But they didn’t know, this being their first time in Fort Worth. Like cowboys, they made most of their living while on horseback and so wore boots better for riding than walking. Because of that, they were all footsore by the time they reached the neat little whitewashed house, which didn’t do a thing to improve Earl’s already surly mood.
Cooper knocked on the door. A minute or so later, a heavyset, middle-aged black woman in an apron opened it and looked out at them in surprise. Politely, she said, “Yes, sirs? What can I do for you?”
“We need to see Mr. Keegan,” Cooper said. He was the smoothest-spoken of the trio, when he put some effort into being polite.
“Are, uh, you gentlemen in the market for brides? Because I got to tell you, Mr. Keegan is plumb laid up right now and ain’t workin’ ’cause he’s hurt.”
Earl’s patience ran out in a hurry. “I don’t have time to be arguing with some mammy. If Keegan’s laid up, that means he’s here. Get out of the way.” He bulled ahead, forcing the woman to step back even though she tried to hold her ground.
“Mister, you can’t do that—”
“Grab her and shut her up,” Earl told the other two.
A little wide-eyed, Hawthorne said, “You mean kill her?”
“No, just keep her from yammering in my ear, you idiot!”
The two outlaws took hold of the woman’s arms. Hawthorne clapped a hand over her mouth as she started to yell. Earl shoved past. He didn’t know exactly where Keegan was, but the house wasn’t very big so he didn’t think he’d have any trouble finding the man.
Keegan helped with that by calling through an open door down a hallway, “Lantana, who was that at the door?”
Earl stalked down the corridor and stopped in the doorway. The man in the room was in bed with his back propped against several pillows piled behind him. His splinted and bandaged right leg stuck straight out in front of him. He stared in alarm at the rugged-looking stranger in his house. “Who are you?”
“You’re Cyrus Keegan?” Earl asked.
“That’s right.”
Earl took a couple steps into the room. Keegan wasn’t a young man. He was fifty years old, maybe more. Hard to say how big he was with him stuck in bed like that, but he seemed medium-sized, at best. A fringe of gray hair ran around his ears and the back of his head. Watery blue eyes peered at Earl through wire-rimmed spectacles.
“I’m looking for Molly Brock. You know where she is.”
Keegan shook his head. “You’re mistaken, sir. What have you done to my housekeeper? Where’s Lantana?”
“Don’t worry about her. A couple of my pards are keeping her company.” Earl went closer to the bed. “Molly Brock. Where can I find her?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Earl loomed over the bed and drew his gun. That caused Keegan to flinch back against the headboard as much as he could with the pillows behind him.
“You traded telegrams with her a few days ago. Is she here in town? By God, you’d better tell me.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” Keegan couldn’t keep his voice from shaking, but he didn’t lack for courage—or foolishness. “You get out of my house right now—”
Earl chopped down with the gun in his hand, slamming it against the splinted leg. Keegan’s back arched. He screamed in pain, a shriek that was cut off when Earl backhanded him across the mouth with his other hand.
Earl drew back the revolver’s hammer and put the barrel against Keegan’s head. Keegan whimpered and tried to pull away from the gun, but there was nowhere for him to go.
“Molly Brock,” Earl said again.
“Miss . . . Miss Brock is a client! I can’t betray her trust—”
“It’s Mrs. Brock. I’m her husband.” A humorless grin tugged at Earl’s mouth. “So if you sent her off as a mail-order bride, you broke the law, Keegan. She can’t marry anybody else. She’s already married to me.”
“I . . . I swear I didn’t know that! I can only go by what my clients tell me. There’s no way to check all their stories and make sure they’re telling the truth.”
With his free hand, Earl took hold of Keegan’s chin and squeezed, forcing the man’s mouth into an O of pain and fear. He twisted Keegan’s head back and forth. “I don’t give a damn about the marrying part. I wouldn’t have that bitch back on a bet. But she stole from me, and I’m not gonna put up with that. So tell me, Keegan . . . where is she?”
Keegan made noises, but he couldn’t form words with Earl Brock holding his chin in such a brutal grip.
After a moment, Earl let go, and Keegan gasped. “San Angelo! She left here with some other ladies yesterday, bound for San Angelo!”
“Got husbands waiting for them, do they?”
“That . . . that’s right.”
“Well, at least one of them is gonna be disappointed, then.” Earl leaned closer. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, now would you, Keegan?”
“It’s the truth, I . . . I swear it! They left here in a wagon yesterday morning. Five women. One of them was your . . . your wife.”
Earl frowned a little. “You sent five women across Texas in a wagon by themselves?”
“I was supposed to go with them. But then, this happened”—he nodded toward his broken leg—“and I couldn’t go. I was told later that they hired a couple men as guides and to, you know, look after them in case of trouble.”
“They’re gonna have trouble, all right. Bad trouble.” Earl lowered the hammer on the gun and moved it away from Keegan’s head.
Then he struck, slamming the barrel against the man’s mostly bald dome. Keegan groaned and slumped over on his side, the splinted leg causing him to twist grotesquely. It must have been a painful position, but he wouldn’t know because he was out cold.
Earl went back to the front room and found that Cooper and Hawthorne had tied and gagged the black housekeeper. She sat on a chair, glaring murderously at them.
“Find out what you needed to know, Earl?” Cooper asked.
“I did. We’ll be riding as soon as we can get the horses.”
“What about her?” Hawthorne gestured toward the housekeeper. His voice held a slight tone of dread, as if he still expected Earl to order them to kill the woman.
“By the time she gets loose and can raise a ruckus, we’ll be long gone. Just leave her.”
Cooper said, “What about the, uh . . .” He pointed with a thumb down the hall toward the room where Earl had been.
“He’s out cold.” Earl went to the front door, opened it, and walked out.
The other two hurried after him.
Over his shoulder, Earl asked, “Either of you two know where San Angelo is?”
“Yeah, about two hundred and fifty miles west of here, I’d say,” Hawthorne replied. “Fort Concho’s there. I used to work for a rancher who sold some horses to the army, and we delivered ’em to the fort.” Hawthorne grinned. “That wasn’t long before I figured out I’d rather steal horses.”
“You can point us in the right direction, then.”
“Molly’s gone to San Angelo?” Cooper asked.
“She’s pretending to be a mail-order bride, but I know she’s just trying to get as far away from me as she can, in the hope that I’ll never find her. I will, though. We’ll catch up to her before she ever gets there.”
Five women—and two men, Earl thought. Whoever those hombres were, they wouldn’t be any match for him and his companions. They would catch up, kill the men, get his $50,000 back, and see how good-looking the women were before they decided what to do with them.
It couldn’t be any simpler than that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The train pulled into the Texas & Pacific depot at the southern end of downtown Fort Worth a little after ten in the morning.
Ripley Kirkwood’s private car had been switched to the train in St. Louis. It would be detached and kept on a siding until Kirkwood needed it again, whenever that might be. The young man’s
father was an important stockholder in the T&P, so the line did what it could—within reason—to assist him.
Porters removed Kirkwood’s bags from the car and loaded them onto a wagon hired by Kirkwood’s efficient and brutal assistant. Leon had also made arrangements for rooms in the city’s best hotel a few blocks from the depot.
Kirkwood told him, “See to it that the bags are delivered. I need a drink.”
“I should stay with you, sir.”
“I can take care of myself,” Kirkwood snapped.
Deep down, he knew that he probably couldn’t. More than once, he had needed his father’s money as well as Leon’s violent and ruthless methods to get him out of trouble. But he would be all right in broad daylight in the middle of a city, even a half-civilized cow town like Fort Worth.
Leon made a low, rumbling sound in his throat, but he didn’t argue. He knew from experience that once his boss’s mind was made up, no one could change it.
What Kirkwood didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. As the young man strolled off in search of a place where he could get a drink at the relatively early hour, Leon spoke to the wagon driver and slipped the man a five-dollar gold piece to ensure that he would take care of delivering the bags to the hotel.
With that done, Leon followed his employer. For such a big, bulky man, he moved smoothly and swiftly, blending into the background so that even if Kirkwood glanced back, he probably wouldn’t notice that he was being trailed.
Kirkwood went into a saloon a couple blocks north of the depot. It wasn’t the fine sort of drinking establishment he was accustomed to in New Orleans, but it wasn’t too squalid, he decided. The front windows were relatively clean, and so was the bar he saw as he stepped up to it.
A couple men sat at one of the tables drinking coffee. They had a bottle of whiskey on the table, as well, and from time to time they picked it up and splashed a little liquor into their cups. If they had been at it for very long, the mixture was probably more whiskey than coffee by now.
Two more men stood at the far end of the bar with mugs of beer in front of them. A fifth customer sat at a table in the rear corner, leaning back in his chair with his legs stretched out in front of him and his hat tipped down over his eyes. As far as Kirkwood could tell, the man might be asleep.
It was quiet enough in there to sleep, no doubt about that. The men at the table conversed in voices too low to make out their words. The pair at the bar didn’t appear to be interested in talking. Sunlight slanting in through the front windows struck sparkling reflections on dust motes floating in the air.
The place felt almost like a church—the Church of the Early Morning Drunk.
The bartender wore a white shirt. No apron or vest. Or tie, for that matter. He had a weathered, rawboned look as if he might have been a cowboy at one time. The heavy limp in his step as he came along the bar toward Kirkwood explained why he no longer rode the range. Some sort of accident had crippled him, more than likely.
“What can I get you, mister?”
“Brandy,” Kirkwood said.
The bartender smiled. “Hope you didn’t have a particular brand in mind, because we’ve only got the one bottle. Not much call for it in these parts. It’ll have to be in a regular glass, too. Don’t have any of those—what do you call them? Snifters.”
“That’s fine,” Kirkwood said, trying not to let his impatience show. He was there for a drink, not conversation.
The bartender got the bottle from a shelf, set a glass on the bar, and poured it half-full. He looked at the ten-dollar gold piece Kirkwood pushed across the hardwood and said, “Not even brandy costs that much around here, mister.”
“You don’t know how badly I need it.” Kirkwood fought the temptation to gulp down the whole drink. He sipped the brandy and went on. “The rest is for information. I’m looking for a woman.”
“This ain’t that kind of a place, mister,” the bartender replied with a shake of his head.
“Not that sort of woman,” Kirkwood said. “And not just any woman.”
It was a long shot that Isabel would have ever been there, but one had to start somewhere. He couldn’t rely on Leon for everything.
“Her name is Isabel Sheridan. She has dark hair and eyes, and if you ever saw her, you wouldn’t forget her. She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known.”
“Well, we have some good lookers around here, I’ll give you that. But I don’t recall any by that name. You have a reason to think she may have come in here?”
“Not really. I just know she arrived in Fort Worth a few days ago. I’ll ask about her in every saloon, every restaurant, and every hotel, if I have to.”
Well . . . Leon would ask about Isabel in those places, but practically speaking, it was the same thing.
“You must really want to find her.”
“We were supposed to be married.” Kirkwood wasn’t sure why he was spilling his guts to this bartender. Maybe he had held in all the hurt and rage for too long. “I have to find her. She has to tell me what went wrong.”
“Ran away, did she?” The bartender shook his head ruefully. “Gals are like that. Changeable, you know? You never know what sort of notions they’ll take into their heads. Young fella like you—handsome, I mean, and you look like you got money—I’m sure you won’t have any trouble findin’ some other gal who’d be plumb happy to marry you.”
“You don’t understand. She was mine—and she ran away from me. I can’t abide that. I remember I used to have a dog that kept running away from me.” Kirkwood stopped short, deciding it might be better not to finish that story.
The bartender frowned anyway, evidently not liking what he heard in Kirkwood’s voice. “You want another drink?”
“I haven’t finished this one.”
“Well, it might be best if you go ahead and finish it, then take your business somewhere else, friend. I’m not sure this is the right place for you.”
Kirkwood’s fingers tightened on the glass. “Are you telling me to get out?”
“Just call it a suggestion.”
Kirkwood wanted to reach across the bar and slam the glass against the man’s head. He could see it shattering, the jagged edges slicing into flesh, blood spurting. How dare someone even think of throwing him out of a cheap place like this! Didn’t the bartender know he was Ripley Kirkwood? Didn’t he know who his father was?
No, of course he didn’t, but that didn’t matter. The bartender should have been able to tell just by looking at him that he was a man of quality.
The bartender must have been able to tell something by looking at him, all right, because he put his hands on the bar and said. “Now listen, mister, don’t even start thinking about causin’ any trouble in here.”
“I just asked you a question,” Kirkwood said, spacing the words out through clenched teeth.
“Yeah, and I gave you an honest answer, and now I think it’s time you went on your way.”
The two men at the bar finally noticed what was going on. One of them said, “This fancy-pants fella givin’ you trouble, Gene?”
The bartender raised a hand. “No trouble. He’s gonna finish his drink and leave, aren’t you, mister?”
“I’ll leave when I’m damned well ready.” Kirkwood knew he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for, but he couldn’t tolerate it when inferiors defied his will.
And Ripley Kirkwood considered just about everyone he encountered to be his inferior.
The two cowboys started toward him. “He don’t need to finish his fancy drink,” one said. “But I’ll pour the rest of it over his head if he wants me to.”
“Damn it, Ross,” the bartender began. “I don’t want the place busted up.”
A sneer twisted Kirkwood’s mouth as he said, “I’ll finish the drink my way.” With a casual flick of his wrist, he dashed the rest of the brandy into the first cowboy’s face.
The man howled a curse and staggered back, pawing at his burning eyes. The second man spe
wed an obscenity and lunged at Kirkwood, who twisted at the hips and met him with a straight right to the jaw. Anyone who thought he was weak and defenseless just because he was rich was making a bad mistake.
The punch landed solidly and rocked the cowboy’s head back. Kirkwood hooked a left into the man’s midsection that doubled him over. He clasped his hands together and raised them, poised to bring them down in a clubbed blow to the back of the cowboy’s neck that would drive him senseless to the floor and maybe even kill him.
Before that blow could fall, the bartender reached over the hardwood and grabbed Kirkwood from behind. His arms went around Kirkwood’s chest and jerked him back against the bar. The edge dug painfully into Kirkwood’s back.
“I got him!” the bartender yelled.
His face dripping brandy, the cowboy had recovered enough to clench his fists and move in. He blinked rapidly. His vision still wasn’t completely clear, but he could see well enough to slug punches into Kirkwood’s body.
The impacts made Kirkwood grunt. He jerked up his right leg, planted that foot in the middle of the attacker’s chest, and shoved. The cowboy flew backwards, arms flailing, and landed on the table where the two men were drinking spiked coffee. It collapsed with a crash. Cups and whiskey bottle went flying. The men fell over backwards in their chairs.
“That’s it, damn it!” the bartender cried. “Teach this bastard a lesson, boys! I’ll hang on to him!”
Kirkwood twisted back and forth but couldn’t break the bartender’s grip. His hat fell off. He panted from anger and exertion.
The fifth man, the one sitting alone, hadn’t budged or even lifted his head, but the other four closed in on Kirkwood, fists poised to hammer him insensible. If they got him on the floor, they might stomp him to death. He knew that, but in his wild rage, he didn’t care. He just wanted a chance to strike out at them.
He didn’t get that chance. Massive hands reached from behind and caught hold of two men by the neck. The newcomer smashed their skulls together with near-fatal force. then let go of them. They dropped like puppets with their strings cut.
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