Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  He was already drunk though the sky was only just beginning to lose the light of day.

  “I’ve had my eye on that gun all the time you worked on it, and it’s me who will have it! I’m your son, not this damned Mick!”

  Arthur, who had been drinking heavily since Trace retrieved the bottle for him, was in no mood to monitor his tongue.

  He lifted a hand and waved it dismissively at Alec, as though to wave him back into the gun shop.

  “Go sleep it off,” the old man said. “You’re drunk.”

  Alec swore and quickly stepped toward his father, and for the first time in their lives the strains between them brought about physical violence.

  Alec backhanded the old man, a calculated, vicious blow that cracked like a gunshot.

  The old man staggered and fell, his jaw hanging at a strange angle.

  Trace was so stunned he froze, not even daring to breathe.

  Alec glanced at his unconscious father, mumbled alcohol-slurred words Trace could not understand, then slowly turned his head.

  “Give me my gun,” he said. “I will have need for it.”

  He stepped toward Trace, his eyes ugly.

  The words roused Trace out of his stupor and he took a step back.

  It took a moment before he remembered he was armed.

  As Alec advanced another step clarity broke through and Trace acted.

  He lifted the Colt and pointed it directly at the other man’s chest.

  “Is this what you want?” he said. He raised the muzzle of the revolver for emphasis. “Maybe I should give it to you lead first.”

  Alec laughed, an ugly, reckless sound.

  “Don’t be a damned fool. You don’t have the guts to pull the trigger on a man.”

  Staggering drunk as he was, he lunged and managed to get his hand on the gun. Stunned with surprise, Trace froze again, and Alec jerked the gun from his hand.

  He didn’t take possession of it, though.

  The revolver’s barrel was still hot from Trace’s target practice and Alec yelped and let it drop to the ground.

  The gun landed in the middle of the firing range ground.

  Younger and impaired only by fear and the tension of the moment, Trace went after the gun first.

  Alec tripped him, though, and moments later had the weapon in his possession again. He leveled it shakily in Trace’s direction as Trace came deftly back to his feet.

  Trace yelled his anger and rushed at the older man.

  Alec pulled the trigger.

  CLICK.

  The hammer snapped but no shot came. Trace had emptied the chambers during his practice shooting, though in the heat of the moment he had been as unaware of it as Alec had.

  Trace stepped close and his fist connected hard with Alec’s chin.

  The man jolted backward and landed on his rump, and Trace danced over him, gripping his right hand and fearing he might have broken his finger against Alec’s sharp chin bone.

  Alec got up, roaring in fury and rubbing his jaw, clutching the empty gun tightly in his hand. Trace made a grab for it but missed. Alec, roaring again, swung the revolver against Trace’s temple and knocked him cold in a lucky blow.

  For a moment there was silence in the enclosed back lot.

  Alec stood slump-shouldered, Trace senseless at his feet, his father groaning and beginning to move slightly a few yards away. Alec, alcohol coursing through his bloodstream and his heart beating over-fast against his ribs, tried to clear his mind by force of will, and assess his situation.

  Trace Kerrigan was so still that Alec thought he was dead, until he saw the faint movement of respiration.

  Turning to look back at his father, his eye was drawn to the edge of the firing range, where Trace had placed a supply of ammunition for his shooting practice.

  Alec chuckled and soon had the Colt reloaded despite his fumbling fingers. Rearmed, he felt a surge of victory in knowing he now had the advantage. Let the boy rush him now—he’d be greeted by a bullet.

  Trace, though, would rush no one.

  He remained unconscious at Alec’s feet, head laid back and eyes closed almost completely, though enough of a slit remained to reveal the lower whites of his eyes, showing his eyes were rolled upward in their sockets.

  Alec, considering his next move, pulled a flask from his pocket and took a swig. So drunk was he already that the influx of a new jolt of alcohol was almost enough to drop him where he stood.

  He capped and pocketed the flask, and found himself pondering the option of putting a bullet through the brain of Trace Kerrigan while he lay helpless. He could place the gun in the hand of his still unconscious father and leave him to deal with the consequences of the murder.

  He’d despised Trace Kerrigan since the first day he’d come to work at the gun shop. For seven months he’d had the growing awareness that his father possessed a far greater liking for the young man than for his own son . . . and it infuriated Alec.

  He’d never gotten to the point of trying to rid himself of young Kerrigan, but then, no tempting situation like the one now at hand had previously presented itself. Nor had a development as infuriating as his father’s gift of the custom Colt to Kerrigan.

  He could do away with the pest, and leave his father to bear the brunt. Punish them both.

  The tiny spark of moral consciousness that still flickered in Alec Lundy’s soul put up only the feeblest resistance to that idea. Liquor had taken away from him any meaningful sense of restraint.

  Arthur Lundy carried with him at all times a small revolver, tucked away in a side holster. That fact was about to become a crucial factor in the life of Trace Kerrigan.

  The gunsmith had been slowly coming around after being knocked unconscious by the backhand blow delivered by his son.

  He rolled over, the movement shooting pain through his broken jaw. His vision slowly cleared, and what he saw from his prone position was at first hard to make out, then hard to believe.

  Alec was standing over a seemingly senseless Trace Kerrigan, aiming the customized Colt at him. Alec’s stance was that of a man clearly about to shoot . . . but he was wavering. Through drunkenness, perhaps, or indecision about where to put the bullet, or maybe whether to shoot at all.

  Moving sluggishly despite a sense of desperation as he comprehended the situation, Arthur rolled to one side and reached beneath his jacket flap to find his revolver, and in his distraction Alec did not notice his father’s movement.

  He decided at last that he would shoot the boy in the chest, and that, yes indeed, he did have it in him to really do it.

  Then he would put the Colt into the hand of his father and be gone. Who could say? Maybe the old gunsmith himself would actually believe he had been the one who killed his young employee, by accident or some unremembered intention.

  It would hardly matter . . . the local constabulary would certainly believe Arthur was the killer. No one left alive, except Arthur himself, would know that Alec had even been present.

  “Alec.”

  The voice made the drunken man start and step to the side, turning in a wheeling stagger to see who had spoken.

  He was stunned to see his father on his feet. He was unsteady but standing, and in his hand was the small revolver he carried, but which Alec had forgotten about in the wild drunken race of events.

  “Pa,” Alec said, and steadied himself, facing the old man.

  “I can’t let you do that, boy,” Arthur said. “I’ve stood by and watched you become a liar and a drunkard, but I’ll not allow you to put the stain of murder on your soul.”

  “Murder . . . I ain’t murdered nobody, Pa. He’s just knocked cold, that’s all.”

  “I saw what you were about to do, boy. I won’t let it happen. I’ll drop you where you stand before I allow it.”

  “Pa, don’t talk that way! It’s me, it’s your son, Alec!”

  “I’ll not allow my son kill a good lad, or go to face judgment in this world or the next as a murd
erer. If I have to do it, shoot you I will, Alec.”

  Alec struggled for words and found none. In fact, he couldn’t even find his voice. All that came out were strained vocalizations, and behind them a fury of spirit that washed away the last remnant of common sense and self-control.

  He roared like the madman he very nearly was, and he aimed the coveted Colt at Trace Kerrigan’s heart.

  But the killing shot came from the old man’s gun, striking Alec high on his head, cutting a burning pathway through hair and scalp.

  Arthur Lundy stood with his smoking revolver in his trembling hand, and watched his son collapse, blood trickling down his face in thin, scarlet fingers.

  The Colt dropped from Alec’s hand as he went down, and he tumbled on top of it.

  Arthur stumbled over to where Alec lay beside Trace Kerrigan, who was beginning to murmur now, and move, coming around to the world of the living again with his pistol-whipped temple throbbing terribly.

  The old man hardly noticed Trace, his attention being on the son who had given him so little to be proud of.

  “Alec, boy,” he said as his son lay supine at his feet. “I didn’t want to do it! I had to, boy—you gave me no choice! But I’m sorry for it, son. Sorry indeed.”

  He looked skyward, tears streaming down. “I’ve killed my own flesh and blood,” he mourned to himself and to the sky. “I’ve destroyed my own child . . . and surely my own soul.”

  Arthur went to his knees and laid trembling hands on his son’s chest, praying and weeping without any degree of hope.

  And then, a realization . . . Alec was still breathing. Faintly, but breathing. And when Arthur pulled back up and looked at his son’s face, he saw the eyes flutter.

  “I didn’t do it after all!” Arthur whispered. “God be praised, he’s still breathing!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The bullet had plowed along the top of Alec’s head, digging a shockingly deep furrow in his skull, but the wound was not fatal.

  Arthur Lundy always had tended to shoot high with a revolver. An inch or so lower and the bullet would have punched straight into Alec’s brain. But for the moment, at least, his son still lived, wounded but not mortally so.

  “Come back to me, son! Wake up and speak to me . . . I’m sorry about it all . . .”

  A faint groan rose from the throat of Alec Lundy and filled his father with a rising hope, and a realization that perhaps he hadn’t despised his son as much as he’d thought. How could a man actually hate the fruit of his own loins, after all?

  “Wake up, son. Your father is here. Wake up and we’ll get you help. We’ll get you patched and let you heal, and it will all be good again.”

  If Arthur expected his son to come around at all, he anticipated it would be like a slow rise through murky water. He was unprepared for it when Alec’s body arched backward and a shuddering spasm passed through him from head to toe and evoked an involuntary loud grunt from Alec’s throat. Then his eyes opened, but seemed unable to focus.

  “Son? Son! It’s all right, boy. You’re hurt, but you’re alive.”

  Alec managed to make his eyes lock together for half a moment on his father’s face. “Pa? What . . .”

  “You’re shot, boy. Across the top of your head. Do you not remember?”

  “Shot . . .” Alec’s eyes fluttered out of focus again. “Shot . . .” And then he did remember.

  “You . . . you shot me, Pa.”

  Arthur had hoped that, somehow, the details of the shooting would have gone unremembered. He looked into his son’s blood-covered face and his lip trembled.

  “It was . . . it was an accident, Alec. I was trying to scare you so you wouldn’t . . . so you wouldn’t commit a murder and kill young Trace. You were about to do that. I couldn’t let you do such a thing, so I tried to . . . just to scare you, that’s all.”

  “Shot me . . . God, my head . . .”

  “It’s just a flesh wound, son. Right now it’s a bleeding mess, but it will heal.”

  “You shot me!” Alec said again, as if trying to believe it. His speech, before a muddy garble, was a bit clearer, though his drunken slur lingered. “Shot by my own father . . .”

  Arthur hung his head and wept over his supine, bleeding offspring, feeling himself the greatest of all sinners.

  Alec groaned and closed his eyes, his head hurting badly now. Though he could not see it for himself, the flow of blood from his furrowed wound onto the earth beneath him was slowing.

  He drifted out of awareness for a time he could not determine. When he opened his eyes again he was looking into a moon so bright he had to squint against the light a few moments. As his vision adjusted he was able to see that the stars were bright as well in a velvet-black sky.

  He felt stronger. His head still hurt and he was weak, but lying on his back on firm ground, he could not tell if he was dizzy or not.

  Arthur still leaned over him, though his weeping had given way to quietness. He looked at his son’s bloodied face in the moonlight, and said, “I’m mighty sorry I shot you, boy.”

  Alec closed his eyes again and said nothing. For half a minute, quiet reigned in the back lot shooting range.

  “I’m going to go get a wet cloth to clean your face, Alec,” the old man said, pushing to his feet. He turned and strode back toward the rear of the gun shop.

  Off to the side, and for the moment forgotten, Trace Kerrigan lay in lingering unconsciousness, unmoving but breathing steadily and quietly, like one asleep.

  A few moments later, Alec defied the pain in his head and his sense of weakness to make an attempt to rise.

  He was growing more uncomfortable where he lay, something pressing painfully into his back beneath him.

  He actually managed to rise, and more surprisingly, keep on his feet.

  Slowly he straightened, enjoying the feel of a cool breeze against his crusted face. As he lifted his head to let it breathe over him, though, his head filled with agony, the ditch plowed across his head suddenly pulsing with heightened misery.

  I’m shot, he thought. I’ve never been shot before . . . always wondered how it would feel. Now I know.

  Shot. By my father.

  Lowering his head in an effort to lessen the agony, he saw what he’d been lying on. The gleaming. 36-caliber Colt his father had given to that young Kerrigan boy, as if an outsider deserved such a prize gift over Arthur’s own son.

  It filled Alec with such fury that it made his head surge with pain another time.

  He stooped slowly, painfully, and picked up the gun. His now. He would not relinquish or lose it.

  His father had gone off, he remembered, to wet a cloth with which to cleanse and cool his brow and face . . . but where was he? He had not returned.

  “Is he inside drinking?” Alec muttered. “In there drinking whiskey and leaving me out here to suffer by myself. Damn him! Damn him to hell!”

  Still forgetful of the fact that another person also was in the back lot, Alec yielded to irrational fury stoked by physical pain and long-standing familial hatred, and walked with the Colt in hand toward the same door through which his father had disappeared earlier.

  Out on the ground of the shooting range, Trace Kerrigan moaned softly and stirred a little, beginning to regain awareness.

  Alec heard nothing of it. He entered the rear door of the gun shop with the Colt dangling in his hand. It was dark inside and Alec stumbled a bit as he felt his way along.

  “Pa? Where are you?”

  It hurt to shout, he discovered, so he lowered his voice. He smelled a whiff of whiskey.

  “You in here drinking, Pa? ’Cause you and me have something to settle. You shot me, Pa, and that ain’t something I can sweep out of my mind like dirt off a wood floor. Where are you, Pa?”

  The loud clunk of a bottle onto the ground in a front corner let him know where Arthur was, and also that he’d been right . . . the old gunsmith was into his liquor again.

  “Pa, I hear you, so you can qui
t hiding in the dark now. We got some talking to do, you and me.”

  “I’m mighty sorry, son,” the old man said from the darkness. “Nothing has gone the way I wanted. I had no notion of shooting you, but you were ready to kill young Trace, and that would have been wrong. I couldn’t let you do it, so I shot. I just stopped you from making a big mistake, and doing something that would have put you on the gallows. I didn’t kill you, though, boy, remember that.”

  “You tried, Pa, you tried. You and I both know that. And you may have killed me yet—my head hurts like hellfire. You nigh put lead through my brain.”

  “Forgive me, son. I ask that of you.”

  Visible to Arthur only by the feeblest ghost-glimmer of light from the street outside, Alec’s face grimaced in a sudden charge of pain. He lifted his empty hand to gently touch the side of his head, careful not to let his fingers drift up and over into the throbbing wound itself.

  “Dear God, Pa, it hurts! It hurts bad!”

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  “That don’t help, Pa. Damn you, it don’t help one bit.”

  He raised the Colt and fired into the corner where his father stood. Alec listened to the man yelp and fall, a dead-weight thud that shook the rough wood floor. The bottle from which Arthur had been drinking clattered on the planks and rolled over to rest against Alec’s ankle.

  Realizing what he’d just done, he let the Colt drop from his numbed fingers.

  It hit the whiskey bottle and shattered it, scattering glass shards and liquor over the floor.

  Alec suddenly felt the compulsion to flee.

  He lurched toward the front door, opened it, and closed it behind him. The street was mostly darkness.

  Stricken by sudden dizziness, Alec tried to descend the three steps that led from the porch down to the street. His feet tangled against each other and he fell, hard, his wounded head slamming into the hard-packed ground.

  He was out cold in an instant. Thus he was unable to know, and therefore react, when a heavy freight wagon, laden with lumber, came rumbling fast around the nearest corner, its young driver late in returning to his employer’s yard for the night and trying to make up for lost time.

  The two dray horses pulling the wagon passed over Alec’s unmoving form without touching it.