Texas Vigilante

by Bill Crider

  “Sure he does,” Jephson said. “Ask him.”

  “You’re too smart for your own good, ain’t you, Jephson,” Angel said.

  “You mean he’s right?” Hoot said. “You want ’em to catch up with us?”

  Jephson’s voice was tired. “I finally figgered it out, Hoot. I wondered why Angel didn’t seem to be in any big hurry when we left that ranch. It was because he didn’t care if someone caught up with us. That’s what he wanted all along.”

  Hoot didn’t seem to get it. “What’s he talkin’ about, Angel? Who do you think’s goin’ to be after us, anyhow?”

  “Somebody named Brady Tolbert,” Jephson said.

  Laurie almost smiled. Brady was her other uncle. She didn’t see him very often, but she liked him. Of course she’d liked Angel, too, but that was before he’d carried her off from the ranch and lied to her about the picnic. She didn’t like Angel at all now.

  “Who’s Brady Tolbert?” Hoot wanted to know.

  Laurie wanted to yell out, “He’s a Texas Ranger, and he’ll put you all in jail!” But she kept quiet. She even tried not to breathe.

  “He’s the bastard that put me in the pen,” Angel said. “Him, and my sister and that husband of hers. I’ve taken care of two of them. Now it’s his turn.”

  Laurie flinched at that. She couldn’t help it.

  “I thought you were possumin’,” Angel said to her. “You might’s well know that your daddy’s been shot and your mother’s prob’ly dead.”

  Laurie struggled to sit up. She wanted to hit Angel, to claw his face, to draw his blood.

  “You’re a liar!” she said. “You’re just a great big liar!”

  Angel mashed down on her back and held her in place.

  “You’re practically an orphan,” he said. “You can start gettin’ used to it. All you got left in the world is your Uncle Angel. You and me are gonna live down in Mexico, where folks’ll treat us right.”

  “I don’t want to go to Mexico! I want my mother!”

  “She won’t be comin’. Maybe your Uncle Brady will, but me and the boys’ll take care of him. I’m gonna be your shield and protection from now on out.”

  “No, you’re not! They won’t let you!”

  “They can’t stop me,” Angel said. “Plenty have tried, but it just didn’t work out.”

  “Uncle Brady stopped you.”

  “You might say that. He stopped me once. But that was just luck. He caught me by surprise. It won’t happen again.”

  “He will too stop you. And if he doesn’t, Miss Ellie will.”

  “Miss Ellie,” Angel said. “That the woman I was talkin’ to back there at the church?”

  Laurie didn’t know for sure who Angel had spoken to, but she said, “Yes, and she’s going to get you. You wait and see.”

  Angel laughed. “You think that woman can stop me? She tried once, but she never even pulled a trigger. I don’t think we have to worry much about her.”

  “You’ll see,” Laurie said. “You’ll see.”

  “I guess we will,” Angel said.

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-ONE

  “You’re sure they went this way?” Brady Tolbert asked.

  “I’m sure they were headed this way when they started off,” Ellie said. “I can’t say that they didn’t double back or that they didn’t just go on back to town.”

  “Just checking,” Brady said. “Following the river doesn’t seem like the smartest thing to do, and it’s not like Angel to do something that’s not smart.”

  It had stopped raining about a quarter of an hour earlier. The clouds were thinning out, and the moon was peeping through them now and then, touching their ragged edges with silver-gray light. Ellie had taken off her slicker and stowed it behind the saddle.

  She still wasn’t sure what to make of Brady Tolbert. He obviously hadn’t liked the idea of having her go with him, and he didn’t seem to trust her judgment completely, but at the same time he was respectful enough.

  “Maybe they’re planning to cross the river,” Ellie said. “Head south for Mexico.”

  “You live around here, so you should know about the river. Where can they cross?”

  “Now that’s going to be a problem for them. I don’t think they can cross it. If that’s their plan, they’re out of luck. It’s been raining hard for hours, and there’s no telling how much it rained north and west of here. That river’s flowing full and fast enough to sweep away a man and a mule without half trying. And there’s no bridge, not around here. It’s a long way to a bridge in this direction.”

  “Angel wouldn’t have any way of knowing that, though, would he?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ellie said. “Maybe he’s spent some time in these parts before.”

  “Maybe. But if he has, he wouldn’t be going this way. Not if he was smart.”

  Ellie was getting a little irritated by the Ranger’s insinuations.

  “If you want to go off in some other direction,” she said, “you’re welcome to do it. This is the way I’m going, but you can go wherever you want to.”

  Brady stopped his horse and leaned on the saddle horn until Ellie had ridden up next to him.

  “Kinda touchy, aren’t you,” he said.

  Ellie didn’t think of herself as touchy. She thought of herself as pretty even-tempered. But she had to admit that the Ranger had riled her some.

  “If I am, it’s because those three men have done some things I can’t forgive. They tried to kill your brother and your sister-in-law, and they carried off your niece. God only knows what they’ll do to her if we don’t stop them.”

  “I didn’t say I blamed you. I just said you were touchy.”

  “You don’t think I know what I’m doing.”

  Brady chuckled. “It’s not that. I just can’t figure out why Angel’s not trying harder to get away from us. What he’s doing doesn’t make any sense, and that’s not like him. He’s a little crazy, but he’s not stupid. Could be he’s trying to lead us into a trap.”

  Ellie thought about that. Then she said, “He’s done one or two other things that don’t seem real smart to me.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, taking Laurie, for one. Why would he do that?”

  Brady rode along slowly, and for several minutes he didn’t say anything.

  “I can’t figure it,” he said finally. “Looks like she’d slow them down. You got any ideas?”

  “No. And there’s something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did he stop in that old church? If he really wanted to get away, he would’ve just kept on going. He must’ve gotten to the church before the river got too high to cross. If he’d gone on ahead, we might never have caught up to him.”

  “You’re right. It’s almost like he wanted us to find him. By God, I’ll bet he is setting a trap.”

  “You could be right about that,” Ellie agreed. “Remember that message I gave you back at the church, that he’d be looking for you?”

  Brady said that he remembered.

  “Well, that sounds like he’s got something in mind for you, all right. It’s almost like he’s waiting for you.”

  Once again Brady was quiet for a while as he thought things over. Ellie didn’t have any more to say, either, and the only sounds were those made by their horses and the river.

  It had turned cool after the rain stopped. The moon was still glowing around the edges of the clouds, and it had started down. Ellie wondered what time it was. Midnight, maybe, or a little after. She didn’t care. She’d ride all night and the next day, too, if she could do anything to help Laurie. It galled her that she’d had to let Angel ride off with the girl, but sometimes you had to put aside your feelings and make the best of things. She’d catch up to Angel sooner or later, and she’d get Laurie back from him. That was a promise that she’d made to herself.

  Brady broke his silence. “Angel wouldn’t have any way of knowing I was her
e,” he said.

  Ellie didn’t know what he was driving at, and she said so.

  “I think he took Laurie to get back at me,” Brady told her.

  Ellie figured it out then. Everything fell into place.

  “I bet you’re right,” she said. “I thought Sue was dead, and when I told Angel, he said he was sorry he wasn’t the one who’d killed her. And he said he hoped he’d get a chance to kill your brother later on. He’s out for revenge.”

  “You sound like you know something about that,” Brady said.

  “What I know is that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I told Angel that, but it didn’t impress him. Sue told me that he’s always been of a mind to get back at people he thinks have done him wrong.”

  “So I’ve heard. And now he wants to get back at me because I helped put him in prison. It makes sense. He could be pretty sure I’d come for him after I heard about Laurie. What he didn’t know was that I was already on the way.”

  “So he’s going to just dawdle along, taking his good time, and wait for you to catch up with him.”

  “That’s the way I see it. But he’s going to get fooled. For one thing, I’m a whole lot closer to him than he probably thinks I am.”

  “That’s one thing. Is there anything else?”

  “Maybe,” Brady said.

  “What would it be?”

  Brady smiled and looked at Ellie. “He doesn’t know I have help.”

  No, Ellie thought. That’s where you’re wrong. He doesn’t know that I have help.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Laurie hated her Uncle Angel now. She hated him for taking her away from her home, she hated him for lying to her, and she hated him for saying that her father had been shot and that her mother was dead.

  Her mother wasn’t dead. She was sure of it. It didn’t matter what Angel said. There were some things that were just too awful to be true, and that was one of them.

  She was more determined than ever to get away from Angel and the other men. She was certain that Miss Ellie was coming after her, and maybe her father was too. Maybe he’d been shot, but he wouldn’t let that stop him.

  And then there was Uncle Brady. He’d be coming as soon as he heard what Angel had done. He was a Texas Ranger, and Laurie knew that the Texas Rangers never failed to get whoever they set out after. Her mother had told her that, and, unlike Uncle Angel, her mother had never lied to her.

  She listened to the men talking, waiting for her chance to escape them.

  “What do you think, Hoot?” Angel said. “Think we could ford the river about here?”

  “Good God, no,” Hoot said. “Look at that. We wouldn’t have a hope in hell.”

  “How about it, Jephson. You think Hoot’s right?”

  “He’s right,” Jephson said. “We better keep on looking.”

  “All right by me,” Angel said. “We can look all night, far’s I’m concerned.”

  As they rode along on the mules, Ben Jephson told himself that he was seven kinds of a fool. Maybe seventy kinds. He’d stayed with Angel because he’d thought Angel was smart. He’d thought Angel would know how to avoid the law and therefore avoid going back to prison.

  But Angel didn’t seem to give much of a damn whether he went back to prison or not. All he cared about was getting a little of his own back with the people he thought had betrayed him.

  As far as Jephson was concerned, the whole idea was crazy. And Jephson certainly hadn’t bargained on having a little girl along with them. That made things even worse. She was as likely to get killed as not if shooting broke out on the trail. Angel seemed to care about her, but it apparently hadn’t occurred to him that he was putting her in danger. Or if it had occurred to him, he was doing a good job of ignoring it.

  And Hoot was just as crazy as Angel. Maybe worse. There was no telling what he would do to the girl if he got the chance. The only good thing was that he wouldn’t get the chance as long as Angel was around.

  Or me, Jephson thought. He knew he couldn’t let anything happen to the girl, any more than Angel could. It was bad enough that he hadn’t tried to stop Hoot from shooting those people back at the church. Probably a couple of them were dead, at the very least. It couldn’t go on. If Hoot tried anything with the girl, Jephson knew he’d have to step in and try to stop it.

  They had worked their way down as close to the river as they could. In what little moonlight there was, Jephson could see the swirling white-foamed water that raced over the rocky bed and crashed into the stones that stuck up at odd angles all along the way.

  A man who got into water like that would most likely be knocked down within ten seconds and drowned within ten minutes. Or, if he was lucky enough to stay alive, he’d have three or four broken bones to worry him.

  “We could make better time if we got away from the river,” he said. “We could get back on flat ground and have a lot better chance of gettin’ away from here.”

  “What’re you worryin’ about?” Angel asked him. “For all we know, there’s nobody followin’ us. We got all the time in the world.”

  Jephson didn’t disagree, but he was convinced that Angel was wrong. That woman back at the church hadn’t looked to Jephson like the kind of give up easy. Maybe he should’ve let Hoot shoot her, but he just couldn’t do that.

  “What about that woman?” he asked.

  “You ever hear of a woman that could take on three men with guns?” Angel asked. “I’d hate to think I was a-scared of a woman.”

  “I’m not scared,” Jephson said.

  But to tell the truth, he was. A little. There was something about the way she looked.

  “What about those people Hoot heard in the church?” he asked.

  “They’re all shot up,” Angel said. “Ain’t that right, Hoot.”

  “That’s right,” Hoot answered. “Most of ’em, anyway.”

  “See?” Angel said. “They won’t be ridin’ anywhere if they’re shot. So we don’t have to get in any big rush. We’re doin’ just fine.”

  “And besides, you want ’em to catch us,” Hoot said. “Ain’t that what Jephson was tryin’ to tell me a while back?”

  “That’s right,” Angel said. “But tell the truth, now, Hoot. You don’t care if they catch up to us, do you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “You’d prob’ly even have yourself a pretty good time, wouldn’t you?”

  “Could be,” Hoot said, and Jephson could tell that he was smiling, though he couldn’t see his face. “And it might not be too long now before we find out. Somebody’s back there. I can hear ’em.”

  Jephson couldn’t hear a thing above the sound of the river, but when it came to hearing, Hoot hadn’t made any mistakes so far.

  “Well, then,” Angel said. “I guess we’d better make ’em welcome.”

  “How’ll we go about doin’ that?” Hoot asked.

  Angel looked around. There were several large trees a little farther up the river bank, and he pointed to them.

  “You wait back in there, Hoot. Let ’em ride right on by you. Jephson and I can ride on a little ways. See those big rocks up there?”

  He pointed on up the river, and Jephson saw a couple of large white rocks that jutted up out of the ground.

  “I see ’em,” Hoot said.

  “We’ll ride on around those rocks and stop. When whoever’s comin’ rides past you, you can open up. When you start shootin’, so will we. You’ll be shootin’ toward the river, and we’ll be shootin’ back down along the bank, so there’s no danger we’ll get in a crossfire.”

  Jephson knew one thing. He wasn’t going to be part of another ambush. The one at the church had been bad enough. But he didn’t know how he was going to get away from Angel.

  “Let’s go,” Angel said.

  Jephson sat still for a second or two, then flicked the mule’s reins and followed Angel up the river.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Angel and Jephson had hardly concealed themselves behind t
he rocks when Angel said, “There they come.”

  Laurie waited until he moved his hand from her back to reach for his pistol. As soon as he did, she sank her teeth into his leg.

  He yelped in surprise, and Laurie slipped from his lap. She hit the ground running.

  “Miss Ellie!” she called. “Miss Ellie!”

  Hoot heard her yelling, said, “Damn,” and got off a couple of shots at the two people who were now almost directly opposite him.

  He missed Ellie, who had urged her horse into a lope as soon as she heard Angel yell, but he hit Brady Tolbert. Tolbert jerked upright and tried to turn and fire, but Angel shot him out of the saddle.

  “Get the woman,” Angel told Jephson. “I’m going after the girl.”

  Jephson had no intention of getting the woman. He’d had enough of Angel. It was time for him to strike out on his own, something he should have done a long time ago, and if he got sent back to Huntsville, well, that was just his bad luck. At least in prison he wouldn’t have to deal with Angel any longer.

  So he just turned his mule around and rode away.

  Laurie hadn’t gone more than thirty yards before she was completely lost. She hadn’t been able to see where they were headed, and all she knew was that she didn’t want to run in the direction of the river.

  Instead, she’d run the opposite way, but as soon as she’d gotten into the trees and out of Angel’s sight, she had no idea where Miss Ellie was. She called out again before she realized that making noise might be a bad idea. Maybe Miss Ellie would hear her, but so would Angel.

  She certainly didn’t want Angel to hear her, so she stopped calling out and tried to make as little noise as possible. It was quite dark in the trees, so it was hard to be quiet. She kept letting branches swish as they swung back into place after being shoved aside, but at least her bare feet were silent on the ground.

  She, however, wasn’t silent when she stepped on the sharp point of a broken stick. She shouted out in pain and then clapped her hands over her mouth.

  But she was too late.

  Someone had heard her.