Red Ruckus

Book 3: Morgan Clyde Western

by Brett Cogburn

Genres: Classics; Action & Adventure Romance

Synopsis

Two-time Spur Award winner Brett Cogburn brings back the true grit and glory of the Wild West with his third post-Civil War thriller featuring New York City policeman-turned M&K Railroad lawman Morgan Clyde …

Morgan Clyde, former New York City peacekeeper and Union army veteran, is a man of righteous words and a gunfighter of uncanny skill. With deadly aim he has ended the reign of every badman to walk the dirt-packed streets of Indian Terriotry’s notorious Ironhead Station. But now he faces those who wear the badge.

With every corrupt businessman, immoral thief, and brutal outlaw either behind bars or six feet under, the town of Eufaula has come under the jurisdiction of men who bend the law to their own whims. They’ve broken their sworn oaths to protect the innocent and anointed themselves as judges, juries, and executioners.

Now Morgan must break the law to enforce it, even if it means putting old friends—and lovers—into his line of fire …

Release date: August 23, 2022

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

The sheer volume of the screaming coming from somewhere down the street, coupled with the fact that the voice’s high pitch told it came from a woman, brought Morgan Clyde down the street at a dust-stirring clip that even a long-strided horse would have been hard-pressed to keep up with. The flat brim of his black hat was tilted down in a determined rake to the point that the only thing visible of his face was the stub of a cigar jammed in one corner of his mouth beneath his mustache.

The woman down the street screamed again, followed by the sound of screeching nails and busting lumber. Another voice, this time distinctly male, shouted some warning, followed by the boisterous laughter of several other unknown male participants.

Morgan leaned into his march even more, cursing the pair of freight wagons parked in front of the general store and blocking his vision of whatever was taking place on the boardwalk beyond them that warranted all the noise and excitement. The bottom of his black frock coat flapped at his waist and up about his elbows in the stiff breeze, and the open front of that unruly garment occasionally revealed the flash of the tin badge pinned to his wool vest and the pistol holstered at a cross draw on his left hip bone.

People had gathered on the opposite side of the street to take in the scene, some of them watching whatever was taking place in the alley between Hogan’s Mercantile and Klein’s Feed & Seed, and others more interested in the looming arrival of their deputy city marshal then storming down the wheel-rutted, potholed thoroughfare in a manner that said he was likely on the prod.

More onlookers appeared before Morgan when he rounded the lowered tailgate of the last wagon. A half-ring of men was gathered in the mouth of the alley, some jeering and catcalling and others giving ribald advice to whoever was screaming within the alley. Morgan shoved through the crowd without so much as an “excuse me,” or a “beg your pardon,” and the shove he gave one especially big farmer dressed in a tattered straw hat and patched overalls two sizes too short for his overgrown frame caused the man to stagger aside most indignantly. But none of the crowd complained, not even the giant farmer with fists the size of Morgan’s hat, not with Morgan’s hand resting on that big pistol and his jaws chomping on the cigar like an overheated work mule slavering at the bit in its mouth.

“What’s going on here?” Morgan said.

Nobody answered, but the crowd moved back a little.

Morgan took a step closer to the alley and peered intently into its shadowed depths for whatever calamity had caused him to leave his breakfast half finished on the boardinghouse dining table, and his coffee only half drunk and growing cold in his mug so early in the morning.

Now that the crowd was hushed, his hearing was only then registering that along with the woman’s shrieks there was the unmistakable sound of pigs grunting and squealing back in the alley, and lots of knocking and banging. What’s more, the woman he couldn’t see wasn’t only shrieking; she was screaming one of the most profane, creative strings of cuss words he had ever heard man or woman utter. And that was saying something, since he had heard some pretty talented profanity artists from docks of New York City to tobacco-spitting bullwhackers in Kansas and saddle sore and half-drunk cowboys up the trail from Texas. And not a one of them could hold a candle to the barrage of shameful oaths coming out of that alley, a fact that caused the town’s one and only Methodist preacher standing in the crowd to go a little red around the neck.

“I said, what’s going on?” Morgan repeated.

In answer to his question, a rather large red shoat charged out of the mouth of the alley at a dead run, aimed straight at him. He barely managed to take hold of the plow handle of his Colt pistol before the red shoat struck him in the shins.

The impact from one hundred pounds of charging young swine knocked Morgan’s legs out from under him and would have sent him to the ground if it hadn’t been for the lowered tailgate of the freight wagon just behind him. He caught himself there with a wild grab, but that precarious perch was short-lived. The red shoat’s momentum carried it underneath the team of mules harnessed to the wagon. The mules promptly panicked and bolted away in a dead run with the bounding, rattling wagon building a dust storm behind them. That sudden removal of the wagon tailgate from beneath Morgan dumped him most unceremoniously into the mudhole at the end of the leaky water trough Mr. Hogan had built in front of his porch.

Morgan propped himself up with one elbow of his black frock coat buried in the muck of the mudhole and tried to shove his disheveled hat out of his eyes while the braying of the runaway mules faded into the distance. He stood and slung the mud from his hands.

No sooner had Morgan righted himself than more swine began to appear out of the alley. There were white pigs, black pigs, spotted pigs, and everything in between. There were grown pigs and half-grown pigs, and even one enormous sow with swaying rows of milk-swollen teats hanging under her and an entire litter of her little piglets darting and weaving among her legs. To say “pigs” is to imply some type of domesticated, gentle farm livestock of the swine persuasion, but these animals were the farthest thing from tame. More properly, and in the local vernacular of Texas, they were simply hogs.

Hogs or pigs, unlike the red shoat that had preceded them, they didn’t exactly charge out of the alley, but rather sauntered at a trot, not afraid and almost oblivious to the crowd of onlookers. And behind them came Mrs. Klein. She was an elderly, petite woman, but she swung the broom she brandished with the sprite and strength of a young giant, all the while continuing to curse.

“Clyde, I swear I’m gonna kill that Hogan if he don’t quit letting his hogs get in his whiskey mash,” she said when she took a moment to quit swinging the broom and take a breath or two.

At that very same moment, while Mrs. Klein glared at him, it came to Morgan that she was right. Hogan’s hogs were definitely drunk. And not simply regularly drunk, but drunk to the point that they didn’t even seem to notice Mrs. Klein’s broom swinging at them. And their grunting pig talk was more lethargic than anything. The old sow flopped down in the mudhole in front of him and appeared to be about to go to sleep. A smallish black gilt, with a bottle nose two hands long, was so inebriated that when it made a halfhearted attempt at a staggering, weaving trot it fell on its side and didn’t get up. Another of the hogs, a young red boar with black spots down its sides, wanted to root under the feed store loading dock, but couldn’t seem to figure out that the gap between the porch boards and the ground was too narrow to allow its bulk to pass. Instead of giving up, the boar butted its snout against the lumber twice, and then stood and stared at what had brought it to an abrupt stop, as if perplexed.

Hogan’s hogs usually ran in the post oak forest and creek bottom thickets about town, foraging mostly at night. Their only claim to domestication was to be bayed by a pack of Mr. Hogan’s mean dogs once or twice a year in order to have their ears notched with a pocketknife to maintain Hogan’s claim of ownership. To add further insult to injury, and what normally added to the hogs’ skittish distrust of humans, was Mr. Hogan’s penchant for castrating most of the young boars with the same pocketknife and to pen up a few of the plumpest hogs for feeding and fattening that would see them end up one day as bacon or a fine slice of salt-cured ham in his skillet.

But there Hogan’s hogs were, right in the middle of town acting like gentle pets. Hogan’s other business was likely to blame for that, for in addition to his mercantile venture and his pork farming (if you could call it that) were the whiskey stills he was rumored to operate in the very same creek bottom thickets where his hogs ran—the very same whiskey Hogan wholesaled to every saloon in town. And apparently, as Mrs. Klein claimed, Hogan’s hogs had developed a taste for the leftover mash and leavings that were a by-product of Hogan’s whiskey making, for a more content bunch of hogs were never seen than those that came out of the alley.

“I tell you, Deputy,” Mrs. Klein said, “you do something about his hogs or I will!”

Mrs. Klein said more, most of it vile and profane references to the grunting porkers surrounding her, but it all blended together so fast that Morgan couldn’t follow half of what she said. But apparently, the Methodist preacher had understood some of it, for he gave out a gasp and mumbled something about the Lord forgiving her as he took leave of the crowd.

“You tell him to keep his livestock penned up like civilized folk do!” Mrs. Klein’s attention had shifted from the hogs to the near corner of the long porch fronting Hogan’s store.

Hogan himself had sauntered out to lean against a porch post with one hand tucked in his waistband, and picking his teeth with a sharpened matchstick.

“Drunk, good for nothing, stinking hogs,” Mrs. Klein said and shook her broom in a threatening manner at the storekeeper. “Just like their owner.”

Hogan gave back nothing in reply to that statement, but he did smirk a little.

“Now calm down, Mrs. Klein.” Morgan held up his muddy palms as a peace offering, but inadvertently took a step closer to her.

Instead of appeasing the woman, she must have thought he meant to steal away her improvised weapon. She shifted the broom to point at Morgan.

“Don’t you try and coddle me like I’m feeble-minded,” she said with a shake of the broom for emphasis. “That saloon trash on Skiddy Street might be scared of you and that pistol, but I ain’t.”

A fight on the streets with a little elderly woman was the last thing Morgan wanted, and he took a deep breath and tried to think his way to a happier ending while he kept watch on the broom. More than a year wearing a badge in Denison, seeing it born from an end-of-the-line railroad camp to something resembling the beginnings of a town proper, and yet he had few dealings with Dorothy Klein other than to see her occasionally frowning at him through her store window when he passed. His guess was that the widow was every bit of eighty years old, but she had a reputation for not letting her age and withering body get in the way of her disagreeable nature. She and her husband hung out their shingle within a few days of the MK & T Railroad, or the Katy as it was called by most, spiking down the last rail. The husband had quickly run for mayor, and just as quickly died of pneumonia before the election could take place. The only conversation Morgan could ever recall having with Mrs. Klein was for her to relay quite proudly that her husband had gotten twenty-six votes, despite being in a pine box twelve hours before the polls opened.

“I’m sure Mr. Hogan will pay for any damages his hogs might have caused you,” Morgan said.

“Like hell I will,” Hogan said.

Morgan looked at the storekeeper. While younger than Mrs. Klein by about twenty or thirty years, falling somewhere on the tail end of his middle years, Mr. Douglas Hogan could be equally difficult to deal with. And despite the storekeeper’s apron he wore and the pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, Morgan remembered seeing the old army musket Hogan kept leaning in the corner at the end of his counter. It was kept loaded, according to what Hogan often boasted to his customers, in case he had to run any sassy, carpetbagging Yankees out of the store.

“Them hogs knocked a hole in my storeroom floor and et up a hole tableful of tater eyes I had laid out for drying,” Mrs. Klein said. “And they scattered three sacks of oats besides scaring off my good paying customers.”

“You ain’t had a paying customer all morning,” Hogan chimed in. “Everybody’s probably sick of you gouging them with your prices.”

“You’re one to talk, you old highbinder,” Mrs. Klein threw back.

“Let’s keep the peace here. No need for hard words from either of you,” Morgan said.

“You tell him to keep his hogs penned, or maybe you do your job for once and shut down his whiskey making.” Mrs. Klein managed a fake smile, obviously pleased that she might have scored a blow against both Hogan and the deputy city marshal.

“It’s open range,” Hogan said in his Mississippi drawl. “No law says I’ve got to pen anything.”

“My business premises ain’t open range,” Mrs. Klein said with her voice getting a little more shrill and crackly again. “And if there ain’t a city ordinance against running your hogs on the street, there ought to be.”

Hogan didn’t give Morgan a chance to cut in. “I don’t need you or this Yankee policeman telling me what’s in the city ordinances, since I wrote most of them.”

The jab at Morgan didn’t go unnoticed, and he took another deep breath, reminding himself that it wasn’t the first time that Hogan had wisecracked about where he came from, nor would it likely be the last. And Morgan also reminded himself of one of the oldest rules of law enforcement, that the man in the middle often risked getting hit by both sides.

“You two have been business neighbors for a long time now,” Morgan willed a kindness and patience in his voice that he didn’t feel at the moment. “And you’ve always gotten along fine.”

More than a few in the crowd knew the two shopkeepers well enough to snicker at the outright falsehood of that statement. The two shopkeepers had never gotten along.

“Mr. Hogan will pen his hogs and pay for whatever damages they’ve caused,” Morgan continued.

“Didn’t you hear me the first time?” Hogan said, straightening from the porch post.

“I’ll take it to the justice of the peace,” Mrs. Klein snapped.

“You take your moldy oats and your rotten spuds wherever you want to, you old hag,” Hogan threw back. “Been nothing but complaining and griping since you nailed up that shack you call a store beside me.”

Mrs. Klein’s temporary calm ended right there. The broom wasn’t long enough to reach Hogan up on the porch, and the nearest target for her fury was the sow lying in the mud. She reared back and swung the broom with both hands, with Morgan lunging to stop her. Only, Morgan wasn’t quick enough, and Mrs. Klein’s aim was off. Instead of the sow, she hit one of the piglets standing around their momma. And the piglet immediately began to squeal with fright.

Morgan didn’t know much about half-wild Texas hogs, and even less about drunken ones. But he did know enough to realize that a squealing baby wasn’t a good thing with so many of its larger kindred around to hear its distress.

“Back away, Mrs. Klein,” Morgan said.

At first she didn’t respond, and even reared back with the broom to strike again. Then she noticed what everyone else noticed. First one of the grown hogs gave a loud woof of alarm, and then another. The drunken beasts may have been still sluggish and heavy with the effects of Hogan’s mash, but the piglet’s squealing had awoken their instinct to protect one of their own. In an instant, the sow stood and snapped her jaws twice in threat, and the rest of the hogs shuffled to her side, forming a ring around her and her litter and looking at the crowd as if the townsfolk had them bayed and were about to make bacon of the lot.

Morgan grabbed hold of Mrs. Klein’s arm and yanked her towards the crowd. Hogan had disappeared off his porch and was somewhere inside his store.

“Step aside and make a way for them!” somebody called from the crowd. “Don’t let them feel like they’re hemmed up or they’re going to get on the fight!”

“Don’t let them hogs gnaw on me!” Mrs. Klein begged, finally seeing the danger her temper and her broom had led her to.

The piglet quit squealing and consoled itself on one of its mother’s muddy teats. The rest of the hogs still faced outward, en garde, but seemed to have calmed somewhat.

“Back away.” Morgan tugged Mrs. Klein with him as he eased away, unwilling to take his eyes from the threat in front of him.

Morgan’s Colt pistol slid out of its holster and balanced before him in his right fist. He still wasn’t sure that one or all of the hogs weren’t going to charge him, and he had no doubt what those razor-sharp tusks could due to a man’s legs.

“Unhand me, you big oaf,” Mrs. Klein said when they reached the crowd.

But she went willingly when Morgan passed her through its ranks and off the front line of danger.

Morgan watched the hogs in the mudhole and was beginning to believe that they had calmed enough to no longer be a threat. But at that very moment one of the piglet’s siblings shoved it away from its milk, and the youngster, already with its feelings hurt from the brooming it had received, squealed again. And no sooner than it squealed than a deep, threatening grunt came from somewhere back in the alley.

Morgan’s pistol swung that way just as a large black boar stepped out of the alley. It snapped its jaws rapidly several times, making a loud popping sound, and the ivory white of its tusks plain where they curled its leathery lips on each side of its snout. The adult male stood almost as high as Morgan’s waist, and its hide was covered in coarse, black hair, thinning over the thick, plated hide of its shoulders. It was as ugly and formidable a beast as Morgan had ever laid eyes on.

Despite all the jeering and bold talk that the onlookers had put to effect earlier, they fled in multiple directions at once, everyone looking to get out of reach of the boar. Only ten feet separated Morgan from the enraged beast, but there was no place for him to go without turning his back. The .45 revolver in his hand suddenly felt small and inadequate.

The boar came at him at a dead run with its mouth gaped open to bite, and there was no time for Morgan to aim his shot. He simply extended the pistol barrel at the boar’s head and squeezed the trigger as he lunged out of its path.

The roar of the pistol sounded at the same instant the boar closed on him. The boar went to its knees from the impact of the bullet, but was up again as if it were never hit. It lunged forward and barely missed taking hold of Morgan’s leg with its mouth. Its shoulder collided with Morgan, knocking him aside and down on one knee. In that instant before the boar could wheel back, it was broadside to Morgan and at point-blank range. He thumbed the hammer back on the Colt and extended the pistol’s barrel once more, pointing at a spot directly behind the boar’s front shoulder.

The impact of the soft lead bullet once more knocked the boar to its knees. But again, it fought for life, shaking its head and slinging blood with its back legs still churning and driving in an effort to turn its body to come head-on at Morgan. It swung its bony head and Morgan felt something hard and sharp dig through his left forearm. He fell onto his back with his boot heels scrambling in an attempt to push away from those slashing tusks and biting jaws, but the boar staggered after him.

The boar was so close that Morgan could smell the stinking musk of it and the sour mash on its breath. The boar loomed over him, blotting out the sky, and then its jaws latched onto the boot top above his ankle, shaking him with violent jerks of its head. Morgan thrust his pistol towards the boar’s head and pulled the trigger when he felt the barrel press into the soft flesh of one of its ears. The gun roared and the boar went limp and fell atop Morgan’s legs.

Morgan shoved against the boar with his free hand and fought his legs from under the pressing weight until he was back on his feet. He couldn’t shake the notion the boar would rise again and come at him, and he stood over the downed hog and fired twice more into its skull before he was sure it was dead.

He was still standing over the dead animal when Mr. Hogan appeared back on his porch. The storekeeper was holding his long-barreled Richmond musket.

Morgan gave Hogan a glance and then looked down at the ripped left coat sleeve on his frock coat. That hand was bloody, either from the boar’s wounds or h. . .