- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
Born out of the grit, sweat, and drive of a cattle ranching empire, U.S. Marshal Chet Byrnes is turning the savage and lawless Arizona desert into a homeland. To some he's the hero that the West needs. To others, he's a moving target.
Chet is spearheading a stage line from Gallup to the Colorado River. It'll be a boon to Navajo trading posts, and lay out the territory for new settlements. Unfortunately, it's not Gerald Halls idea of progress—killing Chet is. The mysterious Texas gambler has hired three kill-crazy assassins—and counting—to bury Chet under a storm of bullets. To turn the tables on a game of revenge, Chet has to match the deranged Texan play by play, body by body, and bullet for bullet. Come hell or high water, that stage line is going through—even if its forged in blood.
Release date: December 18, 2018
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Print pages: 400
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Author updates
Close
Rage for Vengeance
Dusty Richards
The sulfurous smell of gun smoke plus sagebrush stung his nose. Chet Byrnes rose up to look over the upset buckboard bed and with his Colt .45 blazed away at the distant shooters. Behind him, Cole Emerson, the young man who rode with him, was crawling back uphill, attempting to keep low in the sagebrush and bunchgrass after recovering the rifle thrown from their buckboard wreck while they tried to outrun the would-be shooters.
A few infrequent wild shots from the attackers kicked up dust around Chet, and one struck the wood of the bed. They were too far away to do much damage with handguns. Belly-down on top of the rise east of them were the three masked men who, on horseback, had charged the two of them on the buckboard traveling west. Mid-day the glaring sun bore down hot. Their racing buckboard must have struck something, upset and threw both men and the bed off the frame. Their team of horses lost no time heading west with the empty trucks hitting the high spots.
Cole took a seat on the ground behind the upright bed and levered a cartridge in the rifle’s chamber. “This gun appears to be all right. Where are they at?”
“There is tall stalk standing up there; one of them is on your right side of that stem and belly-down. Aim low.” Chet finished reloading cartridges in his own Colt.
Cole nodded and gained his feet to standing behind the upset wagon bed. He laid the rifle barrel on the wood side, took aim, and fired.
Results were a man screamed in the cloud of dust set off by the bullet on the rim line. “I’m hit, boys. Get them.”
Another stick figure rose with a smoking revolver. Cole took aim and his second shot struck the shooter and sent him down. He ducked to reload with a smile at Chet. “You see number three?”
“No, not yet. Bet he won’t expose himself now we have the rifle. My dad always said don’t send a boy when you needed a man. Good shooting.”
“He may have fled.”
“Yes. I think he got the hell off that ridge.” Chet listened and could hear a horse running off, no doubt with the last attacker aboard.
Cole handed him the rifle. “I’ll go try to catch our horses.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll go see if they can talk and tell us anything.”
Cole gave him a concerned frown. “Watch them. Wounded snakes can bite.”
“Oh yes, I know all about that. Wonder why they tried to rob us?” Chet asked.
Amused by the question, Cole chuckled. “We must have looked rich. Damned if I know, Chet.”
“Maybe we both should go up there and check on them. I’d bet their saddle horses are up there. That team ran off maybe as far away as Center Point waiting for us by now.”
Chet laughed. “How much of these so-called robberies are we going to have when we are up and running this stage line that we’re trying to get ready for?”
“This whole road is isolated, and I guess the criminal element holding out up here has no one to stop them until we take a hand in doing that.”
“Your brother-in-law at the Windmill Ranch, Sarge, covers part of this route driving contract cattle every month to the Navajos for us. Does he have much trouble?”
“I bet Sarge just handles them if they are dumb enough to try him. He probably leaves them for the buzzards.”
Amused, digesting Chet’s words, Cole nodded. “I bet he simply does that. Your sister’s husband is a tough quiet guy, and he takes the ranch’s monthly cattle drives damn serious.”
“He sure does a great job of getting them there on time at it too.”
They were climbing up the steep slopes through the knee-high sagebrush and grass-clad slope to reach the ridge. Guns in hand, he and Cole both kept an eye on their destination on the top.
“You hurting?” he asked Cole.
“Not bad. But I bet we’re both sore in the morning. Lucky we flew off through the air when that bed overturned in our wreck.”
“My wings aren’t as good as they used to be for cushioning a landing.” Chet’s hip was sore where he hit on it.
“Hell, mine too. I can see the first guy, and he looks alive.”
Cole started to the left, leaving Chet with the wounded outlaw lying on the ground. He could see their two bay saddle horses grazing through their bits a short ways away. Good. He was not made for much walking after being tossed out of a wagon. They’d have something to carry them to the next stage stop on the route. He knelt and felt for the man’s pulse on his neck. Nothing. The unshaven kid looked pretty ragged. He turned him on his back. Besides, he needed a haircut and a bath, which he’d probably not get before his funeral was held.
“This guy is alive,” Cole shouted.
“Coming. This one isn’t taking in air anymore.”
Cole gave a head toss back to the other. “I made sure he was disarmed and asked him who he was. He said he ain’t answering questions.”
Obviously, from the bloody shirt, the outlaw’d been shot in the right shoulder. The scraggy bearded man in his twenties looked in pain seated on the ground.
“We can leave you here to die. We want answers or else . . . ?” Chet told him.
“Go to hell.”
Bent over, Chet grabbed a handful of his shirt and jerked him up in his face. “How about some pancake cactus spines under your fingernails? I can make you real uncomfortable, and I am not messing around with saving you either. Now who are you?”
“Johnny Duncan—Texas—what are you bastards going to do to me?”
“Probably cut your throat. What were you three after?”
“A man said he’d pay us well if you two never got back to civilization.”
“Who was that man?”
“I don’t have a real name—” Pain cut his words off.
“Then how were you going to collect the money?”
“He said he’d meet us Friday and pay us a hundred dollars apiece.”
“Where? At Horse Head Crossing?”
“Yeah. Longhorn Saloon. Wore a brown suit coat. Boss of the Plains Hat. Gray mustache. Maybe forty. I think he was a gambler.”
“Scars?”
“Top of his right hand been bad burned a long time ago.”
“No name?”
“He never gave it.”
“How much money was he going to pay you?”
“I told you. A hundred dollars apiece.”
“It don’t sound like anyone I know,” Cole said.
Chet agreed.
“I can catch their horses and ride up to the next station. Get some help and bring back a conveyance for him in a few hours,” Cole said.
“You do that. Who got away?” he asked the outlaw.
“A kid named Soapy Jones. I knew he had no guts for this deal, but he made an extra gun. Rod Place over there came up here with me from Texas. Heard they needed cowboys. Hell, there ain’t no cows up here. We’ve about starved.”
“How did you meet this guy in the suit?”
“We built some fence for another guy over by Saint Johns. When we met him the three of us really needed a drink and a little loving from a dove. He offered us twenty bucks apiece to start this deal. Paid us that money and promised us a hundred more to each of us if we stopped you and him—that guy just now went after the horses.”
“How did you recognize us?”
“Oh, he had good photographs of you and some pretty little Mexican gal all dressed up.”
“That was my wife. Was there a name of who made the photo?”
“I never noticed. He had another of that guy with you and another pretty woman holding a boy.”
“That was his wife, Valerie, and my son Rocky who she is raising.” Rocky was the boy Chet had fathered back in Texas.
“You looked like them pictures.”
“Don’t guess he ever said how he got those photos?” Chet asked him.
“No, but they were good pictures. He said you’d be coming back through here shortly on horseback or buckboard.”
Cole was back leading the horses. “I’ll ride on west. Get some help.”
“Ride easy. Duncan here saw pictures of us that guy had. The ones taken of you, Valerie, Liz, Rocky, and me that we had made. I guess by the traveling photographer who came by Center Point. What was that a month ago?”
Cole shook his head. “About that long ago. Wonder how he got them?”
“The guy hired them must be moving up and down our stage line. I have a description . . . now we need to find him. He paid them twenty apiece and promised a hundred more for each one of them if we were disposed of.”
“Don’t tell my wife . . . she may want to collect it for herself.”
“Cole Emerson, you know better than that.”
He was smiling and nodding while handing Chet the reins to the second horse. No way that that boy’s wife would take a reward for killing them. She might shoot the guys who did it but not him.
“There’s a pint of whiskey in the right hand saddlebag on the horse you got,” Duncan said. “I may need that.”
Cole retrieved it, handed it to Chet, and left.
Chet handed it over to the man who used his teeth to get the cork out and then swallowed some of it. Chet loosened the cinch on the horse left behind and then hobbled him so he didn’t run off. It would be a long, dreary day waiting on Cole’s return and then them hauling the man to the doctor. This no-name man who hired them bothered him—especially how he got to possess copies of those photos from the traveling photographer. But it made sense if he wanted them assassinated to have good pictures of his intended victims.
By mid-afternoon Cole was back with a team of several Navajo boys who worked for their agent, Clyde Covington. They had brought a wagon to reload the bed, plus the truck, team of horses that ran off, and they set in to get things fixed. The spring seat got messed up in the overturn, and the crew of Navajo boys were laughing and having fun while they replaced it with a different one they’d brought along.
The wounded prisoner was treated enough to move, and the dead man’s body was loaded in the wagon bed to go back west. Chet rode the other outlaw’s horse with Cole and they went ahead of the wagons and team. A crewmember drove their repaired buckboard.
On the way to station number three they talked about Duncan, and Chet told his man again about the photos the man showed him.
“This guy Duncan have our photographs to identify us by?”
“Yes, he described the ones we had made up at Center Point of Liz and I and the one of Valerie, you, and Rocky. Copies of those ones that traveling picture man made of us a months ago. That was how those three knew who we were heading west in the buckboard and got after us.”
Cole made a pained face. “That stranger must know us then.”
“Or he has some other purpose for wanting us dead.”
“Or so we fail to put this stage line in operation from Gallup to the Colorado River together and another party gets the mail contract.”
“Call him Mr. X, but I want him and the sooner the better.”
“What will you charge Duncan with?” Cole asked.
“Attempted armed robbery and murder.”
“That’s what they tried. Who got away?”
Chet shrugged. “Some kid named Soapy Jones. No telling where he went if he’s smart. But I bet we run into him again.”
Cole agreed and they’d reached the number-three station about sundown. Clyde Covington came from the corral area to meet them. A tall somewhat bent cowboy in his forties, he came shaking his head, concerned about their incident.
“You two got in trouble already?” His warm smile and laughter made a good ending to a helluva day. Chet turned to meet Clyde’s straight-back proper wife, Iris, who reached up and kissed him on the cheek at the front door of the station.
“My lands. I heard they had shot at you, and you weren’t here when expected, so I figured our boss has been killed. Whew, you have had some day. I’m glad too that that pretty wife of yours wasn’t along as well.”
“So was I. It has been a tough day, but we survived it.”
“Why did they do that anyway?”
“I think so we couldn’t start the stage line in six weeks.”
“Can we still do that?”
“If I have to send all my cow hands up here we will do it.”
“We’re as ready, I guess, as we can be. They said we’d have the horses here soon.”
“Last I had any word from the man in charge, Rod Carpenter, in Gallup, he said his men would move the horses in place in the coming week. There is a tack man coming too, and he will bring you the extra harness you will need.”
“Your man Harold Faulk helped finish the corrals,” Clyde said. “That is a hardworking bunch of men. Him, his son, wife, and daughter are sure scrappy. Why, they work as hard as the men he works. I never saw the likes.”
“I hired them back earlier. He rode clear over to our place asking about work, and I’m proud because he’s got all the stops ready over on this side of Center Point. Cole has another crew over west lining things up that are about ready too. You all will be earning your money in a few weeks.”
“When will we be getting stages?” Clyde asked, showing them seats at the table.
“Oh, for now buckboards will do. It will take twelve months to move up to stagecoaches.”
“I’ll be glad to be started. I guess the way things are the stages must be really coming?”
“Oh, they will. These men I am working with were relying on help that talked big, but it took more than that to put a set of that many stage stops together. No way they’d ever gotten the stages and horses here in time to meet that first mail contract. I am guessing some others folks want that mail contract, so keep your guns handy.”
“Who do you think might be bucking you?”
“Clyde, all I have is that outlaw’s description of the man who had photographs of both Cole and I with our wives to point us out. We had those pictures made some time back by a photographer passing through. He must have sold more prints he made so that we could be identified by the ones he hired to come after us.”
“Ah, you two will get him. I know and read about your law work. Yes siree, you’ll get them.”
“Wish I was that sure. Your food looks great. I guess Cole is coming.”
“He’s washing up on the porch,” Iris announced.
“Good. We really got thrown off that buckboard when it overturned. I guess when a driver don’t show on schedule, you will have to go look for him after some time passes.”
“You bet, and we need to get rid of these holdup men,” Clyde said.
Chet agreed.
Chet decided, in the morning, the pair of them should head back to Center Point and see what else had gone wrong. Clyde said the Yavapai County deputy at Horse Head Crossing would hold the would-be robber until the jail wagon came to pick him up and haul him for trial in Prescott, the county seat for all that part of Arizona in the 1870s. Of course there were only jackrabbits, a few scattered homesteaders, and ranches spread thin all over that land. Horse Head Crossing, St. Johns, and a few army posts pretty well summed up the whole area.
Maybe the stage line would develop more settlements. That was why Chet felt it so important to make this line work like the Black Canyon Coach Line did from Preskitt to the Hayden’s Ferry and Mill. The connection of this new stage route there at the San Francisco Peaks to the military road that led down to Camp Verde was why he called that stop Center Point. All hands were there building houses, barns, corrals to be the central place for the stage operation running from Gallup on the east over to the Colorado River ferry, which made up the territory’s western boundary with California.
They arrived at Center Point two days later and were greeted by both wives and his four-year-old son, Rocky. Damn, Liz looked great running to meet him. He hugged her tight and kissed her in a volley of hammers pounding and handsaws cutting boards.
“You have any trouble?” she asked.
“Oh, some. Someone hired three guys to kill us coming back. I can tell you more later. How is the boy?”
“Oh, he’s fine.”
“Hey, big guy, how are you?” He hoisted his son up. The boy was really growing.
“I am fine, Daddy. They were worried you were not back. What took you so long?”
“We wrecked a buckboard is all.”
“I am as glad as they are that you came back. I better go tell Valerie that you are fine.”
He set him down. Rocky, on the ground, hurried for his stepmother. Chet laughed. “You tell her I am fine.”
“Who was the hombre wanted you dead?” Liz asked.
“Some guy in a bar at Horse Head Crossing hired three lost Texas cowpokes. He promised to pay them a hundred dollars apiece to eliminate Cole and me both. Worse yet, that guy had copies of those pictures of you and me, plus Valerie, Cole, and Rocky they took up here a few weeks ago. This guy showed them to those three would-be killers, but where he got them from I don’t know.”
“I never saw that photographer again, did you?” Liz asked, leading him to the large tent set up as a mess hall.
“No. I never saw him again, but when Jesus and Spud get up here, I’ll go find the guy that hired them cowboys and he’ll wish he never tried it.”
“Now I have to worry about that meeting?”
“No, I’ll kill him where he is at. Hell with bringing him in alive even.”
“Oh, I am just so glad you are finally at home. I must tell you that the young man Shawn McElroy on the Force has been seriously writing to Reg’s widow Lucy Byrnes.”
“Well, what is wrong with that?” Valerie brought him a plate of food and bread. He acknowledged her.
“Nothing. But he wants to move up here to be closer to her.”
“Lord, I don’t know how, but I’ll work on it. Maybe Ratchet Thornton could go down there and help Roamer. That Force job is still tough work but not near as bad as when I started it down there.”
“Good.” Valerie nodded. “I think Shawn would be a good one for her.”
“How big is she?” Last time he saw her the second pregnancy showed some. She already had one baby girl who was still pretty young—heavens, him and Liz had been trying hard for over two years to have a child, but she’d pre-warned him she had never been pregnant with her first husband.
His wife frowned at him. “Oh, she’s not that big. Besides he must be very serious about her with one child and the baby coming.”
“I can say she is a dandy lady, and I’d do anything I could for her. What’s next?”
“You said you were going looking for this guy who hired killers to get after you?”
“I need to stop him from harming the real drivers. I’ve spent lots of time and energy invested in this stage line. Getting it together. So anyone trying to stop it needs to be stopped first.”
Liz nodded in agreement.
Chet said, “I thank you girls and the cook for this food. My stomach was sure empty when we got here. Valerie’s feeding Cole, I see. Those two are lovebirds maybe worse than we are.”
Liz looked in their direction. “Maybe, but they are two great people among the giants in your operations. But you know that well.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I will go see about a bath for you.”
He put down his fork. “I’d rather talk to you than eat alone. Stay here.”
“Go ahead and eat. I will sit here and listen. I like to be with you too. I still shake my head about when I came looking for the man with the gold horses. I expected a grand place and you were staying at some adobe hovel called a ranchero under a canvas.”
Liz continued, “But there you were, this man, standing so tall, hat off and so handsome—how could I ever impress him that I was thinking very serious about him and wanted to share his life at that first minute I ever saw you.” She winked at him and went on. “So he showed me the valley on horseback and I went wading in the river. Oh, it was like heaven I was in such a dream. Alone with him and then like Jesus did the disciples at the last supper—he washed my feet.”
Chet shook his head as if amused. “I only dried them. So you could get your boots and socks on.”
She jumped up and squeezed his head to her chest hard. “That was the longest day of my life. Even longer than when my first husband kidnapped me and took me off to marry me. That time was never that long as the time I spent with you. Chet Byrnes, you have shown me more than any man on this earth could have and I love being your wife—but that day had to be the grandest of them all. From the time when I arrived at your place down there until at last I slept by myself in that tent set up for me and Anita.”
He shook his head at her. “That was after we’d made love—in the hay of all places—under those stars. Afterward when I let you go to your tent I feared so much that you would be gone from my life, like a dust devil whisked away, and when those two letters finally found me I thanked God for holding us together.”
“Drink your coffee now and I will bathe you and shave you so we can be man and wife all over again.”
“Salute to that.” He raised his cup and downed the remains. He noticed Valerie had already left with her two men—Cole and Rocky.
Late that night he lay awake on a cot. Still weary from all the riding and not sleeping in his own bed, he wondered who really was that man who hired the guns and what was his business? He’d find him, he vowed, lying there in the dark holding his sleeping wife tight to him.
Dawn came as Chet slipped outside into the cool mountain air. The sky still shadowy as the pink of morning had barely broken in the east, though some rays struck the mountaintops of pine and above them. His bladder empty, he ducked and went back inside the tent to finish dressing.
“The cook will have breakfast ready at the big tent. These men have worked long hours and they work hard every day. Buildings are really taking shape. There are stacks of hay and more being delivered.” Liz pointed out the fodder after they dressed and left for the food tent.
The open-sided large tent was full of workers eating breakfast. Some had said hi to him as they came in. Bill Corbett, the man in charge of them, came by and told him good morning.
“Get your food and set down,” Chet said, looking up from his meal.
“Glad you’re alive.”
“I am too. I see lots of progress going on. We don’t need it completed to start the run, but we do need it completed before fall.”
“I’d hire some more real carpenters, but if they don’t know anything they aren’t worth ten cents.”
Chet agreed. “This is a big project here. You have all the material you need here, right?”
“Oh, most is here. I’m not short anything right now. That mill tries hard to supply us. My men work hard. I think we are doing all we can.”
“Keep up the good work. We will need some buildings at the other stations in the future as well.”
“That should be a snap. Again, happy to see you weren’t hurt in the wreck.”
“I’ll survive. You and your boys keep pounding.”
Corbett left him and Liz said, “He works hard.”
“You should know.”
“Oh, I don’t see much goes wrong. They all work. He is a real taskmaster. You call him that?”
“Yes. We were lucky to find him.”
Chet knew there was no way to know where his man Jesus was at that moment. Cole sent him west to check on a problem at one of those stations on the western side of Center Point. There would be no telegraph to use like Preskitt had going south, and the route would definitely be harder to manage without a telegraph wire from Gallup, New Mexico, to the Hardeeville Ferry crossing where it met the California Stage Line.
After breakfast he and Liz went south in a buckboard to check on Robert and his wife at the sawmill. It was simply a side trip to get her away for some fresh air, apart from the hammers beating nails going up at the center for support. It was a fresh ride through the turpentine-smelling ponderosa pines that covered the high country in northern Arizona Territory. They reached the couple’s nice house, and Robert’s pregnant wife Betty invited them in, excited over any company that dropped by.
Chet loved the sweet Mormon girl who married his man in charge of the mill’s timber-hauling setup when the mines in southern Arizona hired all their help away and they couldn’t get the trees to the mill. Chet set up a log-hauling division, and Robert soon was chosen the superintendent despite his age. Since then things had moved so well Chet feared they didn’t worry enough about him. At the dance in Camp Verde, Robert met the tall blond beauty, Betty, and despite efforts by her family and girlfriends for her not to marry him, she did it anyway and later laughed about her place in life living in a large company house with a man who had a real job. Plus she knew he loved her.
Despite the federal law against polygamy, many of the LDS faith ignored the law. Betty told Liz privately she didn’t have to worry about Robert finding another wife. He’d told her, many times in the beginning, that one was enough for him. She also could make her husband coffee though she never drank it herself. Her man also saw she got to attend her church of the Latter-Day Saints each Sunday even if he was working on a needed thing. They were looking forward to their first child.
Fred Roach, in his thirties, was Robert’s number two man who joined them for the lunch that Betty and Liz spread out on the large table. Chet considered it a congenial visit. Robert reported things were going smoothly, and they were well caught up with the mill’s needs. For some time he’d wanted more logs hauled in from distant points and finally they would begin doing that. In a move to get some of the distant logs hauled in quicker, he hired some oxen team owners without work to bring them in cheaper than he could, thus solving his biggest concern.
The visit passed and Chet knew what he knew before he came by—the log-hauling operation was going smoothly. After lunch he and Liz drove back to the noisy camp and she thanked him for her break from the hammers and saws.
Coming up through the construction zone of men who were packing boards on their shoulders, Chet saw the brown face of his man Jesus Martinez and the shorter Spud Carnes on horseback coming to meet them.
“Hey, how you two doing?” He stepped off and handed her the brid. . .
A few infrequent wild shots from the attackers kicked up dust around Chet, and one struck the wood of the bed. They were too far away to do much damage with handguns. Belly-down on top of the rise east of them were the three masked men who, on horseback, had charged the two of them on the buckboard traveling west. Mid-day the glaring sun bore down hot. Their racing buckboard must have struck something, upset and threw both men and the bed off the frame. Their team of horses lost no time heading west with the empty trucks hitting the high spots.
Cole took a seat on the ground behind the upright bed and levered a cartridge in the rifle’s chamber. “This gun appears to be all right. Where are they at?”
“There is tall stalk standing up there; one of them is on your right side of that stem and belly-down. Aim low.” Chet finished reloading cartridges in his own Colt.
Cole nodded and gained his feet to standing behind the upset wagon bed. He laid the rifle barrel on the wood side, took aim, and fired.
Results were a man screamed in the cloud of dust set off by the bullet on the rim line. “I’m hit, boys. Get them.”
Another stick figure rose with a smoking revolver. Cole took aim and his second shot struck the shooter and sent him down. He ducked to reload with a smile at Chet. “You see number three?”
“No, not yet. Bet he won’t expose himself now we have the rifle. My dad always said don’t send a boy when you needed a man. Good shooting.”
“He may have fled.”
“Yes. I think he got the hell off that ridge.” Chet listened and could hear a horse running off, no doubt with the last attacker aboard.
Cole handed him the rifle. “I’ll go try to catch our horses.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll go see if they can talk and tell us anything.”
Cole gave him a concerned frown. “Watch them. Wounded snakes can bite.”
“Oh yes, I know all about that. Wonder why they tried to rob us?” Chet asked.
Amused by the question, Cole chuckled. “We must have looked rich. Damned if I know, Chet.”
“Maybe we both should go up there and check on them. I’d bet their saddle horses are up there. That team ran off maybe as far away as Center Point waiting for us by now.”
Chet laughed. “How much of these so-called robberies are we going to have when we are up and running this stage line that we’re trying to get ready for?”
“This whole road is isolated, and I guess the criminal element holding out up here has no one to stop them until we take a hand in doing that.”
“Your brother-in-law at the Windmill Ranch, Sarge, covers part of this route driving contract cattle every month to the Navajos for us. Does he have much trouble?”
“I bet Sarge just handles them if they are dumb enough to try him. He probably leaves them for the buzzards.”
Amused, digesting Chet’s words, Cole nodded. “I bet he simply does that. Your sister’s husband is a tough quiet guy, and he takes the ranch’s monthly cattle drives damn serious.”
“He sure does a great job of getting them there on time at it too.”
They were climbing up the steep slopes through the knee-high sagebrush and grass-clad slope to reach the ridge. Guns in hand, he and Cole both kept an eye on their destination on the top.
“You hurting?” he asked Cole.
“Not bad. But I bet we’re both sore in the morning. Lucky we flew off through the air when that bed overturned in our wreck.”
“My wings aren’t as good as they used to be for cushioning a landing.” Chet’s hip was sore where he hit on it.
“Hell, mine too. I can see the first guy, and he looks alive.”
Cole started to the left, leaving Chet with the wounded outlaw lying on the ground. He could see their two bay saddle horses grazing through their bits a short ways away. Good. He was not made for much walking after being tossed out of a wagon. They’d have something to carry them to the next stage stop on the route. He knelt and felt for the man’s pulse on his neck. Nothing. The unshaven kid looked pretty ragged. He turned him on his back. Besides, he needed a haircut and a bath, which he’d probably not get before his funeral was held.
“This guy is alive,” Cole shouted.
“Coming. This one isn’t taking in air anymore.”
Cole gave a head toss back to the other. “I made sure he was disarmed and asked him who he was. He said he ain’t answering questions.”
Obviously, from the bloody shirt, the outlaw’d been shot in the right shoulder. The scraggy bearded man in his twenties looked in pain seated on the ground.
“We can leave you here to die. We want answers or else . . . ?” Chet told him.
“Go to hell.”
Bent over, Chet grabbed a handful of his shirt and jerked him up in his face. “How about some pancake cactus spines under your fingernails? I can make you real uncomfortable, and I am not messing around with saving you either. Now who are you?”
“Johnny Duncan—Texas—what are you bastards going to do to me?”
“Probably cut your throat. What were you three after?”
“A man said he’d pay us well if you two never got back to civilization.”
“Who was that man?”
“I don’t have a real name—” Pain cut his words off.
“Then how were you going to collect the money?”
“He said he’d meet us Friday and pay us a hundred dollars apiece.”
“Where? At Horse Head Crossing?”
“Yeah. Longhorn Saloon. Wore a brown suit coat. Boss of the Plains Hat. Gray mustache. Maybe forty. I think he was a gambler.”
“Scars?”
“Top of his right hand been bad burned a long time ago.”
“No name?”
“He never gave it.”
“How much money was he going to pay you?”
“I told you. A hundred dollars apiece.”
“It don’t sound like anyone I know,” Cole said.
Chet agreed.
“I can catch their horses and ride up to the next station. Get some help and bring back a conveyance for him in a few hours,” Cole said.
“You do that. Who got away?” he asked the outlaw.
“A kid named Soapy Jones. I knew he had no guts for this deal, but he made an extra gun. Rod Place over there came up here with me from Texas. Heard they needed cowboys. Hell, there ain’t no cows up here. We’ve about starved.”
“How did you meet this guy in the suit?”
“We built some fence for another guy over by Saint Johns. When we met him the three of us really needed a drink and a little loving from a dove. He offered us twenty bucks apiece to start this deal. Paid us that money and promised us a hundred more to each of us if we stopped you and him—that guy just now went after the horses.”
“How did you recognize us?”
“Oh, he had good photographs of you and some pretty little Mexican gal all dressed up.”
“That was my wife. Was there a name of who made the photo?”
“I never noticed. He had another of that guy with you and another pretty woman holding a boy.”
“That was his wife, Valerie, and my son Rocky who she is raising.” Rocky was the boy Chet had fathered back in Texas.
“You looked like them pictures.”
“Don’t guess he ever said how he got those photos?” Chet asked him.
“No, but they were good pictures. He said you’d be coming back through here shortly on horseback or buckboard.”
Cole was back leading the horses. “I’ll ride on west. Get some help.”
“Ride easy. Duncan here saw pictures of us that guy had. The ones taken of you, Valerie, Liz, Rocky, and me that we had made. I guess by the traveling photographer who came by Center Point. What was that a month ago?”
Cole shook his head. “About that long ago. Wonder how he got them?”
“The guy hired them must be moving up and down our stage line. I have a description . . . now we need to find him. He paid them twenty apiece and promised a hundred more for each one of them if we were disposed of.”
“Don’t tell my wife . . . she may want to collect it for herself.”
“Cole Emerson, you know better than that.”
He was smiling and nodding while handing Chet the reins to the second horse. No way that that boy’s wife would take a reward for killing them. She might shoot the guys who did it but not him.
“There’s a pint of whiskey in the right hand saddlebag on the horse you got,” Duncan said. “I may need that.”
Cole retrieved it, handed it to Chet, and left.
Chet handed it over to the man who used his teeth to get the cork out and then swallowed some of it. Chet loosened the cinch on the horse left behind and then hobbled him so he didn’t run off. It would be a long, dreary day waiting on Cole’s return and then them hauling the man to the doctor. This no-name man who hired them bothered him—especially how he got to possess copies of those photos from the traveling photographer. But it made sense if he wanted them assassinated to have good pictures of his intended victims.
By mid-afternoon Cole was back with a team of several Navajo boys who worked for their agent, Clyde Covington. They had brought a wagon to reload the bed, plus the truck, team of horses that ran off, and they set in to get things fixed. The spring seat got messed up in the overturn, and the crew of Navajo boys were laughing and having fun while they replaced it with a different one they’d brought along.
The wounded prisoner was treated enough to move, and the dead man’s body was loaded in the wagon bed to go back west. Chet rode the other outlaw’s horse with Cole and they went ahead of the wagons and team. A crewmember drove their repaired buckboard.
On the way to station number three they talked about Duncan, and Chet told his man again about the photos the man showed him.
“This guy Duncan have our photographs to identify us by?”
“Yes, he described the ones we had made up at Center Point of Liz and I and the one of Valerie, you, and Rocky. Copies of those ones that traveling picture man made of us a months ago. That was how those three knew who we were heading west in the buckboard and got after us.”
Cole made a pained face. “That stranger must know us then.”
“Or he has some other purpose for wanting us dead.”
“Or so we fail to put this stage line in operation from Gallup to the Colorado River together and another party gets the mail contract.”
“Call him Mr. X, but I want him and the sooner the better.”
“What will you charge Duncan with?” Cole asked.
“Attempted armed robbery and murder.”
“That’s what they tried. Who got away?”
Chet shrugged. “Some kid named Soapy Jones. No telling where he went if he’s smart. But I bet we run into him again.”
Cole agreed and they’d reached the number-three station about sundown. Clyde Covington came from the corral area to meet them. A tall somewhat bent cowboy in his forties, he came shaking his head, concerned about their incident.
“You two got in trouble already?” His warm smile and laughter made a good ending to a helluva day. Chet turned to meet Clyde’s straight-back proper wife, Iris, who reached up and kissed him on the cheek at the front door of the station.
“My lands. I heard they had shot at you, and you weren’t here when expected, so I figured our boss has been killed. Whew, you have had some day. I’m glad too that that pretty wife of yours wasn’t along as well.”
“So was I. It has been a tough day, but we survived it.”
“Why did they do that anyway?”
“I think so we couldn’t start the stage line in six weeks.”
“Can we still do that?”
“If I have to send all my cow hands up here we will do it.”
“We’re as ready, I guess, as we can be. They said we’d have the horses here soon.”
“Last I had any word from the man in charge, Rod Carpenter, in Gallup, he said his men would move the horses in place in the coming week. There is a tack man coming too, and he will bring you the extra harness you will need.”
“Your man Harold Faulk helped finish the corrals,” Clyde said. “That is a hardworking bunch of men. Him, his son, wife, and daughter are sure scrappy. Why, they work as hard as the men he works. I never saw the likes.”
“I hired them back earlier. He rode clear over to our place asking about work, and I’m proud because he’s got all the stops ready over on this side of Center Point. Cole has another crew over west lining things up that are about ready too. You all will be earning your money in a few weeks.”
“When will we be getting stages?” Clyde asked, showing them seats at the table.
“Oh, for now buckboards will do. It will take twelve months to move up to stagecoaches.”
“I’ll be glad to be started. I guess the way things are the stages must be really coming?”
“Oh, they will. These men I am working with were relying on help that talked big, but it took more than that to put a set of that many stage stops together. No way they’d ever gotten the stages and horses here in time to meet that first mail contract. I am guessing some others folks want that mail contract, so keep your guns handy.”
“Who do you think might be bucking you?”
“Clyde, all I have is that outlaw’s description of the man who had photographs of both Cole and I with our wives to point us out. We had those pictures made some time back by a photographer passing through. He must have sold more prints he made so that we could be identified by the ones he hired to come after us.”
“Ah, you two will get him. I know and read about your law work. Yes siree, you’ll get them.”
“Wish I was that sure. Your food looks great. I guess Cole is coming.”
“He’s washing up on the porch,” Iris announced.
“Good. We really got thrown off that buckboard when it overturned. I guess when a driver don’t show on schedule, you will have to go look for him after some time passes.”
“You bet, and we need to get rid of these holdup men,” Clyde said.
Chet agreed.
Chet decided, in the morning, the pair of them should head back to Center Point and see what else had gone wrong. Clyde said the Yavapai County deputy at Horse Head Crossing would hold the would-be robber until the jail wagon came to pick him up and haul him for trial in Prescott, the county seat for all that part of Arizona in the 1870s. Of course there were only jackrabbits, a few scattered homesteaders, and ranches spread thin all over that land. Horse Head Crossing, St. Johns, and a few army posts pretty well summed up the whole area.
Maybe the stage line would develop more settlements. That was why Chet felt it so important to make this line work like the Black Canyon Coach Line did from Preskitt to the Hayden’s Ferry and Mill. The connection of this new stage route there at the San Francisco Peaks to the military road that led down to Camp Verde was why he called that stop Center Point. All hands were there building houses, barns, corrals to be the central place for the stage operation running from Gallup on the east over to the Colorado River ferry, which made up the territory’s western boundary with California.
They arrived at Center Point two days later and were greeted by both wives and his four-year-old son, Rocky. Damn, Liz looked great running to meet him. He hugged her tight and kissed her in a volley of hammers pounding and handsaws cutting boards.
“You have any trouble?” she asked.
“Oh, some. Someone hired three guys to kill us coming back. I can tell you more later. How is the boy?”
“Oh, he’s fine.”
“Hey, big guy, how are you?” He hoisted his son up. The boy was really growing.
“I am fine, Daddy. They were worried you were not back. What took you so long?”
“We wrecked a buckboard is all.”
“I am as glad as they are that you came back. I better go tell Valerie that you are fine.”
He set him down. Rocky, on the ground, hurried for his stepmother. Chet laughed. “You tell her I am fine.”
“Who was the hombre wanted you dead?” Liz asked.
“Some guy in a bar at Horse Head Crossing hired three lost Texas cowpokes. He promised to pay them a hundred dollars apiece to eliminate Cole and me both. Worse yet, that guy had copies of those pictures of you and me, plus Valerie, Cole, and Rocky they took up here a few weeks ago. This guy showed them to those three would-be killers, but where he got them from I don’t know.”
“I never saw that photographer again, did you?” Liz asked, leading him to the large tent set up as a mess hall.
“No. I never saw him again, but when Jesus and Spud get up here, I’ll go find the guy that hired them cowboys and he’ll wish he never tried it.”
“Now I have to worry about that meeting?”
“No, I’ll kill him where he is at. Hell with bringing him in alive even.”
“Oh, I am just so glad you are finally at home. I must tell you that the young man Shawn McElroy on the Force has been seriously writing to Reg’s widow Lucy Byrnes.”
“Well, what is wrong with that?” Valerie brought him a plate of food and bread. He acknowledged her.
“Nothing. But he wants to move up here to be closer to her.”
“Lord, I don’t know how, but I’ll work on it. Maybe Ratchet Thornton could go down there and help Roamer. That Force job is still tough work but not near as bad as when I started it down there.”
“Good.” Valerie nodded. “I think Shawn would be a good one for her.”
“How big is she?” Last time he saw her the second pregnancy showed some. She already had one baby girl who was still pretty young—heavens, him and Liz had been trying hard for over two years to have a child, but she’d pre-warned him she had never been pregnant with her first husband.
His wife frowned at him. “Oh, she’s not that big. Besides he must be very serious about her with one child and the baby coming.”
“I can say she is a dandy lady, and I’d do anything I could for her. What’s next?”
“You said you were going looking for this guy who hired killers to get after you?”
“I need to stop him from harming the real drivers. I’ve spent lots of time and energy invested in this stage line. Getting it together. So anyone trying to stop it needs to be stopped first.”
Liz nodded in agreement.
Chet said, “I thank you girls and the cook for this food. My stomach was sure empty when we got here. Valerie’s feeding Cole, I see. Those two are lovebirds maybe worse than we are.”
Liz looked in their direction. “Maybe, but they are two great people among the giants in your operations. But you know that well.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I will go see about a bath for you.”
He put down his fork. “I’d rather talk to you than eat alone. Stay here.”
“Go ahead and eat. I will sit here and listen. I like to be with you too. I still shake my head about when I came looking for the man with the gold horses. I expected a grand place and you were staying at some adobe hovel called a ranchero under a canvas.”
Liz continued, “But there you were, this man, standing so tall, hat off and so handsome—how could I ever impress him that I was thinking very serious about him and wanted to share his life at that first minute I ever saw you.” She winked at him and went on. “So he showed me the valley on horseback and I went wading in the river. Oh, it was like heaven I was in such a dream. Alone with him and then like Jesus did the disciples at the last supper—he washed my feet.”
Chet shook his head as if amused. “I only dried them. So you could get your boots and socks on.”
She jumped up and squeezed his head to her chest hard. “That was the longest day of my life. Even longer than when my first husband kidnapped me and took me off to marry me. That time was never that long as the time I spent with you. Chet Byrnes, you have shown me more than any man on this earth could have and I love being your wife—but that day had to be the grandest of them all. From the time when I arrived at your place down there until at last I slept by myself in that tent set up for me and Anita.”
He shook his head at her. “That was after we’d made love—in the hay of all places—under those stars. Afterward when I let you go to your tent I feared so much that you would be gone from my life, like a dust devil whisked away, and when those two letters finally found me I thanked God for holding us together.”
“Drink your coffee now and I will bathe you and shave you so we can be man and wife all over again.”
“Salute to that.” He raised his cup and downed the remains. He noticed Valerie had already left with her two men—Cole and Rocky.
Late that night he lay awake on a cot. Still weary from all the riding and not sleeping in his own bed, he wondered who really was that man who hired the guns and what was his business? He’d find him, he vowed, lying there in the dark holding his sleeping wife tight to him.
Dawn came as Chet slipped outside into the cool mountain air. The sky still shadowy as the pink of morning had barely broken in the east, though some rays struck the mountaintops of pine and above them. His bladder empty, he ducked and went back inside the tent to finish dressing.
“The cook will have breakfast ready at the big tent. These men have worked long hours and they work hard every day. Buildings are really taking shape. There are stacks of hay and more being delivered.” Liz pointed out the fodder after they dressed and left for the food tent.
The open-sided large tent was full of workers eating breakfast. Some had said hi to him as they came in. Bill Corbett, the man in charge of them, came by and told him good morning.
“Get your food and set down,” Chet said, looking up from his meal.
“Glad you’re alive.”
“I am too. I see lots of progress going on. We don’t need it completed to start the run, but we do need it completed before fall.”
“I’d hire some more real carpenters, but if they don’t know anything they aren’t worth ten cents.”
Chet agreed. “This is a big project here. You have all the material you need here, right?”
“Oh, most is here. I’m not short anything right now. That mill tries hard to supply us. My men work hard. I think we are doing all we can.”
“Keep up the good work. We will need some buildings at the other stations in the future as well.”
“That should be a snap. Again, happy to see you weren’t hurt in the wreck.”
“I’ll survive. You and your boys keep pounding.”
Corbett left him and Liz said, “He works hard.”
“You should know.”
“Oh, I don’t see much goes wrong. They all work. He is a real taskmaster. You call him that?”
“Yes. We were lucky to find him.”
Chet knew there was no way to know where his man Jesus was at that moment. Cole sent him west to check on a problem at one of those stations on the western side of Center Point. There would be no telegraph to use like Preskitt had going south, and the route would definitely be harder to manage without a telegraph wire from Gallup, New Mexico, to the Hardeeville Ferry crossing where it met the California Stage Line.
After breakfast he and Liz went south in a buckboard to check on Robert and his wife at the sawmill. It was simply a side trip to get her away for some fresh air, apart from the hammers beating nails going up at the center for support. It was a fresh ride through the turpentine-smelling ponderosa pines that covered the high country in northern Arizona Territory. They reached the couple’s nice house, and Robert’s pregnant wife Betty invited them in, excited over any company that dropped by.
Chet loved the sweet Mormon girl who married his man in charge of the mill’s timber-hauling setup when the mines in southern Arizona hired all their help away and they couldn’t get the trees to the mill. Chet set up a log-hauling division, and Robert soon was chosen the superintendent despite his age. Since then things had moved so well Chet feared they didn’t worry enough about him. At the dance in Camp Verde, Robert met the tall blond beauty, Betty, and despite efforts by her family and girlfriends for her not to marry him, she did it anyway and later laughed about her place in life living in a large company house with a man who had a real job. Plus she knew he loved her.
Despite the federal law against polygamy, many of the LDS faith ignored the law. Betty told Liz privately she didn’t have to worry about Robert finding another wife. He’d told her, many times in the beginning, that one was enough for him. She also could make her husband coffee though she never drank it herself. Her man also saw she got to attend her church of the Latter-Day Saints each Sunday even if he was working on a needed thing. They were looking forward to their first child.
Fred Roach, in his thirties, was Robert’s number two man who joined them for the lunch that Betty and Liz spread out on the large table. Chet considered it a congenial visit. Robert reported things were going smoothly, and they were well caught up with the mill’s needs. For some time he’d wanted more logs hauled in from distant points and finally they would begin doing that. In a move to get some of the distant logs hauled in quicker, he hired some oxen team owners without work to bring them in cheaper than he could, thus solving his biggest concern.
The visit passed and Chet knew what he knew before he came by—the log-hauling operation was going smoothly. After lunch he and Liz drove back to the noisy camp and she thanked him for her break from the hammers and saws.
Coming up through the construction zone of men who were packing boards on their shoulders, Chet saw the brown face of his man Jesus Martinez and the shorter Spud Carnes on horseback coming to meet them.
“Hey, how you two doing?” He stepped off and handed her the brid. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Rage for Vengeance
Dusty Richards
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
