Trail Drive (The McCabes Book 5)

by Brad Dennison

  TRAIL DRIVE

  A McCabe novel

  BRAD DENNISON

  Author of The Long Trail and Return of the Gunhawk

  THE McCABES

  The Long Trail

  One Man’s Shadow

  Return of the Gunhawk

  Boom Town

  Trail Drive

  Johnny McCabe (Coming Soon)

  JUBILEE

  Preacher With A Gun

  Gunhawk Blood (Coming Soon)

  THE TEXAS RANGER

  Tremain

  Wardtown

  Jericho (Coming Soon)

  Trail Drive is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2015 by Bradley A. Dennison

  All Rights Reserved

  Editor: Donna Dennison

  Copy Editor: Loretta Yike

  Cover Design: Donna Dennison

  To my father,

  Ralph Dennison

  He was instrumental in turning me toward writing. I always knew I wanted to be a storyteller but I didn’t know what to do about it. He suggested I try writing a novel, and that started a path I’m still on, all these years later.

  PART ONE

  The Canyon

  1

  Johnny McCabe didn’t need a clock to know it was about an hour before sunrise. He had set his mind to wake up at this time back in his days with the Texas Rangers. When you’re on the trail, pursuing outlaws or renegade Comanches or Mexican border raiders, you want to be awake and already in motion by the time the eastern sky starts to lighten. His days in the Rangers were now long behind him, and he was now forty-five years old and sleeping in a warm, comfortable house with his wife beside him. But even still, old habits die hard. About an hour before sunrise, he would find himself awake, listening to the sounds around him, ready to reach for his gun if he had to.

  Jessica was buried to her shoulders in covers. Bed sheets and blankets and a patchwork quilt. She was breathing slow and easy, the way she did when she was in a deep sleep.

  Johnny sat up and swung his legs out and over to the floor. The bed creaked a little, but not enough to wake Jess up. The room was dark as Johnny wasn’t one to sleep with a lamp burning low like a lot of folks did, and in the darkness he reached for his jeans, where he had left them, draped over the foot of the bed.

  He was in a long-handled union suit, and he slid his jeans on over it, then pulled on his boots and folded his pant legs out and over the boots. He wore large-roweled Texas spurs and they were already strapped onto his boots. He usually just pulled his feet out of his boots at night, leaving the spurs in place.

  He grabbed the range shirt he had taken off the night before, and shouldered into it. His gunbelt was draped over one corner of the foot of the bed.

  In his early days with the Rangers, he had worn Paterson Colts. They were old and scratched up, but they worked. He had gotten them from an uncle who had ridden with the first incarnation of the Texas Rangers in the war with Mexico. Johnny was ten years old when he returned to Pennsylvania. Those guns stayed with him when he grew up and went West, and he eventually replaced them with a pair of Remington forty-fours.

  In those days, reloading a pistol took some time. If you were a man of the gun, you often carried two pistols. Or you carried spare cylinders on you. Johnny found switching cylinders to be more time-consuming than just carrying two guns. When one gun was emptied, he pulled the loaded gun and kept on shooting.

  A few years ago, Colt came out with a revolver that could be loaded with metal cartridges. One of these new Colts was what he now carried. This new revolver could be reloaded quickly, so his days of carrying two guns were behind him. After all, guns were heavy and cumbersome to wear.

  He wrapped his gunbelt around his hips and fastened the buckle, and then tied the holster down to his leg.

  He went out to the hallway, stepping lightly so he wouldn’t wake anyone up. Though he was sure Dusty would be awake soon. Dusty had been raised on the trail by outlaws, and usually slept light and was out of bed early.

  Johnny went downstairs and into the kitchen. A lamp on the table was burning low, so he turned it up enough to fill the kitchen with a pale, yellow light. Then he went to the full wood box that was waiting by the stove and built a fire.

  Johnny’s father had taught him and the boys years ago, back on the old farm in Pennsylvania, to keep the wood box full. The last thing you want is to wake up on a cold morning and have to go outside and start splitting wood while everyone is inside waiting for a fire.

  Once a fire was burning in the stove, Johnny stepped outside the kitchen door for a taste of the morning air.

  He had left his hat up in the bedroom. It was a battered old felt hat with a wide brim, and was a sort of neutral tan color. It could pretty much blend into any background. He had chosen the hat color specifically for that reason. Ginny referred to it as desert neutral. The jacket he wore was a similar color. Even the range shirt he was wearing.

  Again, he thought about what Zack Johnson had said about him. He had been shot at once too often. Ginny had said once that he lived in a perpetual state of war.

  Johnny had noticed Zack didn’t really live like this. His brother Matt didn’t, either.

  Johnny had always been good with his guns. Even as a young boy, when his uncle gave him that first brace of Paterson Colts, Johnny had seemed to take to shooting like he was born to it. He would sometimes ride the family horse, the horse they used for plowing. He would ride bareback as they had no saddle. He would set up old tin cans on a fence and ride past them, shooting at them as the horse trotted along. Even at fourteen years old, he would hit the cans more times than not.

  His uncle had shown him the border shift, and it wasn’t long before he could do it better than his uncle could.

  His mother was worried. She didn’t want him to be one of those men who lived by the gun. Those men his uncle had ridden with in the war with Mexico, and who had remained in the West when he returned to Pennsylvania.

  And yet, here Johnny was. In a remote valley in the mountains of Montana. His skill with a gun, and his ability to keep a steady hand even when bullets were flying about him, had saved his life more than once.

  He supposed he had become what his mother feared. Maybe she had been right to fear it. Being what he was had come with a price. He had left a string of bodies that stretched back through the years, and sometimes they would come back to him in his dreams.

  He couldn’t guess at the number of men he had killed, but he remembered the first one. Many men he knew didn’t count Indians among those they had killed, but Johnny did. The man had been a Comanche warrior. Johnny took him out of the saddle with one shot, and despite his skill with a pistol, he had done the shooting that day with a rifle. The old Colt revolving rifle that had been standard-issue among the Rangers, back in the day.

  Part of the price was that he was forever on alert. He didn’t seem to know how to shut off that part of my mind. When he heard a creak in the house at night, he was immediately awake, gun in hand. If Dusty or Josh got up to go downstairs and use the outhouse, they would rap a fist against Johnny’s bedroom door and say, “Just me, Pa.” It seemed to Johnny that sort of thing shouldn’t be necessary. Yet, in the McCabe household, it was.

  Johnny went back into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Once it was ready, he crossed through the parlor and out to the front porch. He stood with steam rising from the coffee, let the cool morning breeze from the mountains wash over him, and he gazed off into the darkness. The sun would
be rising soon, and already the sky overhead was growing light enough that the stars were gone, but the ridges surrounding the valley were still just empty-looking dark voids.

  He drew in a deep lungful of air. Nothing made him feel alive more than clean, mountain air.

  He had spent a winter with a band of Shoshone a long time ago in this valley, and he took much of their philosophy to heart. After that winter, he had stopped cutting his hair. It was now what Ginny called Shoshone long. He usually tied it back with a length of rawhide, but at the moment it was hanging free about his shoulders.

  One thing he did after that winter with the Shoshone was to keep his face clean-shaven. The Shoshone called a white man with a beard dog face. Even on the trail, if he had the opportunity, he would heat water and shave.

  As he stood on the porch, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply again. There was a taste of balsam in the air, and he could catch a scent of earth.

  Then he was struck with a feeling, that unmistakable feeling, that he was being watched. That someone was out there somewhere in the darkness.

  The eastern sky was now starting to show a little bit of gray. A hush had fallen upon the land the way it often does right before dawn. As though the pine forest on the ridges that surround this valley, and all the life in that forest, were holding their collective breath to wait and see what the day would bring.

  And yet, the feeling was there. That nagging feeling that someone was out there in the darkness.

  Was it just that he had been shot at too many times? He wondered if he was going to turn into one of those crazy old men who saw enemies everywhere. He had seen them—men who had survived a war but continued to carry the war inside them.

  He forced himself to turn away from the coming dawn, away from the feeling that someone was out there in the darkness, and stepped back into the house.

  He went to the kitchen and set the cup down on the table, and then pulled out the chair he usually took at the head of the table and lowered himself into it. He didn’t just drop into a chair. Never an uncontrolled movement.

  He could hear Ginny’s gentle footsteps making their way across the parlor floor, and she strolled into the kitchen. The woman never seemed to be hurrying. Always moving through life at a stroll, gracious and dignified, and yet always seemed to be where she needed to be.

  She said, “Good morning, John.”

  She would refer to him as Johnny when she talked to someone else about him, but when she talked to the man directly, she always called him John.

  “‘Mornin’.” He took a sip of coffee. “The water’s hot for tea.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was in a robe, and her hair was in a long braid that fell over one shoulder and to her waist.

  Ginny dumped some tea into a tea ball. Earl Grey, a blend she ordered all the way from England. She filled a small tea pot with hot water and then dropped the tea ball in to let it steep.

  And all while, Johnny couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been out there in the darkness, watching the house.

  2

  The household gradually came to life. Ginny started breakfast going on the stove, and soon Temperance and Haley were downstairs to help her. Josh gave his father a good morning, then went outside and grabbed an ax. You seldom saw Josh sit still for long. Not that there was any need at the moment to split wood, but with Josh around, there would always be a surplus.

  Cora came bounding down the stairs with a delighted squeal of, “Daddy!”

  Just hearing her call him that warmed his heart. He scooped her up and she wrapped her little arms around him.

  Jessica followed Cora into the kitchen. She was fully dressed. She might lounge about in her nightgown and robe in the bedroom she and Johnny shared, but when she came downstairs, she was washed up and fully dressed and ready to start the day.

  Johnny gave her a quick kiss, then he went upstairs to wash up and shave, and to grab some clean clothes.

  Twenty minutes later, he was in a freshly laundered range shirt, a light gray in color. Again, it would blend well into any natural background. He slid on a leather vest and tied his hair back. He checked in a mirror to look at a small nick his razor had given him on the side of his chin.

  Johnny then saw his gunbelt, sprawled on the bed where he had dropped it when he came upstairs.

  He picked it up and was about to buckle it back on, but then he had a thought, one he had been having almost every morning for the past couple of months. The thought of maybe leaving the gun here and just going downstairs without it. After all, Josh was outside splitting wood without a gun strapped to his leg. Last night, as they had sat in front of the fire in the parlor, like they often did as a family, Josh and Dusty were both without their guns.

  For years he had slept with the gun on a chair by the side of the bed and within reach. A few weeks ago, he had begun sleeping with his gun not on the chair, but in its holster slung over the foot of the bed. Should he really need the gun, he could get to it fast enough but he no longer wanted it within easy reach. He didn’t know anyone else who slept that way.

  The first night he had laid there in bed staring at the dark timbers overhead, aware of every sound about him. The wind outside. The crickets chirping. Dusty stepped out of his room and down the stairs to use the outhouse. He tapped the door with his hand and said, “Just me, Pa,” and continued on. Johnny remained in bed and counted every step Dusty made to the back door.

  The second night he had slept a little. But at one point he found himself instantly awake, thinking he had heard Cora calling for him. He snagged his gun from the gunbelt and bolted for the door.

  He stopped in Cora’s doorway. In the moonlight, he could see her in her bed, a tumble of covers pulled to her chin. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing easily.

  Jessica came up behind him and laid a gentle hand on his arm.

  He said, “I heard her calling out. Like she was afraid.”

  Jessica shook her head. “She’s all right. She’s sound asleep. Come back to bed.”

  They went back to their room, and Johnny sat on the edge of the bed and she sat beside him. She then did something he doubted he would allow anyone else in the world to do. He allowed her to gently take the pistol from his grasp and slide it back into the holster.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Give it time.”

  The third night, Johnny slept. In his dreams, he saw the faces. The men he had killed. A man in a border town, years ago, with a wide brimmed hat and whiskers on his face. Grinning like an idiot as he reached for his gun. Whiskey had made him over-confident, but he must have come by his lack of brains naturally. Johnny couldn’t talk him down. The man was determined to draw on him. Even then, Johnny’s reputation as being too good with a gun was spreading, and this man wanted to be known as the one who had beaten him. The man’s pistol cleared leather first, but it made little difference. Johnny was faster than he was. Johnny was faster than almost any man he had ever met. His pistol was cocked and pointed toward the man in half a second or less, and his gun was the only one to fire.

  Then Johnny’s dream shifted, and he saw ten Comanches riding down on him and Zack Johnson. Johnny was twenty years old, and Zack had taken an arrow to the leg, and had fallen from his horse and hit his head on a rock.

  So calmly he almost frightened himself, Johnny drew his right-hand gun and began cocking the hammer and firing. Like shooting cans from a fence. One warrior fell, then a second, and a third.

  When the fifth fell, his gun was empty. In those days, they generally loaded only five cartridges, leaving an empty chamber in front of the hammer so if the gun got accidentally jarred, it wouldn’t go off. With his pistol empty, he executed a border shift. The captain of the Texas Rangers had said he never saw a smoother one. With the fresh gun in his right hand, Johnny cocked back the hammer and was ready to fire, but the surviving Comanches had pulled their horses to a halt and were turning away.

  Johnny had killed so
easily. So calmly. He didn’t think about it much at the time because he had to get Zack back to the fort. Had to do so while they still had time to save his leg. But when he thought about it later, he realized he hadn’t been afraid. When those Comanches had been riding down on him and firing their rifles at him, an almost unnatural calmness had come over him and he didn’t even flinch as their bullets kicked up dirt at his feet.

  It was this calmness that had helped him survive so many gunfights over the years. His skills at trick-shooting helped, but if you can’t hold your gun hand steady when the bullets are flying, then trick-shooting won’t do you a lick of good.

  He had killed so many men over the years. He had long since lost track of the number.

  Last summer, Johnny had considered adding one more to the list. Aloysius Randall, owner of the hotel in town and chair of the Town Council. Randall had tried to force his intentions onto Bree. Johnny had never killed a man who didn’t need it, and he knew few who needed it more than Randall. But Bree had beaten the stuffing out of the man, so Johnny decided that would be good enough. He didn’t want more blood on his hands.

  To sleep without his gun within reach had been a big decision, but not as big as the one he was now considering. To go all the way downstairs without it.

  He drew a deep breath. Just the thought of not having his gun with him set him on edge. But it was time. He had been living like he was in a perpetual state of war for too long.

  He walked over to the foot of the bed, buckled his gunbelt to itself and then hooked it around the post, and left it there.

  He took a step back. He felt a little shaken, almost on the verge of panic. His stomach felt jittery. He found it a little hard to breathe.