The Brothers O'Brien

by J. A. Johnstone

  “The wine is to your liking?” Aracela asked. “We import it by the cask from Spain.”

  “I prefer French wines,” Whitney said. “The aged reds of the Rioja region, like this one, have never been favorites of mine.”

  “Then we must bring you some French wine immediately.” Aracela raised her hands, to clap for a servant.

  “No, not on my account. This is drinkable.” Whitney looked around him. “Where is Don Manuel?”

  Aracela pretended to be shocked. “You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “My father is dead.” She dabbed the corners of her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. “His body lies in the hacienda chapel.” She made a little sobbing sound. “Now my father and brother are gone, and I am alone.”

  Her ploy for sympathy went unheeded. “How did your father die?” Whitney’s head emerged from his fur coat shell like an inquisitive turtle.

  “He was killed leading an attack on your men,” Aracela said. “He wanted the valley for himself, and nothing I could say would dissuade him.”

  “You invited me here to tell me that?” Whitney asked. “That your father is dead?”

  “No, not that, Mr. Whitney. Much more than that.”

  A servant scratched on the door, then entered. “Dinner is served.”

  “Shall we postpone talking business until after dinner?” Aracela said.

  “If you wish,” Whitney said. “But I believe we have little to discuss.”

  He ate sparingly, saying that he avoided highly spiced food because of an unfortunate disposition to dyspepsia. Despite Aracela’s entreaties, he’d refused to part with his coat, its moth-eaten presence undoing the gold and silver elegance of her candle-lit table.

  She’d begun to hate the little man with a passion. He seemed immune to her charms and her broad hints that she was sexually available. In fact, nothing she did seemed to please the little rat. If she hadn’t needed him, at least for now, he would’ve been dead before midnight.

  “Do please try the strawberry torte, Mr. Whitney,” Aracela said. Then as a sudden afterthought, “I baked it myself.”

  Whitney made an exasperated sound close to a sigh. “I didn’t kill them with my own hand, but I’m responsible for the deaths of your father and brother. Now you offer me strawberry torte.” He sat back in his chair, his eyes steely. “What do you want from me, woman?”

  The man would not be charmed, so she laid it on the line. “I’ll renounce all claim to the Estancia Valley in exchange for an alliance.”

  “I already own the Estancia.”

  “Do you own Dromore?”

  “You mean the O’Brien brothers’ place north of here?”

  “Yes, the biggest, richest ranch in the Territory. Dromore was spared the worst of the blizzards, and I’m told the land and cattle are now worth millions.”

  For the first time that evening, Whitney seemed taken aback. “What are you trying to tell me? Do you mean I should take Dromore?”

  “Yes, I do, Mr. Whitney. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I ask you, why stop with the Estancia?”

  “Why indeed,” Whitney said after a while in thought. His gaze wandered to the fireplace, as though he hoped to find inspiration in the flames. Finally he returned his attention to Aracela. “This alliance you speak of, you’d need to offer me more than your best wishes.”

  Aracela looked at him over the rim of her glass, her beautiful eyes calculating. “Money. Hard cash, Mr. Whitney. The continuing returns on my father’s foreign investments, enough to hire an army of pistoleros.”

  Whitney considered what she said. That he was cash-strapped he could not deny. With this woman backing him, taking Dromore was not out of the question. Clear the Estancia, then push his men north and acquire the ranch by force, killing anyone who stood in his way. He’d keep Donna Aracela around until her money dried up, and then get rid of her. The entire scheme was wild and not without its dangers. The humiliation of Charlie Packett that morning by the O’Brien brothers and their foreman was a case in point. But it was doable, and the potential rewards were tremendous.

  “Well, Mr. Whitney,” Aracela said, “do we have a deal?”

  “Perhaps. When can you get money to me?”

  “Tonight. I can give you ten thousand dollars on account. And there will be more to come.”

  Whitney said nothing, but Aracela watched avarice grow in his eyes. “Wait here,” she said, “I’ll be right back.”

  Whitney stood as the woman rose from her chair and left the room, her silk dress rustling with every elegant step.

  Dromore.

  The very name inflamed Whitney’s imagination. Soon, he could be the new owner of a ranch worth a fortune. As a member of the landed gentry, he’d be welcome in every high society drawing room in the nation, to say nothing of Europe.

  He gulped down a glass of wine to calm his hammering heart, and then smiled. The ragged urchin from the East Boston slums could soon be on his way to the top. All he needed was guts, ruthlessness, and the determination to win.

  Donna Aracela returned with a pigskin valise. She laid the bag on the table, snapped it open, and took out a bundle of notes. “It’s all here. Do you wish to count it?”

  “No, I’ll take your word for it.” Whitney knew he’d count it later at the first opportunity.

  She picked up a decanter and stepped to the side of his chair. Her thigh pushed against his arm as she said, “More wine?”

  “No, I must be going.”

  “I wish you’d reconsider and spend the night. I could make you so . . . comfortable.” She glanced out the window. “Oh dear, it’s snowing again.”

  Whitney got to his feet. Sweat beaded his forehead, but from heat or desire, Aracela couldn’t guess. The little man solved her dilemma. “I never mix business with pleasure,” he said. “We are now, as you say, allies, so any future dealings between us must be on a strictly formal basis.”

  Aracela smiled. Oh, how I’m really going to enjoy killing you, you arrogant little rodent. “You’re right, Mr. Whitney. But how will we keep in touch?”

  “I will report to you here from time to time,” he said, “and keep you apprised of what’s happening.”

  “Our partnership is on a fifty-fifty basis, of course,” Aracela said. “I get half the Estancia and half of Dromore.”

  “Yes, that goes without saying.” Whitney could afford to be generous, since he didn’t have the slightest intention of keeping his part of the bargain. “Now, could you have my horse brought around? Oh, and thank you for a wonderful evening.”

  “The feeling is mutual, I’m sure, dear Mr. Whitney,” Aracela said, aware she sounded like the heroine of a bad novel.

  Whitney picked up the valise. “I’ll assemble my men in Estancia town and hire more Texas guns. By spring, I’ll own Dromore.”

  “We’ll own Dromore, you mean.”

  “Why, of course. That was just a slip of the tongue.”

  After Whitney left, Donna Aracela’s ambitions were soaring, and she was too keyed up to relax. She called for her maid. The girl was a dull, lumpish peon with a bovine acceptance of whatever abuse her mistress inflicted on her. When the girl entered the drawing room, Aracela told her to strip, which she did. When Aracela picked up her riding crop, the maid’s black eyes revealed a certain amount of fear, and that pleased her mistress greatly. There was no great pleasure to be had whipping a cow.

  “Come closer, child.”

  The vaquero Otilio stood in darkness and watched Joel Whitney mount his horse and leave. He was certain the little gringo had spent time between Donna Aracela’s thighs, and jealously raged in him, painful as a cancer. He had come to consider Aracela as his woman, and she should sleep with no other man, now or ever.

  What to do with such a woman? Such a whore?

  There was a way, the ancient, honorable way of his people.

  His black eyes feral in the gloom, Otilio watched Aracela’s window and thought his heart
was broken. It felt as heavy as lead.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Joel Whitney opened the door of Charlie Packett’s hotel room and warily stepped inside.

  “Stand right there, or I’ll drop you where you stand,” Packett said.

  “Damn it, Charlie, don’t shoot. It’s Whitney.”

  The sound of a Colt’s hammer lowering was loud in the quiet. “I was about to gun you for sure,” Packett said.

  “Light the lamp. We need to talk.”

  A match flared, then Packett lit the lamp by his bed. He laid his gun on the table. “I thought you might’ve been one of them O’Brien clan. I aim to put bullets in all of them.”

  Whitney wanted so say, Up until now, you haven’t done very well on that score, but he kept his mouth shut. “You have to ride, Kid. Round up Clay Stanley and the rest of them and bring them here.”

  “That ain’t happening, boss,” Packett said. “I was roughly handled and before I ride anywhere I’ve got a score to settle.”

  Whitney considered that. Turning Packett loose on the O’Briens might not be a bad idea. Gun the brothers and their hard-case foreman and Dromore could be fatally weakened. But he dismissed the notion. He was certain Charlie couldn’t take them, especially Jacob O’Brien, who had a gun rep, and was as mean and nasty as hell to boot. Getting rid of the brothers was a job for Clay Stanley. None of them could match his speed with the iron.

  “That will have to wait,” Whitney said. “Getting the boys back here is more important.”

  “Not to me it ain’t.” Packett lit one of the rolled cigarettes he kept on the bedside table.

  Whitney grabbed a chair and dragged it to the bed. “Charlie, you’ll get all the revenge you want and then some. I promise you.”

  “How come?”

  “We’re taking Dromore, the O’Briens’ home ranch.” The room was very cold and Whitney sat hunched in his fur coat. “There’s millions at stake here, understand? Personal matters must take a backseat.”

  “Millions for you, you mean,” Packett said. “What’s in it for me?”

  “When I have Dromore here”—Whitney clenched his fist—“you’ll get a bonus big enough to keep you in women and whiskey for ten years. Longer than that if you watch your money.”

  Packett watched his cigarette smoke drift in the room angled with shifting shadows. “What makes you think taking Dromore from the O’Briens will be easy?”

  “I didn’t say it will be easy. Look . . .” Whitney picked up the valise from the floor and opened it. He showed the contents to the young gunman.

  “It’s money,” Packett said. “A lot of it.”

  “Not just money, Charlie. It’s a war chest, ten thousand dollars to buy men and arms. Dromore will be mine before the spring melt.”

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “From my new partner, Donna Aracela Ortero. And there’s more where this came from.”

  Packett’s smiled like a rattlesnake. “And suppose I just take all that money from you?”

  A split second later he was staring at the derringer pressed into the space between his eyebrows. “And suppose I just blow your damned head off?” Whitney was not a needlessly profane man, but he was on edge, and his nerves were shredded.

  “A joke, boss,” Packett said quickly. “Only a little joke.”

  “A very little joke,” Whitney said, ice in his voice. Packett stubbed out his cigarette butt on top of the table. “I’ll saddle up and ride, boss. Bring the boys in like you said.”

  Whitney eased down the belly gun’s hammer. “Stay away from the O’Briens until I give the word, you hear?”

  “I hear you, boss.”

  Whitney rose to his feet and picked up the valise. “If you even think about crossing me, Charlie”—he pointed the derringer at Packett’s head—“I’ll kill you.”

  Packett felt a chill. Joel Whitney was more than he seemed, and much more dangerous than he pretended.

  Whitney was too wound up to sleep. He grabbed a bottle of brandy from Mrs. Hazel’s stock and sat in a rocker on the porch. A few minutes later Charlie Packett rode out, then disappeared into darkness.

  Eventually the Kid would have to go, but that was for the future. Whitney concentrated on the present. He tilted the bottle to his mouth, drank deeply, then lit a cigar, his face scowling his racing thoughts.

  He was playing for high stakes, he realized that, and from now on he could trust no one. As he’d previously decided, he would use Donna Aracela, then discard her. The woman did not present a problem. His Texas gunfighters he would pay off after the job was done and he was the new owner of Dromore. To a man they were drifters and wouldn’t care to hang around anyway. The way he figured it, the only real problem he had was the O’Brien brothers.

  Raised in the worst slums of Boston, where every day he’d faced a new fight for survival, Whitney had an instinct when it came to recognizing fighting men. Clay Stanley was one, Jacob O’Brien was another, and so was that tough old coot Luther Ironside.

  As the brandy warmed him, Whitney’s confidence grew. Stanley could take care of the O’Briens, he was certain of that. When they were gone, who would be left? He’d heard the patriarch of the family was a cripple confined to a wheelchair, and his hands were vaqueros, not gunmen. Whitney allowed himself a smile. Taking Dromore could be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

  But then he had another thought. Why waste my newfound fortune on hiring more high-priced Texas guns? There were plenty of border riffraff around who would cut any man, woman, or child in half with a shotgun for fifty dollars. Those were the men he should hire, the scum of the earth who’d kill for whiskey and whores. His Texans, braver and aware of their status, would be in the forefront of the fight, so all things being equal, they would be the first ones to die. It was yet another way to save money—you don’t pay bonuses to dead men.

  Whitney’s little head nodded in its fur cocoon. If it all fell apart—unlikely, but a possibility to be considered—he could scamper with the ten thousand, and maybe more. A man, a ruthless, ambitious man, could do a lot in Boston with that kind of money.

  All in all, Whitney was pleased with his progress, and he drank to that.

  Out in the frozen flatlands, coyotes yipped their hunger to the uncaring night, and snowflakes chased one another in the wind. His wife, God rest her soul, had loved nights like this. Hot from the brandy, he remembered Martha’s nakedness, the stark white of her body in bed. He wondered what Donna Aracela looked like without her fancy clothes. But he couldn’t picture her in his mind.

  He sighed. Ah, well, it didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t want her body, only her money. And then her death.

  Suddenly Whitney’s world seemed so simple, so straightforward, that it pleased him immensely.

  He didn’t know it then, but all that was about to change.

  Chapter Forty

  “Andre,” Ironside said, “can you make out those riders?”

  Perez shaded his eyes against the sun and snow glare for a few moments. “Sí, those are the brothers of Señor Jacob, and three vaqueros ride with them.” He grinned. “All of them relatives of mine.”

  “Go tell Jacob to get out here.”

  After Perez hurried inside, Ironside stood against the hotel porch rail and stared into the distance. The snow had stopped, and the morning had dawned bright and sunny. But the cold was still bitter, the wind biting. The breaths of the oncoming men and horses formed a gray mist around them.

  After a while Ironside nodded to himself. It was Patrick and Shawn all right, but Samuel was with them. Had something happened at Dromore?

  “Hell, you’re right. Samuel is with them,” Jacob said, standing beside Ironside. “I’d recognize him anywhere. Rides straight up and down like a general on parade.”

  “I never could teach you to do that,” Ironside said.

  Jacob looked at the older man. “What do you suppose has happened?”

  “I was about to ask you the sa
me thing.”

  When Samuel rode up to the porch he was smiling, and Jacob took that as a good sign.

  “I found a couple of lost souls out there in the wilderness,” Samuel said. “They were out of grub, out of options, and riding in circles.”

  “Hell, we knew where we were,” Shawn said. “It was you that was lost, Sam.”

  All six men looked trail worn, their faces thin and haggard. Patrick, more bookish than the others, seemed more tired than the rest.

  “What brings you here, Sam?” Ironside said.

  “The colonel was worried about y’all.” Samuel stared hard at Ironside. “He said you’d led them astray, Luther.”

  “He’s real mad at me, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  Samuel swung out of the saddle, as did the others. Patrick staggered a little when his feet hit the ground, and he gave Jacob a wan smile. “I guess I should spend more time riding than I do reading.”

  “A hoss never teaches a man anything,” Jacob said. He called out to one of the vaqueros, “Ignacio, there’s a barn out back. You and Ramiro mind putting the horses away?”

  The man called Ignacio waved and gathered up reins as Samuel and the others stepped onto the porch. Jacob said, “You boys look all used up. There’s coffee on the stove.”

  “I could sure use it,” Patrick said.

  Whitney, cup in hand, stepped onto the porch, and Jacob introduced him. “Sam, I guess you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Joel Whitney. Whitney, this is my brother Samuel.”

  Samuel nodded, but didn’t extend his hand. “Whitney, were those your men I saw up near Chavez Draw yesterday?”

  “Could be. What were they doing?”

  “Murdering unarmed Mexican sheepherders.”

  If Whitney was offended he didn’t let it show. “I now own the Estancia Valley, and I will not tolerate squatters on my land.”