Journey into Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  “Dobbs is a murderer and a thief,” Brewster said.

  “He is indeed,” Kate said. “But Dobbs is a hard man to kill, and Frank knows it.”

  Brewster seemed offended. “I’m a Texas Ranger and I can handle anything that comes my way.”

  “Of course you can. It’s men like you who are bringing law to the West and making it a fine place to live for decent folks. But at this moment in time, we must still depend on men like Frank. Today, the only thing that matters is how fast a man can draw a gun. I’ve seen Frank do that very thing, JC, and he’s faster than you will ever be. Stand aside this once, Ranger Brewster, and let Frank do what he was bred to do.”

  “I could round up the vigilantes and arrest Dobbs as soon as he steps into the barn,” Brewster said.

  “And how many widows would there be in Eagle Pass by this time tomorrow?” Kate asked.

  “And dead Rangers?” Matt Lister spoke for the first time since he and Kate stepped into Brewster’s room. “I’ve been measuring men all my life and if the feller I spoke with is Jesse Dobbs then he’s a handful.” His faded, tired eyes turned to the Ranger. “After the war I was a lawman for a spell my own self, but I never amounted to much. The day I watched John Wesley Hardin practice with his guns was the day I turned in my badge. Hell, I knew if I ever had to go up against a fast draw fighter, I was a dead man. Sometimes a man has to face reality and leave the serious shooting to somebody who’s more experienced and a sight faster than he is.”

  Brewster rose from his chair, stepped to the window, and looked into the dark street, where the members of the Eagle Pass Peace Command huddled together and passed bottles around. None of them was sober. “Then I guess we wait.”

  “‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’” Kate said. “The poet John Milton wrote that.”

  “Was he ever in Eagle Pass?” Brewster said.

  “No. No he wasn’t,” Kate said.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Restless rats rustled near Frank as he sat in a dark corner of the livery stable and awaited the dawn. The bell in the Methodist church tower dinged softly to the errant rhythm of a gusting south wind. He built himself a cigarette, glad that his tobacco sack was almost full. It was going to be a long night.

  Around two in the morning, three men stepped out of the gloom and into the barn. Frank tensed, his fingers closing on his gun.

  After a few moments came the sound of gushing water hitting the floor and a man said, “Hell, I needed that. I’ve been holding it for an hour.”

  “Me, too, Tom,” another man said. “Seems that Old Crow goes right through me.”

  The men left and again the livery was silent but for the rats.

  Frank leaned the back of his head against the wall and dozed, treading the narrow ledge between wakefulness and sleep. He woke several times, once from a dream that he walked among blossoming trees showering him with gold and silver coins that chimed on hard ground. It was the knell of the church bell in a rising wind that had trespassed on his sleep, that and nothing more.

  Cramped, he rose to his feet and stretched the kinks out of his back. He stepped to the door and looked outside. Eagle Pass was lost in darkness and its buildings looked like shadowy ghost ships anchored for the night. A single oil lamp burned somewhere in the murk and cast no light. He turned and walked back to his uncomfortable corner. Would the night never end?

  * * *

  The dawn arrived as it must.

  It is a strange, opalescent time between darkness and light that wakes a man so that he sits up in his blankets expecting to see . . . something different. But always, it’s the same . . . the same things he saw the day before. Only the sky changes.

  Frank woke from sleep with a start. His hand on his Colt, he quickly looked around. The horses were quiet in their stalls, the barn door was a rectangle of gray, and beyond, the wakening town laid in a drift of rain, the child of the Gulf storm clutching at its coattails.

  Rising to his feet, he stood in shadow. Jesse Dobbs would come. He must come. Getting the money out of the country into Mexico was a top priority after the storm delay. The rain wouldn’t stop him. He would come . . .

  * * *

  Frank’s prediction came to pass thirty minutes later.

  He watched Dobbs come through the rain. The man wore an ankle-length slicker and carried a rifle at his side. Above him, the sky was ashen and gloomy, making the morning damp and depressing.

  Dobbs stepped into the barn. “Gimpy!” After a few moments of silence, he called, “Where the hell are you?”

  Frank walked out of shadow. “He’s not here, Jesse. Even think about raising the Winchester and I’ll kill you.”

  “Who are you?” Dobbs said.

  “Name’s Frank Cobb. I’m here to arrest you and take the payroll you stole back to the army.”

  Dobbs smiled. “Hell, I’ve heard of you. As I recollect, back in the day you ran with some wild ones.”

  “I still do,” Frank said.

  Dobbs propped the rifle against the wall of the barn. “We don’t need to quarrel, you and me. Come with me to Mexico and we’ll split the money. Hell, there’s enough for both of us and we can have us a time.”

  “Until I turn my back and your bullet puts an end to the good times. You’re scum, Jesse.”

  Dobbs had been smiling, but his face hardened. “And what does that make you, outlaw?”

  “I could have ended up like you, Jesse, but I went straight, saved myself. You never will.”

  Dobbs made a visible effort to remain calm. When he succeeded in pulling himself together he said, “Last chance, Cobb, and then my talking is done. Throw in with me and we’ll blow this burg as rich men.”

  “Not a chance in hell, Jesse. We have it out here and now.”

  “You can’t shade me, Cobb.”

  “Try me.”

  Dobbs’s hand streaked for his gun. He was sudden. Lightning-bolt sudden. Frank, weakened by his wound and far from being at his best, was way slower. But it didn’t matter. The rifle bullet that crashed onto Dobbs’s back as his Colt cleared leather dropped him like a puppet that just had its strings cut. He was alive when he hit the dung on the floor, but he was beyond movement. With his spine between his shoulder blades shattered and splintered like a dry stick, he died within moments.

  Frank looked at the figure in the doorway. “You didn’t give him much of a chance to make his play.”

  “You gave him his chance. He didn’t take it.” Kate lowered her rifle. “You’re family, Frank. I fight like a tigress for my family and win any way I can.”

  “And now you’ll have to live with it, Kate.”

  “I shot a mad dog, Frank. I can live with that just fine.”

  * * *

  Under the fussy supervision of Texas Ranger JC Brewster, Eagle Pass vigilantes moved the payroll money to the town hall and placed it under guard. The army was informed by wire and it promised that a wagon detail would arrive to pick up the money “sooner or later depending on the exigencies of the service.”

  “The brass don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to get their money back,” Frank said.

  Brewster said, “Probably the job will end up being done by the Rangers. The army will hold a court of inquiry into the robbery before it does anything else and that could take months.”

  “You’ll stay here with the money, JC?” Kate said.

  “I reckon so, unless I’m ordered otherwise. You’re heading back to the ranch?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “We’ve been gone too long.”

  “Going to be quiet around here without you two,” Brewster said.

  “If you’re ever up in the Pecos River country—”

  “I’ll be sure to stop by.”

  “We’ll have tea and sponge cake,” she said.

  “I look forward to it.” Brewster had been smiling, but his face became serious. “Kate, about Jesse Dobbs—”

  “I’d do the
same thing again.”

  “You saved Frank’s life. That’s what he told me.”

  “Do you think I did wrong, JC? Kate said.

  “Nope. The only part of Dobbs that was facing you was his back.”

  Kate smiled. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “That’s the only way to look at it.” Ranger Brewster held out his hand. “Good luck, Kate. You, too, Frank.”

  She took his hand. “And you, JC. Good luck.”

  BOOK THREE

  Sacrifice

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  “Did I not say I’d build a house fit for an Irish queen?” Barrie Delaney bowed.

  “You did and you have.” Kate looked into the old pirate’s crafty eyes. “There’s glass in the windows, Captain.”

  “Ah, the eyes of a beautiful woman miss nothing, to be sure. The glass was founded, Kate. Founded by my associate and fellow gentleman of fortune, Coot Lawson, Esquire.”

  “Found where?”

  “A-laying on the prairie where somebody had thrown them away, pane by pane. ‘Ah-ha,’ says Coot, ‘here’s a fine kettle o’ fish. A dangerous pile of glass lying in the path of any innocent rider.’ Now Coot, being such a caring cove, got his men to remove the glass and then he thought to himself, ‘I know. I’ll take it to Captain Delaney, who is building a fine house for Mrs. Kate Kerrigan. Surely every window needs glass and these panes will not go to waste.’”

  Then, triumphantly, Delaney said, “And that’s how come there is glass in every window of the Kerrigan mansion.”

  “Coot found it, huh? How much did you, or rather me, pay him?”

  “A small reward, Kate my darlin’,” the captain said. “It was such a mere trifle that I’ve forgotten the amount, but I’ll remember when I put it on my bill.”

  “And maybe I’ll remember to hang you and Coot Lawson from the same tree,” Kate said. “Mr. Webbe, you did a fine job with the columns. I declare, it makes the house look like a Southern mansion indeed.”

  “They need some finishing touches. I won’t leave a job half done,” Hargate Webbe said.

  “I will pay you for your work, Mr. Webbe,” Kate said. “You can be assured of that.”

  Delaney laid his hand on the hilt of his cutlass and eyed the little stonemason. “And there will be no padding of the bill, or you’ll answer to me.”

  “I’m an honest man, Mrs. Kerrigan.” He returned the captain’s baleful stare. “Unlike some I could mention.”

  He was spared further abuse when Kate’s youngest daughter said, “Ma, can I see my room now? When you were gone, Trace and Quinn wouldn’t let me.”

  “Yes, Shannon, but the house isn’t finished yet and you must step carefully. Captain Delaney will take you upstairs and show it to you. Where is your sister?”

  “Ivy is already in the house, Kate, pestering my men about making her furniture.” Delaney stretched out a hand to Shannon. “Come, lass, I’ll show you your room. I built it meself by hand, knowing it was for a right pretty girl.”

  After Delaney and Shannon left, Webbe said, “You’ll use that fine door from the cabin for your new house, Mrs. Kerrigan?”

  “Yes. The people who lived in the cabin before us brought it with them by wagon from up north somewhere. The entire family was killed by Indians.”

  “A tragedy indeed.”

  “We gave their remains a decent, Christian burial,” Kate said, “so there is always that.”

  “Amen.” He turned and left her standing in front of the almost finished house.

  Kate stood for a while listening to the tuneless cacophony of hammering as Delaney’s men worked on the interior of the house. She had to concede that for a crew of pirate rogues they were doing a fine job and there had not been a single shooting or cutting since the work started.

  She turned to the sound of hooves behind her. Quinn was out on the range with the hands and she’d sent Frank and Trace to check on the cholera wagons. She thought it was possible that the disease had run its course and the survivors had moved on.

  Frank’s face was grim, and Trace was gray around the gills, his blue eyes haunted as though he’d been given a glimpse of hell.

  Speaking from the saddle, Frank said, “They haven’t moved, Kate. The horses are grazing all over the place, but the wagons are still where we last saw them.”

  “The people? What about the people?”

  “Ma,” Trace said, his voice small, “the people are all dead. They all died inside the wagon circle, every last one of them. There are no living people left.”

  “But . . . but why, Frank? Oh my God, don’t tell me they starved to death?”

  “No, the cholera took them all,” Frank said. “As to why . . . I think they sacrificed themselves, Kate. They knew if they traveled on, they’d spread the plague far and wide so they stayed, knowing it would be their deaths.”

  “Frank, are you sure—”

  “They’re all dead, Kate. I used Delaney’s telescope to make sure.”

  Tears sprang into her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something but couldn’t speak. Then she realized that she’d nothing to say that hadn’t already been said.

  “There will have to be a burying,” Frank said, “but I don’t know how we can do that without risking other lives.”

  Kate said, “Trace, I need your horse. Frank, let’s ride out there. I want to see the wagons for myself.”

  “I told you all there is to see, Kate,” Frank said. “And you can smell the place from a mile away. Maybe you should sit this one out.”

  “Frank, the situation concerns the KK Ranch,” she said. “I want to go there. Trace, help me mount up.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Kate sat her horse, the ship’s telescope unused in her hands. Her eyes were on the buzzards circling above the wagons with the silent patience of the caretakers of the dead. The smell of death tainted the morning air, that and the rotten-fish reek of cholera. She steeled herself and then scanned the wagons with the telescope.

  It was a fine instrument, English made. Engraved on one side were the words, Thos. Harris & Son. Opticians to the Royal Family. No. 57 Opposite the British Museum. It was perfectly suited to a close study of the motionless corpses.

  Faces . . . men, women, and children, cheeks and eye sockets shadowed, the eyes open, staring, but seeing nothing. The people had died where they fell . . . a long way from Nirvana.

  Kate lowered the telescope, her cheeks pale. “Yes, I can see now that everyone is dead.”

  “Not an easy thing to look at,” Frank said.

  “Deaths like that never are. As a child in Ireland, I saw bodies of the people who starved to death during the Potato Famine. They looked like the people in the wagon circle, dead where they fell with the death shadows blue on their thin faces.” She looked into distance, her memories as vivid as the paintings in a Book of Hours. Taking her rosary from the pocket of her cotton day dress, she clutched it to her breast, its silver cross falling over the back of her hand. “Frank, we’ll burn them. We’ll set the wagons on fire and burn everything into ashes.” In a quieter tone, she added, “It’s a terrible thing to do and may God forgive me.”

  * * *

  Everyone who could ride was given a horse—the hands called in from the range, Barrie Delaney and his pirates, Trace, Quinn, Marco Salas the blacksmith, Frank, and Kate herself. A wagon was loaded with coal oil and whatever else would ignite. Around the wagon circle there was mesquite and sagebrush that would burn hot with thick black smoke and would help purify the air.

  Despite his protests Moses Rice was to be left behind to take care of the girls. “But Miz Kerrigan, I seen the cholera before,” he said.

  “Mose, you’re the only one I trust to stay behind with my daughters and keep an eye on things,” Kate said. “God willing, Mr. Lowery will be up and about soon but for now, he must remain in bed, and Jazmin has other duties to attend to.”

  “But Miz Kerrigan—”

  “Please don’t
add to my woes right now, Mose. I need you right here.”

  Bowing to the inevitable, Moses said, “I’ll do as you say . . . but under protest, mind.”

  She smiled. “Duly noted, Mr. Rice.”

  * * *

  Kate split her forces into good riders and bad.

  Led by Frank, the best riders—KK hands, Trace, and Quinn—were given the job of trotting around the wagon circle throwing coal oil onto the canvas covers. Frank also included Barrie Delaney, who had begun his piratical career in Ireland as a highwayman on the old coast road between Lame and Ballycastle and rode like a Comanche. The other pirates, men who could sit a horse but were not horsemen, were tasked with building a mesquite fire to light the torches.

  Kate sat her horse and said to her assembled riders, “Don’t stop for anything. I don’t know how many ways cholera can spread, so throw the coal oil on the canvases as you pass and then get out of there. Trace, Quinn, the rest of you, do you understand?”

  “Sure do, Mrs. Kerrigan,” one of the hands said. “I got no intention of stopping to take in the scenery.”

  “I hope the rest of you feel the same way,” Kate said.

  Frank grinned. “I guess you can depend on that, Kate.”

  “The fire is lit, so let’s get it done,” she said. “I’ll ride down with you.”

  “Kate, you can see just fine from where you’re at,” Frank hefted his jug of coal oil. “The rest of us will get it done.”

  “Truer words were never spoke, Kate me darlin’,” Delaney said. “When there’s dirty work afoot, leave it to the menfolk, I always say.”