot miss and tried to correct his aim.

  He was in bad trouble and he knew it. There were two men, both ready to shoot, he must deal with now. He took the Ysabel Kid as being the most dangerous of the two, bringing the old pin-fire revolver into line and cocking it fast. He made a slight delay and that delay was too long, far too long, when dealing with the Comanche-fast reactions of the Ysabel Kid. The old Dragoon gun bellowed out, kicked high as it vomited a round, soft lead ball from the seven and a half-inch barrel. The .44 ball smashed into Joubert’s body, driving home into his chest.

  Even so, had the Kid been armed with a lesser gun, he would have died. The Dragoon was loaded with a full forty-grain charge, the heaviest load yet possible in any handgun. It hurled out a ball weighing a third of an ounce. A man hit by such a bullet did not remain on his feet, he was knocked down instantly.

  This time was no exception. Joubert went over backwards, his gun falling from his hand as he crashed to the ground.

  At the sound of the shots men came running from all sides towards the Evans’ fire. They’d seen Frank Holman and the young Texan facing each other and, when Holman was knocked down, thought little of it, except that he’d got what he asked for. Now they crowded forward to see what was happening. They parted as Mrs. Holman ran from her wagon, letting her through the crowd. With a shriek she dropped to her knees and lifted her son’s bloody head and cradled it on her knees. She made no other sound and her eyes went to the big burly man who came running from the outer darkness. There was pain, grief and a deep hatred as she looked at the man.

  Major Brant arrived on the run, he could guess what happened and snapped, ‘Tell it, Tracy.’

  ‘Young Holman here tried to force a fight on Dusty. You know how it was?’ the scout replied and there was a rumble of agreement from the crowd. ‘Dusty didn’t want any trouble and tried to avoid it. Then Frank spat in his face and Dusty knocked him down. Turned his back on Frank and the youngster picked his gun up to go for Dusty’s back. Dusty turned and shot him, didn’t have a choice.’

  ‘A likely story!’ snarl
ed the big man, forcing his way forward. ‘What chance would my boy have against a killer like Dusty Fog?’

  ‘He didn’t have a chance, Holman,’ Tracy replied evenly. ‘Your boy never had a chance from the first day you let him strap on that gun. He thought he was fast, but he wasn’t, never would have been.’

  ‘You heard that!’ Holman roared, swinging to face the northern men in the crowd. ‘My boy was killed without a chance.’

  ‘Tracy never said anything like that!’ Tapley Evans barked out. ‘Your boy came here looking for trouble, as he’s looked for it before. Only this time he got trouble and couldn’t handle it.’

  ‘Hear that!’ yelled Holman. ‘Did you hear that? Them rebs are ganging up on us to protect that Texas killer.’

  ‘Hold it!’ Brant snapped. ‘There’s no cause to talk in that manner, Holman.’

  The bete noire of every wagon master taking a mixed crowd west was a revival of the old Civil War hatreds. Even after eight years it was often absurdly easy to stir up trouble between the men of the North and the South. So far Brant had never found himself with any such trouble but it looked as if it might boom open now.

  ‘We ain’t going to let them rebs get away with it, are we?’ Holman yelled. ‘I got good cause to talk that way. Look how they’ve all ganged together, them rebs, to protect the man who killed my son. Are we going to let ’em get away with it?’ He glared at the Northern men as he spoke, spitting out his hatred. ‘You, Caleb, you lost two sons fighting the rebs. Anse Keep, your brother died in Andersonville from the way they treated him. You, Ben, you lost a brother when Quantrill raided Lawrence. Are we going to—’

  ‘Mister!’ Dusty interrupted. ‘Did the man Lon here killed know you?’

  ‘He was my friend. A sick man, a man who couldn’t hardly see,’ Holman yelled back, shaking his fists wildly. His sleeves were rolled down and there were wide leather cuffs protecting his wrists. ‘And that half-breed shot him.’

  ‘Easy, Lon,’ Dusty snapped, catching his friend’s arm and holding him. He indicated the Northern men. ‘Send one of these gents to get the gun that man dropped would you, Major?’

  ‘Fetch it, please, Anse,’ Brant said to the tall, lean man who was the unspoken leader of the Northern men.

  Anse Keep turned to fetch the revolver and Dusty faced the crowd. ‘I came here looking for a man—’

  ‘Hear that?’ Holman bellowed. ‘Just hear that. He’s admitting he came to kill poor old Hogan Joubert. You know he couldn’t see without his glasses or with a gun.’

  The Northern men had to agree that they’d never seen Joubert without his glasses or with a gun. The thing was taking on a sinister note and getting worse all the time. The hotheads and the trouble-causers, of whom there were always a few in any community, were getting ready to pitch in and start trouble. Brant would have a bad shooting scrape on his hands if he made a single move.

  ‘Now listen, all of you,’ he said, trying to calm things down. ‘I’ll tell you why Captain Fog came here.’

  ‘We know why he came here!’ Holman interrupted. ‘Us Yankees are going to take him and hang him for murder.’

  Tapley Evans shook his head, hand hovering the butt of his gun. ‘Not while any of us can pull a trigger.’

  That was all the waverers needed to make them throw their hands in with the side they supported in the War. The Northern men felt they must help one of their kind take the murderer of his son. The Southern men were just as determined not to allow Captain Fog to be taken by the Yankees.

  ‘We licked them rebs once—’ Holman began.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it, all of you!’ The woman they called Grandma Brewster came from out of the darkness, her voice raised and anger on her face. She stood between the two groups of men, right in the line of fire if shooting began. ‘You take your hand from your gun, Tapley Evans. And you Bill Woolsey. You stupid, hotheaded fools. Don’t you realize we’ve got miles ahead of us and our only hope of getting through those miles is to pull together?’

  ‘Them rebs—’ began a man, but his hand left his gun butt.

  ‘Rebs?’ the woman’s tongue lashed him. ‘When your horses need shoeing you don’t ask Tapley Evans who he rode for in the War. And when your wagons need new harness you go to Anse Keep. He doesn’t ask if you wore blue or gray in the War. He goes right ahead and fixes it. When we had to help hand-haul wagons through that mud back in Kansas we didn’t think about the man who was helping us push wearing a different uniform in the War. We all pulled and pushed together. We fought off that Indian attack the same way. So stop your foolish talk of fighting and killing. The South lost ninety thousand men before they called off the fighting, but that did not make the hundred and ten thousand and more Union men who died feel any better. Over two hundred thousand men killed, countless more crippled for life. Isn’t that enough, do you want more killing now?’

  Holman saw the other men wavering and turned his rage and hate filled face at the woman. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. You lived in the South and sold them out. Her name’s Elizabeth van Bruwer.’

  ‘The Yankee spy!’ Tapley Evans growled out. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘It is,’ replied the woman, meeting his eyes without wavering. ‘I’m Elizabeth van Bruwer, the Union spy. But I’m also the woman who helped bring your son into the world, who treated and cared for Selina Brown and brought her through the fever. I tried to make up for what I did as my duty in the War—’

  ‘Don’t listen to the old hag,’ roared Holman, his anger making him slip up. ‘She was supposed to be working for the North but she sold me out to that damned Texan there after—’ His voice trailed off, for he knew he’d said too much.

  ‘I’d bet that leather cuff on your right wrist covers an anchor tattoo, mister,’ Dusty’s voice cut through the silence which followed the man’s words.

  There was more than hate in Holman’s face now, there was guilt and fear. He looked like a trapped animal, a rat whose one way out of a pocket is to fight. It made him all the more dangerous.

  ‘He’s got one all right, Cap’n,’ Evans said. ‘I saw it one time when he was washing, only time I ever saw him with them cuffs off.’

  ‘Come on, you Yankees!’ Holman screamed, knowing some of the men might still follow him. ‘Let’s take—’

  ‘Not this time, Brace!’

  The words brought Holman around to face the kneeling form of his wife. She was still nursing her son’s head and looking at her husband with a glint in her eyes he’d never seen before. He clenched his right fist, the fist which had so often beaten her into a bruised, sobbing heap.

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ he snarled.

  ‘Not this time. I’ve held it shut for too long. Held it shut and took all your blows and abuse,’ she replied, spitting the words at him like they were poison. ‘I’ve watched you and that Hogan Joubert turn my son into a bully and trouble-causer, teach him and make him think he was a good man with a gun.’ Her eyes went to the crowd. ‘That young feller didn’t kill my son. It was Brace Holman and Hogan Joubert who done it. They killed him the first day they gave him the gun belt. You men, you think Holman was for you in the War. He wasn’t—’

  ‘Stop your mouth!’ Holman roared, moving forward, foot drawing for a kick. Then he staggered back, face losing all its color.

  Mrs. Holman was still kneeling, but she held her son’s Army Colt, gripped it in both her hands, lining it. The hammer was drawn back and Holman knew how light the trigger was set. It would take only the most gentle pull to allow the hammer to fall and at that range she could not miss.

  Holman fell back a step or two, the look in his wife’s eyes scared him. He opened his mouth to say something.

  ‘You’ll do nothing to me,’ she hissed, the long years of cruelty and abuse boiling up inside her. ‘Not now, or at all. Not when those folks know how you sold arms to the South in the War. You tried to get Grandma Brewster there killed by a lynch mob when you heard the War was over. The Pinkertons were looking for you
and she knew about that anchor on your wrist, so you had to get rid of her. You went to her hometown, you and that Joubert, who was supposed to be half-blind and not able to use a gun. I’ve seen him use one, and kill men from behind with it.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ Holman gasped for he could see the men of the crowd were wavering and believing. He saw Anse Keep looking down at Joubert’s body, after finding the gun which Joubert’s last convulsions flung under the wagon. The man held the revolver and was looking down, with the aid of a lantern, for something more. ‘She’s tetched in the head.’

  ‘I’m not. Though I should be with the way you’ve treated me all these years. You folks look under the floorboards of our wagon. There’s rifles—’

  With a beast-like snarl Holman leapt forward, lifting his hands to smash down his wife and silence her tongue. There was a crash and smoke curled from the gun in the woman’s hands. Holman stiffened up as the lead drove upwards into his body. He stood for a moment, hands clawing down at the hole the bullet made, then he pitched forward on to his face. Mrs. Holman stared with unseeing eyes at the big shape, then dropped the gun and collapsed across the body of her son.

  Brant looked around, his face pale. ‘Get the doctor here.’

  By now the women of the train were forming up in one body but the men were still in two separate groups, the old hatreds of the war not settled down yet. All looked at the others and waited for someone to make the first move. It was still a dangerous situation and could rip the train wide open at the seams if handled wrong.

  ‘Look at you,’ Elizabeth van Bruwer snapped, still between the men. ‘Grown men. Responsible men, Men with families. You’re acting like children. Do you think you can get to your new homes without each other? You Union men think Major Brant will go with you because he rode for the Union. But how far will you get without a scout? That’s right. Tracy Wade rode for the South, in Mosby’s Rangers. How far will you Union men get without a blacksmith? Will you Confederates be able to repair your own leatherwork? Think on it before you split up. I recognized Holman soon after we left the East, but I never said anything. I thought he was going to make a new life in the west so I let him be. The War was over, it ended for you at the Appomattox Court House but it never ended for me, not until I joined this train. For eight years I never spoke to a living soul other than my two servants. They had to buy my food in the Negro market because no one would serve the Union spy. I did not hate them for it. They were my friends and I betrayed them. A mob was going to lynch me and Captain Fog there stopped them. I thought out who the man you sent your friends to look for might have been later, Captain. I also thought long on what you told me, about having to face the peace.’