Forty Loads

by Brett Cogburn

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Outnumbered, outgunned, and hell-bent on beating the odds.
 
When the beautiful McGaffney twins hire Faro Wells to escort them to New Mexico to claim their inheritance, Faro thinks his luck has finally turned. But a world of trouble stands between him and the supposed fortune: a raging war, hostile Indians, and every raider on the wild frontier. Not to mention the South’s most famous villain, the Black Knight, is hard on Faro’s trail. And the twins may be the worst trouble of all…

Release date: September 2, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 384

Sample

 

PROLOGUE

The old Mexican stood long in the shadows of the balcony, staring at the lighted windows across the street from him. He waited unmoving, despite all the long miles behind him. Patient, yes, but that wasn’t the only thing that kept him still. He was sure that he was being followed. Perhaps all that he had to do was to walk out into that street—so small a thing, dying, the matter of a few steps.

His weariness made it easier to wait. The journey had demanded much of him, and he wasn’t sure how much more he had to give. There was only so much one could do out of loyalty. He was only a man, after all, and an old man at that. Terribly tired—the kind of tired that would take away a man’s cautious edge, make him impatient . . . get him killed.

He scanned the mold black shadows carefully, but nothing was stirring except for the moths and mosquitos flittering in the pale light thrown from the row of windows and balconies lining that long ribbon of stone cutting through the old city. The gas lamps spotting the edges of the street glowed feebly, as if the hot, humid dark was too thick and heavy to allow light to pass through it.

Gut instinct, if nothing else, told him that trouble was near. He couldn’t name his enemies, but twice, bandits had lain in wait for him along the trail. Maybe he was simply unfortunate enough to be the next traveler to come along after they set their ambush, or perhaps they waited for him in particular, some criminal sixth sense telling them that he carried a thing of great value. Gold will do that to wicked men, and oftentimes to men only a little wicked.

Quick footsteps sounded, and he sucked back tight against the wall. His hand found the butt of the ancient, smoothbore pistol tucked behind his broad belt. He pressed the trigger so that the hammer would make no sound as he thumbed it back, and then relaxed his finger when the gun was at full cock.

The white of his eyes followed the slave girl as she passed him by with her bundle of laundry clutched under one arm, her skirt hissing over the cobblestones. She never looked right or left in passing, as if she too realized the night bore bad tidings and wanted nothing more than to get behind the locked door of her master’s home. He listened as her footsteps faded, and then to the sound of someone singing in French far up the street, accompanied by an instrument he could not name. The music was happy and light, and it was no way in keeping with the mood that had overcome the Mexican. A riverboat’s horn bellowed from down at the docks.

It smelled as if it was about to rain, but then again it always smelled to him as if it was going to rain in the city of New Orleans. It rarely rained where he come from, other than the brief monsoon season in the fall that quickly lost itself in the parched sands. But the water in Louisiana seemed to swell up from the ground itself, and the black earth smelled like worms and rotten decay.

Travel overland to New Orleans from the west turned out to be a chancy thing at best, and his last weeks amidst the swamps had been a nightmare. Time and again, when he left the road for fear of pursuit, he found himself blocked by some dead-end bog or flooded quagmire. It seemed as if he had waded or swam most of his way to New Orleans, but it was the loss of his horse that bothered him most. While crossing a great, stagnant slough, a giant alligator had taken hold of his good gelding’s hind leg and drug it down into the oily, black water. The last he had seen of his loyal animal was when its head appeared one last time above the roll of churning water, with its nostrils flared wide and its eyes wild and wide with terror. He knew that it would have screamed if it could have.

The Mexican felt for the scabbard on his hip and was soothed somewhat by the long-bladed knife there. He could always trust his knife. All men bled when pressed against sharp steel. A gun might fail you, hearts and tongues might lie, but a good blade was always true.

He held the pistol before his eyes. Truly, it was a poor peon’s gun, and there were far more modern and better weapons to be bought by a man with more money than he. However, it had always served him well enough, and it comforted him like an old friend. The three of them waited together: the knife, the gun, and the man.

He stepped from under the balcony when the moon passed behind a patch of slow-moving, smoky clouds. He was halfway across the street when he heard a horse coming. He started down the street in the opposite direction, but only made two steps before he heard the whispered talk of men moving toward him. He didn’t have to listen long to determine that they were seeking him.

It started to rain, and not gently. The boom of thunder sounded like a starter’s gun, and the dark sky opened up and poured forth big, warm drops slanting through the pale streetlights. He stood trapped in the middle of the lonely street with a steady stream of water running off the broad brim of his sombrero—a hat that marked him for the foreigner he was in a place where no men wore such things. He went back to the door he had studied so long and knocked on it. He knocked again and still no answer.

Stepping from under the balcony overhead, he craned his neck until he could see the second floor and the curtains of an open window billowing in the light breeze the rainstorm brought. He took the bag from his belt, and with a grunt, lobbed it through the open window and listened to the heavy thump of it landing on the floor inside, hoping that he had the correct address. Not perfect and not as he had envisioned delivering that which was entrusted to him, but the best he could do.

In the end, that was all a man could hope for—to say that he had done his best. He started up the street, wanting to get as far away from the house as possible, so that maybe his pursuers wouldn’t guess where he’d been or what he had left behind.

He didn’t go far before he spied a lone rider coming toward him. The stranger rode a horse almost as dark as the night, and the Mexican could see nothing of his hands under the black, caped oilcloth overcoat he wore. Rainwater ran like glowing quicksilver down the silhouette of man and beast when they parked broadside before him.

“El Hombre Viejo de la Muerte,” the Mexican whispered, half in fear that the dark angel would hear him, and half as if greeting an old friend.

He had talked to a man at a tavern back up the trail three days before that looked very similar to him that waited there and then. That man had asked too many questions about his journey. However, it had been daylight then, and never had he thought that the man was any more than a man—a cutthroat maybe, but at least a man.

Staring at the thing caped in black before him, the Mexican knew he was about to die. He knew that, not just by the blackness that surrounded the thing, but also when he saw that single, Cyclops eye tilted down at him and the leering smile with the quicksilver rain parting around it, as if no moisture could wet those grinning teeth.

The Mexican gave the Devil no chance to ask for his soul, or time to make any demands on the bit of life he had left. He lifted his pistol and squeezed the trigger. His powder was too wet, and the metallic snap of the hammer fall was the only sound in the world. Misfire.

The one-eyed devil’s coat moved, and a pistol appeared out of those dark folds. It was a ridiculously large revolver, and the rain made the charcoal blue barrel shine like polished ebony. The horse stamped nervously in the road and the pistol wobbled and strained to locate its target, moving in synchronization with the cold eye behind it.

The Mexican threw aside his own pistol and drew his knife. He could hear shouts and running footsteps splashing up the street behind him, but he ignored them and charged with his blade bared. Flames flashed before his eyes and the Devil disappeared.

The next thing the Mexican knew, he was lying on the street with water rushing down his sides and the rain falling gently onto his face. Couldn’t move and didn’t seem to have the will to. He was vaguely aware of a group of men standing nearby, silently watching him, faces devoid of all emotion. He looked up into the dark sky overhead until the Devil’s face filled his sliver of vision and stared back at him with that leering eye. He knew what the Devil wanted to ask even before he asked it.

“You are a hard man to follow.” The Devil cocked his head, his one good eye like a bird of prey studying its food for signs of life.

The Mexican smiled, although he didn’t know why. For some reason, both his fear and his pain were gone. He felt light and careless, and found it amusing that the Devil spoke with a slight French accent. In all his life, he never would have guessed that. Living was full of all kind of surprises, and dying seemed no less adventuresome.

“I mean to have what I came for,” the Devil said.

It took the Mexican three tries to speak again, and he felt his own blood on his chin, warmer than the rain, and seeping from him with every working of his mouth. “And you’ll die for it, as I have.”

The Devil’s one eyebrow tilted down. “You could have given it to me back at the tavern, whatever this precious thing is that you carry. Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t kill you.”

“I was never going home.” The Mexican hacked up a ragged spray of the rainwater flooding his open mouth. “I knew it from the moment . . . the moment I said I would come here.”

“Here? To this place?”

The Mexican tried to shrug, but only coughed again.

The devil eye staring at him was as wide and wild as a scared horse’s, and the mouth below it parted like a cadaver’s slowly contracting flesh into a patronizing grin, teeth wet and yellowed like varnished, aged ivory—an ancient smile, fallen, as old as the turning of the earth. “I’ve been here many times. This moment. Different places and different names, but still the same. Sometimes it pays; sometimes not. But this time . . . ah, yes . . . wouldn’t be any other place since I guessed what it was you carried. Something very heavy in your purse.”

The Mexican exhaled a groan.

The Devil held his stamping horse by one rein and squatted over his victim. He gestured casually and languidly with his pistol barrel for emphasis while he spoke—as if the Mexican wasn’t dying, as if it wasn’t raining, and as if they were two friendly strangers who had met on the roadside with all the time in the world for pleasant, idle conversation. “And that is the true measure of worth in all things, old man. The world balances itself. Am I to blame for being willing to take your life for something that is so valuable that you are willing to die for it? I think not. You were simply here, as I’m here. There could be no other reckoning.”

“Fool. Pendejo!” The Mexican was too weak to spit in the Devil’s eye, but it still felt good to call him a dumbass.

The Devil laughed. “But there is a chance, and a good chance, mon ami, that I will die a richer fool than you. Tell me what it is you know, and about this thing you carried that is so precious to you. You’ve got my bullet in your guts. Big bullet, maybe busted your back from the way you’re lying, no? Hurts, doesn’t it? Tell me now, and I’ll put another one in your head. Ease your suffering.”

The Mexican was too close to death to feel any more pain, and the Devil’s voice seemed to come from afar. He felt cold hands slipping inside his vest and tugging at his pockets. He tried to find the moon above him again, but it had long before disappeared somewhere into the smoky clouds drifting so low overhead. There was nothing but raindrops pelting his face and spotting his fading vision.

He took one last ragged breath. The things men would do for gold—pack loads of dull, yellow metal waiting for the taking a thousand miles toward the setting sun. Fools. Had he not been dead he could have told all who would listen that el oro was much easier to find than it was to keep.

CHAPTER 1

“I’ll call.” Faro Wells shoved a small stack of coins into the middle of the table and counted twenty heartbeats waiting to see the result of his decision. The swaying lantern above the table intermittently lighted half of his still, unreadable face.

Faro knew he was a loser, even before the riverboat captain showed his hand. The slow smirk building at one corner of the man’s walrus mustache gave it away. He wished the fat man had been so easy to read earlier, then maybe he wouldn’t have called.

“Tough luck,” the captain said as he reached out with one hand and smeared the winning cards faceup across the table before him.

“Full house, ain’t that the drizzlin’ shits.” The slave trader beside Faro let out a low whistle when he saw the captain’s hand. He paused with a smoldering cigar suspended between two fingers before his lips and clucked like an old hen and shook his head somberly, as if he would have played Faro’s cards differently.

The captain leaned forward to encircle the pot with both forearms. “Can’t say as I blame you for staying on three jacks. I’ve risked more on worse hands.”

Faro Wells watched stoically as the last of his fortune was slowly drug across the scarred oak table and into the fat captain’s belly. He frowned at the pasteboards he’d just thrown down as if they’d failed him. He was dead broke, courtesy of another losing hand. And not just the no-money-in-your-pockets kind of broke, but the no-money-in-your-pockets, lose-everything-you-have, nasty-people-wanting-to- break-your-legs-for-what-you-owe, soon-to-be-no-roof-over-your-head, starving kind of broke.

Faro shrugged. He leaned forward until his entire face was in the light. It was a rugged face, with the angle of his jaw darkened with a two-day growth of whisker stubble. A round, seamed scar the diameter of a pinky finger dimpled the cheekbone just below his left eye. His lips parted to reveal a perfect row of white teeth, but the forced gesture fell short of its nonchalant intent. It was a pirate’s smile that both those who knew him and those who didn’t were never quite sure how to take.

“You know what they say, Captain. Sometimes the worst hand a man can have is a good one.” Faro fought back the exasperated sigh that he so badly wanted to let escape his lungs.

“Better dig in your purse for some more coin.” The clammy-skinned lunger beside Faro coughed into a filthy kerchief before gathering the cards to shuffle for his deal. “You win some, you lose some.”

Faro merely grunted at the sickly cardsharp. Win some, hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked away from a poker table a winner. A man could tell himself that his luck was bound to turn for only so long. He’d always been good with numbers, and he did a swift mental calculation of just how poor his luck had been for the past year. The answers he came up with were quite astounding—astronomical in fact—when considering that a man could be dealt so many poor hands and play what good ones he garnered so badly. It was a miracle of the worst kind, and the kind of miracle he believed in.

“No, I’m played out,” Faro jerked a thumb in the direction of the slave trader to his left. “I haven’t got the price of Fontenot’s cigar on me.”

The wick on one of the kerosene lamps adorning the papered walls was trimmed badly and smoking up the globe. Faro had spent half a decade in such dark, smoky backrooms, but suddenly he felt claustrophobic in the shadowed glow of such a den.

He rose slowly and straightened his coat. He raked back his coal black hair with his fingers and set his broad-brimmed straw planter’s hat on his head, nodding to the men at the table. “Gentlemen, it’s been interesting, if not profitable.”

The slave trader rocked back in his chair with the cigar clenched between his snaggled teeth and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his brocaded vest. “If it’s a matter of money, my offer still stands.”

“Fontenot, you’ll have to wait in line with the rest of them if you want a piece. There’s not one thing left on Royal Oaks that doesn’t have a lien on it, including the slaves,” Faro said.

The men at the table looked down or away, and the room, already quiet, grew uncomfortably so. Although there were no gentlemen present—the farthest thing from it—the group liked to think of themselves as such. And no gentleman liked to discuss another man’s financial woes. It wasn’t proper, even though they all knew that Faro’s finances were in shambles. Social etiquette demanded that one avoid scandalous conversation, at least until the victim of the gossip had removed himself.

“I can stake you with a bit if you want to stay in the game. Your credit’s good with me.” The fat captain put a hand on a pile of money before him. “You’ve ridden my boat off and on for years, and you’ve always been good for your debts.”

And well he could afford to be generous. The man had three riverboats plying the Mississippi from New Orleans to Missouri, and not even the war seemed to slow the man’s profits. His knack for winning at poker proved just how lucky he was.

“Captain, your offer is kind, but I never gamble on borrowed money.”

“Lady Luck can be finicky. You’ve just got to wait her out.” The lunger had gathered control of himself after another round of coughing and sat pitifully hunched over the table, looking more like a beggar than a successful riverboat gambler, even with his suit, silk hat, and gaudy diamond cravat pin.

“You make your own damned luck.” The captain pounded his fist on the table and glared as if he dared any of them to argue with him. “I’ve lost a quarter of a million dollars at one time or another to this old river, but I’ve made money too. I’ve seen my ships sunk and run aground and had the creditors howling at my door like a pack of hounds. A man’s just got to keep picking himself up and coming back for more. Damn them all: drift logs, sandbars, and tight-fisted bankers. I’ll die rich in spite of them.”

Faro stood in the dark corner of the room, waiting for the circulation to return to his stiff knee after so long at the table. He looked down at his coat and plucked at a frazzled hole in the bend of one elbow. A tailor on the Vieux Carré had charged him eighty dollars to make the suit. Its style was supposedly the rage in Paris at the time it was made. When viewed from a distance, or in the dark confines of the room, it was a fine suit indeed, just like all the other dashing, custom-made clothes hanging in his closet at home. But up close, in good light, the suit was as worn and threadbare as Faro felt. It was as pretentious and fake as the empty wallet in his coat pocket, and nothing more than a hint of better times.

Faro started across the room. “I bid you all adieu.”

The captain’s bass voice stopped him at the door. “Faro, keep your chin up. You’re the kind that will come through when all’s said and done. You’ve just got to find something worth betting on.”

Faro paused with one hand on the open door, his tall frame shadowing the doorway with the lights of the docks behind him. “I bet and won once.”

“Hope you do again. The secret’s staying afloat until something else comes your way.” The captain studied the cards the lunger had just dealt him.

Fontenot looked over his own hand at Faro, the humidity of the room transferring itself to the sheen of sweat on his forehead. “I suppose I’ll see you at the auction in two days.”

“I’ll be there,” Faro said.

“I’ll have my hired man there early to look over your bunch.”

“You do that.” Faro made no attempt to hide his disdain for the man. Fontenot was a greasy, shifty type, even for a slave trader. There had been a time when Faro was far pickier about the company he kept and the men he gambled with, but his latest string of bad luck had shortened his list of options. Playing cards with such riffraff was a side effect of his misfortune.

“Good night, Faro.” The captain said absentmindedly, his mind already back on the game. “Give your father my best wishes. He’s always been a man of vigor, and it does many of us who know him no good to see him laid low with illness.”

“I will.” Faro tipped his hat to the room and went out the door.

Once outside, he rubbed at his aching eyes and took in the sun just beginning to peek over the city. He had no clue that he’d been so long at the table, even though the sun and a glance at his pocket watch told him he’d been at the game for better than thirty-six hours.

The riverboat on which he stood was docked alongside the riverbank. Every kind of watercraft imaginable stretched in a long line to either side of her. The great smoke stacks of steamships and riverboats and the masts of sailing vessels stood silhouetted in the dim light as far as he could see. He readjusted the leather and metal brace on his left knee and took the stairs down to the main deck. There was a slight limp to his gait, and he leaned heavily on his cane when he made his way down the gangplank to the dock.

Normally, a carriage or a buggy would have awaited him, but the high sheriff of the parish had impounded them, along with all the other chattels and property of Royal Oaks plantation. He would have had one of the captain’s cabin boys or deckhands fetch him a cab driver, but he hadn’t the price of a fare.

He crossed the breadth of the small wooden dock and made his way toward the low, earthen berm of the levee that lined the river some fifty yards back from the water’s edge. The bare, silty ground was muddy from recent rains and high water, and a cypress plank sidewalk had been laid down for foot traffic. Once over the levee, stacked cotton bales, mule carts, and other piled goods created an alleyway with only a small view of the riverfront warehouses and a portion of St. Louis Street ahead. Faro paused when a black coach with high red wheels and polished brass lanterns halted at the end of that alleyway. The driver watched him with seeming unconcern, but it was obvious that he was waiting. The doors remained closed.

Faro felt for the Colt .31 inside the leather pocket sewn inside his waistband at a cross draw just in front of his left hip. The riverfront was no place to be for a man alone at night or so early of a morn. Better where he was than across the river in Algiers, granted, but still a place where bad things could happen to those less cautious. Regardless, most of those who would rob a man and roll his body into the river didn’t travel in fancy coaches, but he had reason to worry anyway. Lately, his debts had grown, and many of those he owed money to were wealthy enough to afford such wheeled conveyance. More important, many of those gentlemen wouldn’t be above sending a strong arm or two to collect for them . . . or make an example of him.

The coach waited in silence, except for the occasional stamp of the pair of fine bay horses’ hooves upon the street. The window curtains were drawn, and he could see nothing of who might be inside. He was sure the coach’s appearance meant no good for him, but he was too proud to turn back to the ship, and too stubborn to keep standing there like he was lost. He started toward the coach, keeping a close eye on the window curtains.

When he had closed to within a few yards of it, the near door swung open and a black man in a tall hat and a fancy red coachman’s coat slid his long legs to the ground. He studied Faro carefully and there was more than a little hint on his face that he wasn’t impressed with what he saw. He reached his right hand inside his coat.

Faro raised his cane and held it a foot before the man’s stomach. “I’d go easy there.”

The black man didn’t bat an eye. Instead, he ever so slowly produced an envelope and held it forward. “I have an invitation for you.”

Faro kept a careful watch on the man as he leaned forward to take the envelope. His own name was written there in a fine, slanted, calligraphic script. He took two steps back and broke the wax seal. The envelope smelled of perfume. He read the brief invitation once, and then a second time more slowly.

Monsieur Faro Wells,

It has been brought to my attention that you are a bold man who can be trusted to be discreet. It is my wish to meet with you to discuss a small but challenging business venture pertaining to a shipment of gold bullion. Should you be willing to hear my proposal, my driver will bring you to my home.

Sincerely,

Rue McGaffney

Faro searched his mind for what kind of con was being worked on him and could barely keep from laughing. Was it a ruse to get him somewhere where there were no witnesses, or somebody’s practical joke? He tried to decide who might be behind the matter. Offhand, he could think of no one who would bother with mysterious notes and carriages. It all seemed too theatric. Anybody wishing him harm could do so with far less extravagance, and there was no one he knew who would go to such great lengths for a joke’s sake.

If the black man recognized Faro’s conundrum, he didn’t show it. “The coach awaits.”

Faro looked up the river, past the team, in the direction of his home—a home that was only to be his for a few more days. He told himself not to be a fool grasping at straws.

Who was Rue McGaffney? The long hours without sleep and the perfume filling his head made it hard for him to think clearly. A desperate man with few options, the mention of gold had quickened his pulse. He knew what he was going to decide, even though he gave himself a thousand reasons to send the coachman on without him.

“Sucker,” he whispered.

“What’s that, sir?” the coachman asked.

“Nothing,” Faro said as he went past the man and put a foot on the ornate, cast-iron step. “I was just saying what a fine morning it was for a drive.”

He ducked his head and crawled inside the coach to recline on the overstuffed leather cushions on the rear bench. The door latch clicked ominously in place behind him. He was committed and tried to prepare himself for whatever was about to befall him. He was sure that his current run of bad luck would continue and that any fortune that fell out of the sky wouldn’t land in his lap but would instead hit him on the head and kill him. Still, it might turn out to be an interesting morning.

The carriage rocked slightly as the coachman crawled up beside the driver, and the team took off with a lurch. Faro made small openings in the rear window curtains to either side of him so that he could keep his bearings, and sat back to enjoy the ride. However, he did lay his revolver in his lap. He might be a fool for a woman or gold, but he was a cynical fool.

CHAPTER 2

The coach traveled at a high trot up St. Louis Street, past the great warehouses lining the river, and then turned east, aiming for the heart of the oldest part of the city, the Vieux Carré, or what some were beginning to call the French Quarter. In the distance to the southeast, Faro could see the tall spires of the St. Louis Cathedral and the neighboring Presbytere rising above the city.

The clop of the horses’ hooves on the street echoed as if from the bottom of a well. While originally settled by the French, the architecture of that influence had burned in a great fire long before and was replaced during the Spanish rule of the city. Buildings of brightly painted stucco and red tile roofs were jammed tightly against each other in an almost solid wall lining the thoroughfare. Multistoried balconies and galleries fronted almost every residence and shop.

The coach halted before a two-story, yellow town house, and the coachman opened the door for him. Before climbing out, Faro caught a flash of a white dress and a face equally pale disappearing from the balcony directly overhead.

The coachman waited patiently while he stood in the street to let the stiffness leave his bad leg, and then led him to the front door beneath the wrought iron balconies overhead. The coachman raised the hinged doorknocker and rapped gently upon the wood with it.

The door swung slowly inward. An elderly black woman in an