The Quest of Brady Kenton / Kenton's Challenge

by Cameron Judd

  Kenton could not reply to that. He knew his fury would be betrayed in his voice, and that was one satisfaction he would not give to Paul Kevington.

  “My father hates you, by the way. I’ve never heard him mention you without cursing you. He says you were once rivals for my mother’s affections. I guess you could say he won.”

  “Your father is a wicked man. He won nothing. He stole Victoria away. He gained her affection only because her injuries left her senseless for years, only because he lied to her, telling her I was dead. Only because he took advantage of geographic distance, and forced isolation, and an injured woman’s weakened emotional and mental state, to force himself into her life. Had he not chanced to be on that train with Victoria, he would not have been privileged to steal her away before her fate could be known, and I could reach her. None of this would have happened … and you would not even exist.”

  Kevington laughed again. “He didn’t ’chance’ to be on that train, Mr. Kenton. He was there at Victoria’s invitation. She loved him even then, not you. She was going to leave you. She was disgusted that she carried in her a life you had planted there. The same miserable life that now stands beside you. A life that won’t be a life much longer. Hello, Rachel. How pleasant to encounter you at last!”

  Rachel said nothing. She seemed frozen at Kenton’s side.

  “You’re a damned liar,” Kenton said. “You may be able to foist some lies on me, but you will not persuade me that Victoria did not love me. That is something about which there is no doubt. I lived with that woman. I loved her and was loved in turn. We were devoted to one another, more than to anything else in the world. She did not love your father. She feared and despised him, and hated him for pursuing her. These are facts about which there is no question, because I, sir, was there. I know.”

  “You are a fool, Kenton. Soon to be a dead fool. But let me talk to dear Rachel a moment, before we deal with … final matters. Rachel, my darling! How could you have been so thoughtless as to embroil Mr. Kenton in your problems? If you had been strong enough to resist the temptation to find your real father, you could have vanished so thoroughly I could never have tracked you. As it was, all I had to do was track Brady Kenton to find you. And now, thanks to your selfishness, you’re going to get not only yourself killed, but Mr. Kenton, as well! What do you think of that? Doesn’t it make you just burn with guilt?” He laughed.

  “I hate you!” she said, her voice so tight and tremulous it could barely be heard. “You are a murderer and a devil, and I hate you!”

  “Ta, ta, Rachel! It’s not good to die with hatred in your heart. Sends you straight to hell, they say. Let’s see if that’s true.”

  He raised the pistol.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE train made another turn, the track circling to the right around the base of a bluff. Kevington stumbled slightly, losing his aim.

  Kenton reacted to the opportunity. He shoved Rachel down. “Hide!” he ordered her. “Take cover!” Then he leaped straight at Kevington.

  Kevington fired his pistol, sending the slug harmlessly into a cargo crate. Kenton was on him in a moment, knocking him down, struggling with him. The pistol fired again, the bullet going through the roof. Still the struggle went on.

  * * *

  Rachel was paralyzed with terror. She lay on the floor of the boxcar, hearing more than seeing the struggle going on mere feet away from her.

  Hide, Kenton had said. Hide. But she couldn’t even move.

  Somehow she found the strength to force herself up. She could think of no place to hide other than the niche in which Kenton had had her place herself earlier. Almost mechanically she moved in that direction.

  The train curved again, throwing her off balance. She slipped toward the door, and lost her footing.

  The pistol fired again, illuminating for a moment the fierce struggle going on between Kenton and the cursing Paul Kevington. Numb with fright, she felt faint all at once. Stumbling again, she fell out the door, and groped to find a handhold.

  Somehow she caught herself. She was hanging out of the railroad car, legs swinging, nearly touching the grade, feet far too close to the metal wheels. She was hanging on to the edge of the door, her fingertips barely hooked over it.

  “Rachel!” she heard Kenton shout. Somehow, in the midst of his fight, he had detected what had happened. “Don’t let go!”

  The pistol blasted. The slug passed through the door and sang past her face, missing her by an inch or less.

  It was more than she could take. Her fingers lost their grip and she fell.

  * * *

  “No!” Kenton screamed. “Rachel!”

  Kevington slammed the pistol against the side of Kenton’s face. He raised it, clicked back the hammer for the fifth shot …

  Kenton somehow managed to knock his arm away. The shot went through the far side of the car. Kenton locked his arms around Kevington and the fight went on.

  Above, and far down the length of the train, the true brakeman stood rooted in place, looking back along the car tops. He’d heard gunfire. At first he’d been unsure, but that last shot had echoed loudly off the side of the bluff by which the train was passing. There was no question that it was truly a gunshot.

  Someone was firing off a pistol in one of the boxcars. Maybe a drunk vagabond in some kind of mindless celebration, or maybe a pair of stowaways at battle.

  He turned and began running the car tops toward the tender and engine ahead. He would give word that the train should be halted and searched. Gunfire on a moving train was not to be abided.

  * * *

  Inside the boxcar, Kenton was growing weary. Kevington had only one shot left, and knew it, and the knowledge must have doubled his determination to make that shot effective, for he was fighting harder than ever. And Kenton was losing strength.

  And he was distracted. Rachel had fallen from the moving car. She might have tumbled under the wheels or been killed rolling down the grade. Or perhaps she lay hurt back there in the darkness. His daughter … hurt and alone …

  Kenton let out a roar and heightened his efforts. He would not let Paul Kevington kill him.

  Or if he did, he would not die alone.

  Kenton saw the open door beside him. In their struggle they had rolled near to it. With the right kind of effort he could—

  Kevington got the pistol into position. Kenton saw the end of it inches from his face, aimed roughly at the center of his forehead. “This is it, Kenton!” Kevington shouted into his face. “One Kevington took your wife, and now another takes your life!”

  The brakeman was nearly to the tender when he heard the sound of the sixth shot. “Hey!” he shouted. “Gunfire on the train! Gunfire on the train!”

  They didn’t hear him. The train rolled on. Swearing, he continued forward.

  CHAPTER 37

  WHEN Brady Kenton came to, it was daylight. But not a normal kind of daylight—it was a misty, green, organic light, soft and filtered, and with it a smell equally organic. The scent of fresh earth, something like that of a freshly dug cellar.

  He groaned and tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t. His nose was shoved into the soil on which he lay. He was surrounded by greenery; a leaf tickled the back of his neck, making it itch.

  Kenton moved his head a little, and the deep breath came. He groaned again, then pushed himself up, through the leaves that surrounded him.

  He blinked in the broad morning daylight. For a time he couldn’t figure out where he was or how he had gotten here. His memory was a muddle.

  It hit him suddenly, and he looked around, wondering where Kevington was. No sign of him. Kenton stood, wary, and looked again. He was at the base of a steep trackside grade, down from the rails a good twenty feet, and he’d rolled into a natural recess in the slope, a crevice about the size of a large coffin, and covered over with brush. The brush had given way and let him fall into the crevice, then had covered him like a lid, hiding him.

  Kevington had
been with him when they’d fallen from the train. He remembered it now. They’d rolled and tumbled and suddenly had gone out the door, pounding down the grade and breaking away from one another. Obviously Kevington had rolled off somewhere else, and Kenton had dropped into the natural hiding place.

  He wondered how long he’d lain there, knocked senseless. It must have been hours.

  Kenton looked around, thinking maybe Kevington had been killed in the fall. If so, he couldn’t be far away. But he saw no body.

  On the other hand, Kevington might have lived. In the darkness he might have sought Kenton and been unable to find him. Even in the daylight he would have been unlikely to find Kenton in the hidden niche that had caught him. So maybe Kevington had wandered off eventually, assuming Kenton must have lived and headed back down the track …

  To find Rachel. Kenton tensed at the realization. Rachel had fallen from the train farther back; to reach her he would have to walk back in the direction of Denver. What if Kevington was already doing that? He might find Rachel … maybe he already had.

  Kenton had no weapon. Kevington had a pistol, unless he’d lost it in his tumble. Kenton looked around, hoping to spot it, but didn’t.

  No more time to waste. Whatever the odds, he had to go back down the track and find Rachel. He prayed that Kevington hadn’t gotten to her already. If he had, it was already too late.

  He examined himself to make sure there were no unnoticed injuries, and saw that his left arm was cut and quite bloody. But the blood was crusted now, and the arm didn’t hurt much. He’d cut it somehow in the tumbling fight in the dark with Kevington.

  It would take more than that to stop him. He climbed up to the tracks and set out walking as fast as he could back down toward Denver, keeping his eyes peeled for Kevington and Rachel, as well, hoping he would find the former dead, and the latter alive and well.

  * * *

  The station was nothing more than a watering stop, with a log station house and a tiny cafe that sold sandwiches, tea, and coffee. Normally trains stopped there for only minutes, but that had changed last night. A wire had come from Denver saying that the train now at the station should be stopped and searched.

  The train, though, had been late in arriving, and when at last it did, the stationmaster learned that the delay had happened because the train had already been searched even before it got to his station.

  At the moment, he was scratching on a pad of paper with a pencil, taking down a report of what had happened. He’d learned long ago that when something went askew, the railroad loved words on paper. Document, record, and document some more. And make sure that any blame that came down, came down somewhere else.

  “All right, slow down a minute,” he said to the brakeman, scribbling as fast as he could. “You heard shots and had the train stopped and searched. And you found…”

  “We found nobody. A boxcar with an open door and some blood on the floor, and a few bulletholes in it. Whoever it was fell out, or jumped, with the train still moving.”

  “No bodies found?”

  “Not yet. There’ll be a search now that it’s daylight, I’m sure.”

  The scribbler nodded, chewing on his tongue in concentration, and finished his writing. He lowered the pad and looked at the other man.

  “I don’t know what happened here, but you and me have both done our duty. You searched the train once and I’ve searched it again, and there’s nothing more to be found here. I’m going to send this report back down to the central office, and as far as I’m concerned, you fellows can roll that train on and get it out of here.”

  “I wonder who it was?” the brakeman said, looking again at the bloodstain on the floor.

  “Some tramps, most likely. They’ll probably be found dead somewhere back down the track. When folks fall off a train moving as fast as this one must have been, folks tend to die.”

  * * *

  Rachel Frye hadn’t died. She’d fallen screaming from the train and hit the ground hard, rolling like a log, abraded quite badly. Her dress was torn and filthy, hardly more than a rag now, and her arms were scratched and bruised.

  But she was alive. And without any injury except a rib that was very badly bruised and maybe cracked, for it hurt her to walk and to breathe. She kept on walking and breathing anyway, heading up the track. She’d debated whether she should go back down toward Denver, or on up, and had decided on the latter. Denver was far away; the next train station was probably closer. And there she might find out the outcome of the fight between Kenton and Paul Kevington. She prayed that Kenton had prevailed.

  She’d been walking since just after dawn, but had no idea how far she’d come. It felt like miles, but given her condition and the fact she was climbing in thin mountain air, she couldn’t really guess how much distance she’d covered. The thing was to keep on going.

  But suddenly she stopped. Up ahead, coming down toward her, was a man, on foot. He was at the moment too far away to make out clearly, but she saw that he was looking right at her, and knew it was too late to avoid being seen.

  The man paused, then came on again, faster. He broke into a trot.

  Her heart nearly failed her. It was Paul Kevington.

  Rachel stood where she was, a rabbit hypnotized by the stare of a snake about to strike it, a deer frozen in the headlight of an oncoming train. She snapped herself out of it, and looked for a way of escape.

  Off to her left, and down the slope, she saw something unexpected: a jumble of old train wreckage, including a locomotive. It was rusted and splintered and ugly, overtaken with vegetation. She supposed the railroad must have chosen to leave the wreck where it was because its location would make it nearly impossible to pull out again.

  Right now it seemed her only hope. If she could hide there, maybe find something to use as a weapon …

  She ran down toward the wreckage as Paul Kevington continued down the track toward her. He shouted her name, and it scared her to death even to hear his voice.

  CHAPTER 38

  PAUL Kevington felt a grim sense of satisfaction. He had her now. He’d seen her clearly as she ran down the slope, and watched her disappear into the tangled wood and metal of the aging train wreckage.

  She was trying to hide from him. What a fool she was! Did she think he would pursue her from one continent to another, and across a vast frontier, only to let her evade him in such a childish way? He could be patient. Let her hide … he’d take pleasure in finding her. He’d enjoy what followed that, the final victory, even more.

  He’d loved her once, back when he thought she could be his. Now that he knew she never could be, he despised her.

  He stood at the side of the tangled wreckage, looking it over with a smile on his face. His pistol had been lost sometime during the tumble out of the train, and in the darkness he hadn’t found it. He’d not been able to find Brady Kenton, either, but had decided not to worry about that for now. He’d deal with Rachel first, then find Kenton. Mostly likely the old word-scribbler had been killed in the fall from the train anyway, and he’d just not been able to find his body in the dark. He hoped Kenton had gone under the wheels.

  “Rachel!” Kevington called. “Rachel, darling, why are you being so stubborn? Don’t you know by now you’ll never escape me? I’ll follow you right to the gates of hell, my dear, and push you in! Show yourself, sister.” He gave an ironic, harsh emphasis to that word. “Let’s get this done with quickly and mercifully. Let’s end this chase once and for all.”

  He glanced down and grinned as he saw a piece of rusted metal, fragmented and sharp on one end. He picked it up. This would do the job nicely.

  “Come out, sister! Come out and let’s you and I talk! Maybe we can find a better alternative than disposing of you! Maybe there’s some way we can reach terms … maybe you can live through this!”

  He didn’t expect her to believe him. She knew he couldn’t afford to leave her alive. But the chatter would have the effect of making her more unsettled, h
e hoped. Maybe she would make a sound and betray herself.

  He continued his search, shouting, taunting, shoving aside pieces of wreckage. He’d find her soon, and the piece of sharp metal in his hand would settle his account with Rachel Frye once and for all.

  * * *

  Almost an hour after he began his walk down the track, Brady Kenton stopped and listened to the wind.

  He’d just heard a man’s shout.

  Listening harder, he heard it again.

  “Kevington!” he whispered sharply.

  The shouting came from farther down the track. He set off in that direction on a run, as well as his sore muscles would let him.

  It wasn’t a good time to realize that age was catching up to him. Not with Rachel still to be saved—if it wasn’t too late.

  And maybe it wasn’t. Why else would Kevington be yelling, if not in some attempt to find her?

  Kenton ran on, grateful he was traveling downhill rather than up.

  He rounded a bend in the tracks and stopped. He saw Kevington below, clambering about on the wreckage of a train. Kenton remembered reading about this train crash a couple of years earlier, and how the railroad had chosen simply to leave the whole mess where it was.

  Rachel had to be down there, hiding. Why else would Kevington be searching two-year-old train wreckage?

  Kenton’s suspicions were confirmed a moment later by Kevington’s next words.

  “Ah, Rachel! I do believe I see you! I knew I’d find you! Why not come on out, and let’s you and I talk!”

  Kenton let out a yell. “Don’t do it, Rachel! Stay where you are!”

  Kevington wheeled, stared up at Kenton. Kenton heard him curse.

  “Thought you were through with me, Kevington? Did you think I was dead?” Kenton began walking down toward Kevington, looking meanwhile for something he could use as a weapon. That metal fragment looked fearsome. “It’ll take a lot more than a tumble from a train to do me in!”

  Kevington seemed to have lost his banter. “Stay the hell away!” he shouted up at Kenton. “I’ll kill her!”