Benedict and Brazos 27

by E. Jefferson Clay

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  Tom Fallon of the Southwest Militia needed a man he could trust to get into an outlaw stronghold called Drum and rescue the beautiful wife of the state governor, so he called for an old friend, Duke Benedict. But Benedict showed up with a friend of his own, big Hank Brazos … so Fallon found himself with two good men.

  That alone wasn’t enough to guarantee success, though. First they had to get into Drum, and for this they needed the help of a sinister gunman called Holly, who wore a silver mask to hide the ruin of a face that had been chewed-up by a bullet many years before … and they weren’t at all sure they could trust Holly.

  Then there was the matter of a wild gun known as Caleb Flint, Killer.

  With the life of the woman at stake, they had no choice but to go ahead and see what they could do. So they loaded up their guns and set out in full expectation of the war to come.

  And war was exactly what they got.

  BENEDICT AND BRAZOS 27: CALEB FLINT, KILLER

  By E. Jefferson Clay

  First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  © 2021 by Piccadilly Publishing

  First Electronic Edition: December 2021

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

  Chapter One – Ride Back to Revenge

  CALEB FLINT WORKED in the sun.

  He’d hoed three rows of corn and was halfway along the fourth. The valley heat was intense and thunderclouds were building over Bald Knob. Each time he paused to swab sweat from his face, he would look at the heavy cloud mass and shake his head. The corn was too young to withstand a heavy

  downpour. It would be beaten down into the red earth and there would be no cornmeal for winter.

  The heavy hoe slammed into the rows and sweat splashed the hot earth. Now an erratic wind rose, rustling dryly in the corn rows and gusting dust towards the cabin. Tommy came out of the house and went about the yard, rounding up the chickens and penning them in the old shed. Flint couldn’t see the woman but knew she would be watching the sky, praying the rain would pass over. Flint wasn’t a praying man. He believed in what he saw, smelt or touched. He believed in the earth and hard work, and sometimes he believed in luck.

  “Caleb!”

  The man straightened, a powerful, bronzed figure in the yellow sun.

  The boy waved. “Shall I pen the horses, Caleb?”

  Flint considered. If the thunderstorm hit, the animals would scatter, and there were no fences. Yet corralling the stock seemed to him to be inviting the rain. It wouldn’t rain. Not yet.

  “Never mind!” he called and the boy went back into the cabin; a boy with his mother’s black hair and copper-colored skin.

  They had come to this lonely place in the winter and Flint had taken them in. She had been the wife of a Choctaw chieftain and they’d driven her from the tribe when the chief died and an old enemy took the head-dress. They got along well. Flint didn’t love her but knew he’d miss her if she left. She’d never said she loved him either, but sometimes at night when she lay in his arms there was something in her eyes that made him believe she would never leave him.

  The wind grew stronger now and suddenly the sun was gone behind the clouds. Instantly the temperature dropped, chilling the sweat on his naked torso. The corn stalks whipped at him as his hoe churned a steady rhythm in the soil.

  He was cold by the time he finished the row and he paused to pull on his jacket. It was old and worn but had once been the most expensive jacket a man could find in Denver. The jacket, and the Colt he kept in the cabin, were all that was left of the old days when Caleb Flint had been a name to send a tremor through any town he rode into.

  They said you could never quit the gun-trade. They said that even if you quit gunfighting and took up another line of work, sooner or later they would come after you; the boys with gun smoke in their eyes; the brother, father or son of somebody you’d killed; or the cold-eyed hellions who had to prove they could beat you ...

  But Caleb Flint had quit—right after that pitched battle in Dodge that had claimed eleven lives. True, he’d had to bury himself in the trackless Altar Mountains in a hidden valley with no name, to live alone with his memories and the red earth until the woman and the boy had come. But he’d succeeded. He hadn’t used his Colt .45 in two long years.

  He didn’t look like a gunfighter with his heavy sloping shoulders and lumberjack’s hands, while the broad, brown face showed nothing of the cruelty that marked so many of his breed. Only the eyes, steady, cool and gray, suggested a man who’d been tested often in the crucible of violence and not been found wanting.

  The jacket was a little loose across his shoulders, for he’d lost weight since the days they’d called him Iron Man Flint. He did up two of the leather-covered buttons, and as he bent to pick up the hoe again, felt the weight of the steel-framed picture in the breast pocket.

  He would always carry it, that fading daguerreotype of the girl with trapped sunlight in her eyes, even though the pain was a barely remembered thing now. It had been on returning home from the war to find her married to somebody else that had tipped the war-weary Flint over the border of sanity, putting ice in his veins and a killing Colt in his fist. He’d searched for her again in countless women since, but had always failed—while his black gun gave voice to his rage and helped ease the pain.

  So long ago ...

  And now he was a simple man who worked with his hands and lived in tune with the slow turning of the seasons. He ate plain food and only smoked tobacco at night, like an Indian. He asked for little and gave little. And only sometimes now, late at night, he might remember the old days and see again the ghostly shades of the men he’d killed ...

  It began to rain.

  The thunder clapped like a giant drumbeat across the valley. Thunderheads covered the sky, swollen and forbidding.

  Flint’s mouth twisted as the first drops fell, fat and bursting across the field. Birds flew low, seeking the cover of trees.

  It eased, then came on heavier over the valley, sweeping the corn, tapping against the roof of the cabin, plastering the man’s brown hair against his face as he stood defiantly, waiting for it to pass over. The stream in the gulch began to thicken in its course and the earth was turning from red to ochre. He could barely see the house now; the trail beyond was hidden behind the gray sheets of rain.

  At length, he heard the woman call, her voice faint through the beating of the rain. Yet still Flint continued to stand his ground, until he saw the mule trotting past the barn as the thunder came again. Then he flung the hoe aside and strode towards the house.

  The horseman appeared as he reached the chicken coop. Flint froze in mid-stride. No rider had ever come to this place before. This man was tall and sat a rawboned horse. Flint realized he must have come up the trail on the far side of the house. And staring at him with greater intensity, with alarm bells of danger ringing in his brain, he saw that the rider’s face above the streaming yellow sl
icker and beneath the sodden black hat, seemed to shine in the gray light. Like silver.

  “Flint!”

  The muffled voice came out of the past like a thrown knife.

  “Holly?”

  The rider’s hand came up from the folds of the slicker and Flint saw the gun. Then the woman screamed from the doorway and the rifle in her hands spat fruitless fire at the intruder.

  The man turned almost casually and his six-gun spoke twice. She fell, and only then did Flint see the boy behind her. He too was tumbling.

  With a terrible choked sound in his throat, the unarmed Flint charged, his legs taking great leaping strides through the mud. The cold blue eyes above the silver mask of a face watched him calmly for a moment, then blinked and the six-gun roared again.

  Caleb Flint fell on his back in the sticky yellow mud, as still as death. Through the hole in the breast pocket of the leather jacket, over his heart, crimson ran to tinge the puddle of water oozing out from beneath his broad back.

  “Done,” the horseman said, and turned his horse towards the trail.

  Down by the gulch, the gray mule skittered as a bolt of lightning forked across the creek, and in the empty field, the rain was beating down the young corn.

  “My daddy,” Hank Brazos informed the card players, “was what you’d call a self-made man.”

  “And living testimony to the futility of unskilled labor,” drawled Duke Benedict. “I raise ten dollars.”

  Brazos scowled across the table as the Southern and Cimarron Railroad’s southbound clattered noisily across the King John Creek bridge.

  “Don’t push your luck, Benedict,” he warned. “Texans don’t take kindly to tinhorns bad-mouthin’ their kin.”

  “Sorry,” murmured Benedict, an eye-catching figure in black broadcloth and immaculate white linen. “Please, tell us some more about your father, Johnny Reb. I’m sure the boys would be fascinated to hear about the famous time he went on a turkey shoot.”

  The ‘boys’ looked interested, for the swashbuckling Benedict and the giant young Texan who’d boarded the train at Mission were the most intriguing specimens encountered on the Capital City-Granite run in many a long day.

  “A turkey shoot,” asked miner Joe Cleet. “What in tarnal’s that, Hank?”

  “Forget it,” growled the Texan.

  But Benedict obliged. “Down around Frog Hollow County, Texas,” he smiled, raking in his winnings, “those tall, strapping Texans drive herds of turkeys around like you might round up cattle. And Joe Brazos was a tophand turkey herder—until the day he set out with a flock to drive five miles from Frog Hollow to Durant for a shoot. That was the day the North and South declared war.” He paused, the grin turning wicked. “You sure you wouldn’t like to finish the story, Reb?”

  “I’m warnin’ you, dude.”

  Benedict leant back in his chair. “Joe kept driving,” he said. “Through Durant, across the desert, over the New Mexico border—into the mists of nowhere.” He picked up his cards.

  “Yes, sir, a wonder turkey trail driver, but no soldiering man was our Joe.”

  Some suppressed smiles but others looked apprehensive as Hank Brazos’ blue eyes turned stormy. The Texan looked willing and able to take Benedict by his immaculate collar and the seat of his well-tailored pants and tip him through the open window onto the railbed. But they didn’t understand that clashes like this had always marked the unlikely partnership between a one-time Confederate sergeant and a Union Army captain, and never progressed beyond the talking stage. Well, hardly ever.

  “At least,” Brazos said tightly, “I knew who my old man was.”

  “Taloga a-comin’ up!” yelled the conductor. “Anybody for Taloga?”

  Benedict and Brazos got to their feet and collected their gear. Brazos snapped his fingers at his sleeping dog, Bullpup.

  “You got business in Taloga?” asked one of the card-players, curiously.

  “Yeah—business,” grunted Brazos, and it seemed to them that the big, easy-going Texan underwent a subtle change as he peered out the window as the train slowed. The passengers were suddenly aware of the heavy gun rig buckled about his flat middle, and found themselves wondering if he were really just a drawling young Texas drifter after all. And with the approach of the little whistle-stop town, they were aware that Duke Benedict seemed to have changed too, suddenly looking like a man with a lot of steel behind that fancy facade.

  All moved to the windows to watch Brazos and Benedict alight. They were the only passengers to get off. They spoke to the depot clerk who went along to the box car to get their horses, then stood looking about the depot.

  Beyond them, Taloga drowsed in the sun. “The butt-end of nowhere,” as someone described it.

  Then, as the depot clerk returned, leading two saddle horses, a buggy swung into sight and came rolling towards the depot. It stopped and a tall man descended. He was in his forties with iron-gray hair and military bearing. He paused when he saw Benedict and Brazos, then moved towards them, right hand extended as the Mogul locomotive let out a great hiss of steam and started to roll out.

  “Well I’ll be damned!” breathed one of the passengers as their car inched past the three men who were shaking hands. “That feller that met ’em. That’s Marshal Tom Fallon!”

  “Fallon?” asked another. “You mean Chief Marshal of the Territorial Militia?”

  “That’s him. Boys, there must sure be somethin’ doin’ in Taloga today!”

  Chapter Two – They Came to Taloga

  THE MARSHAL WAS a pale-skinned man whom no sun could redden for long. His eyes were agate gray and there was a deal of white in his hair that had been dark when Duke Benedict had seen him last. He was hard and muscular. There was strength in his broad face and his eyes were cool and alert. He never drank, but sat with a cup of coffee before him in the cool gloom of the Last Hope Saloon as Benedict and Brazos washed down the soot and dust with tall beers.

  Tom Fallon had made his name in the Union Army and had seen two years’ action in the same unit as Benedict, the 17th Cavalry. A fighting man who hung up his guns after the war, he only took them down again when commissioned to form the Territorial Militia.

  In the war, Fallon had known Duke Benedict as an educated, reckless and undisciplined young officer—and about the best fighting man he’d ever met. When the marshal had learned that Duke Benedict was in Mission two days ago, he’d had no hesitation in sending a message by express rider urgently requesting him to join him in Taloga, and there wasn’t a man he’d rather have seated opposite him right now than ex-Captain Duke Benedict.

  He said as much in his clipped way and Benedict lifted his glass lazily in his direction.

  “Old soldiers should stick together, Marshal,” he said. “Besides, your message sounded urgent.”

  “It was ... ” Fallon bent a quizzical glance on Brazos, who was feeding Bullpup biscuits from his pocket. “Somehow I expected you’d be alone, Benedict.”

  “At times I wish I was,” Benedict quipped. Then he added simply: “Brazos is a friend, Fallon. They come scarce these days.”

  “You look like a fighting man, Brazos,” the lawman observed.

  “Well, I don’t perzackly know about that, Marshal,” said Brazos patting Bullpup’s head. “But I did fight for four years under the best fightin’ man this country has ever seen.”

  “And who was that?”

  “Robert E. Lee, of course.”

  Fallon’s eyes flashed. “He lost.”

  “He didn’t lose, Marshal. America lost.”

  “All right,” Benedict interrupted. “The war’s over and anybody who forgets that is a fool. Right, Fallon?”

  “I guess so.” Fallon studied Brazos for a long moment and liked what he saw, though surprised at Duke Benedict rating a former enemy by that big word ‘friend’. Then he turned his piercing gray eyes on Benedict again. “I need the help of a good man I can rely on, Benedict,” he said directly. “Two good men would be all the bette
r if your pard is interested. I heard you were dealing faro in Mission, so I took that to mean you’d be available for a real job.”

  “That depends on the job.”

  “Gun work.”

  Duke Benedict sighed.

  “I don’t know, Fallon ... ”

  “It’s important—vital in fact.”

  “It always is.”

  “What he’s sayin’, is that we ain’t hard up, Marshal,” said Brazos. “Benedict had a good run at the tables in Mission and I picked up some useful money breakin’ horses. Gun work’s like stable swampin’, as far as we’re concerned—last card in the deck.”

  “I work with the gun,” Fallon countered. “And I’m proud of it.”

  “That’s different,” replied Brazos. “That badge on your shirt makes it so.”

  The lawman dug into his pocket and produced another worn brass star and placed it on the table. Benedict and Brazos stared at the badge for a moment, then looked at him quizzically.

  “Yours if you want it—Benedict,” Fallon said. “And I can get another for your friend.”

  Benedict looked puzzled. “You’re recruiting?”

  The ghost of a smile touched Fallon’s strong face. “Not for the Militia, Benedict. You didn’t take kindly to discipline as a soldier and I guess time hasn’t changed you. No, I’m not trying to sign you up, but I do need the temporary services of a man like you. If I had such a man in the Militia I’d use him, but I haven’t.”

  “Flattering, Fallon. But I still don’t understand. Why do you want me to work for you?”

  Fallon said briskly, “Let me explain. The task assigned me when I took over the Militia, was to bring law and order to the Territory. It was a formidable task as you could well imagine, with the Southwest Territory having a name for violence that stinks in the nostrils of all decent men coast to coast. Even so, I’ve had considerable success in practically every area with one exception. Ever heard of Drum?”