Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  The steel-rimmed wheels did not.

  One passed directly over Alec’s neck, snapping gullet and airway and spine, ending his life instantly.

  The nineteen-year-old driver, who knew he’d run over something, persuaded himself it was merely some unfortunate dog, and hurried on without daring to investigate.

  Around the next turn of the street, he began to whistle and force up a feigned cheerfulness, but the effort faltered. “Just a dog,” he said to himself. “Just a damned sorry old dog, that’s all it was.” He drove on.

  Seven minutes later, the door to the gun shop opened again and another figure emerged.

  Trace Kerrigan, himself nearly as unsteady on his feet as Alec had been because of the concussive blow he’d suffered from being pistol whipped into unconsciousness, looked less like a boy of fifteen than he did a drunk.

  The fact that he held in his hand a fine Colt revolver his foot had discovered as he walked through the dark shop made him look dangerous, as well.

  The woman who saw him, and then the still form of Alec’s corpse in the street, sounded an alarm with a loud shriek that drew the attention of some men loitering in an alley beside a dance hall nearby. They came running and heard what she had to say.

  “Which way did he go?” one asked.

  “He went down that alley yonder,” she said, pointing with a trembling hand. “He had a pistol in his hand.”

  Two men went up the same alley, looking for the fugitive. Two others went to the body on the street and examined it by match light.

  “This man’s been shot,” one said. “Right along the top of the skull. Damned ugly furrow, that is. Looks like he might have been run over after that. His neck’s mashed awful bad.”

  “You know who this is, Ben? This here is Alec Lundy, the son of the gunsmith who owns this place. Hey, look there! The front door is partly open.”

  The gunshot corpse of Arthur Lundy was quickly found inside and policemen summoned.

  The woman who had seen the gun-bearing male had already absconded, eager to be safe in her home, but a policeman followed and intercepted and questioned her closely about what she had witnessed.

  “Did you recognize the man with the pistol?”

  “I don’t know his name, and it was dark, but I think I’ve seen him before. I think he is the son of that Irish seamstress who lives in the rooms up above the old grocery on Chandler Street.”

  “I’ve seen that woman. Got young children to raise alone because her husband is dead. Name of Kerrigan, I think. Kate Kerrigan.”

  He started to make a comment about Kate Kerrigan’s remarkable beauty, then bit off the words. Not the right thing to talk about under such circumstances, especially with a woman.

  “Yes, sir, officer. Kerrigan. That sounds right. And I do think it was her boy I saw. One of her sons works in Mr. Lundy’s gun smithy.”

  “We may be back around to see you with some more questions, Mrs. Mott. Do you still live over on Danforth Lane?”

  “I do, officer. My husband is—”

  “Owns the feed store, yes Ma’am. I’ve traded with Charlie before, myself. Got a few horses on a little farmstead north of. Thank you, Mrs. Mott. We’ll find this Kerrigan boy and put all these pieces together. Until we know something different, it looks like we’ve got a case of a young fellow killing his employers and stealing at least a pistol, and maybe more. We’ll know better when we’ve had time to look through the inventory and cash box.”

  “Bless you, officer. I’m glad to have you out keeping our streets safe.”

  “Just my job, Ma’am. That’s all.”

  “Well thank you just the same.”

  “We’ll get that Kerrigan boy and have some answers from him, don’t you fret.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Arnold Cheatham was lucky and knew it. An esoteric, intellectual man who felt at home only in the world of academia, he realized how rare a situation he enjoyed.

  If not for the fact his late father had been his exact opposite—an earthy, uneducated man who had built up a small fortune through sheer hard labor as a builder of houses for people of means—Arthur Cheatham would have never had the chance to build up the extensive collection of rare books that were his passion, even like his family.

  A single man who claimed to be a widower, he had never been forthcoming with many believable details about his long-gone wife or the circumstances of her death, or of their marriage before it.

  Not one portrait of the woman hung on the walls of his nicely outfitted house on the edge of Nashville. Many believed his claim of a prior marriage to be a fabrication to help him shun away the inevitable speculation that he might be a good catch for the plainest daughter of some fond mama.

  Cheatham had in his employ a young fellow who loved books as much as he did, Quinn Kerrigan, second son of a local Irish widow who managed, somehow, to keep her family afloat with her hard-earned income from seamstress work and occasional dress-tailoring.

  Quinn, a bespectacled, somewhat shy boy who looked more like a twelve-year-old than the fourteen-year-old he was, had the same sort of academic bent that Cheatham possessed.

  A lover and constant devourer of books, particularly classics of literature and poetry, Quinn had made a point of meeting and getting to know Cheatham when he heard an Irish-born washerwoman who did Cheatham’s laundry talk about the huge library that took up more than half of the space in his house.

  Quinn felt weak at the knees just in pondering the potential delight of gaining access to such a treasure chest of volumes, and made it his goal to somehow gain it.

  It came about more easily than he could have hoped. Lacking any handy pretext to wrangle a meeting with the man, whom most considered an “idler” because he enjoyed the privilege of living, however frugally, off inherited money plus the occasional overpriced sale of oil landscapes that he turned out with ease because they were all essentially the same much-practiced image, Quinn simply gathered his courage, walked up to the door, and knocked.

  He’d chanced to do so on a day Cheatham was deeply involved in sorting and categorizing his private library, and growing frustrated with the job. When the young, round-faced Irish lad appeared at his door and all but pleaded for the chance merely to look at Cheatham’s collection, the visit led around to an offer of work.

  “After you leave your job at the carriage works if you could devote a few hours a week to my library it would be a great help,” Cheatham said.

  Quinn readily agreed, hardly believing his luck.

  “Good, then you will bring order to chaos, and of course I’ll pay you for your trouble.”

  Cheatham said he’d throw in some basic schooling and when Quinn told him of his sisters and brother, he expanded the tutoring offer to include them.

  Quinn saw right through Cheatham, or thought he did.

  He knew his mother was considered one of the unmarried beauties in the city. Cheatham probably knew it, too, and was using Quinn and his siblings as an inroad to the Kerrigan family, positioning himself to gain the trust, admiration, and affection of Kate Kerrigan.

  Quinn was amused that the man thought he could get away with such a transparent and self-serving ruse.

  As time went by and the library gained better and better order and the Kerrigan youngsters became increasingly adept pupils, Quinn had to admit to himself that he was wrong.

  Cheatham seemed to like Kate Kerrigan as he got to know her, but his kind of liking was not of the sort Quinn had expected.

  There seemed nothing romantic or amorous in his attentions to the Kerrigan family’s beautiful young matriarch.

  Indeed, he had a demonstrated propensity to bore her to distraction with endless talk of his literary studies, his hope of someday being situated to establish an academy in Nashville, and of his beloved library, which would form the core of that academy’s literary collection.

  “That is wonderful, Mr. Cheatham,” Kate often told. “A most singular idea and an admirable one.” />
  Then she’d go back to her sewing while Cheatham, seated, as an honored guest, in the Kerrigan family’s only overstuffed and comfortable chair, droned on without respite, numbing Kate’s mind with his talk of books and authors.

  “Do you think Mr. Arthur wants to marry you?” Quinn asked his mother once after Cheatham had spent two long hours trying to teach the basics of Latin to the brother-and-sister twins of the family, Ivy and Niall, age nine in this year of 1867.

  “I have my doubts that he will ever wish to marry any woman,” Kate replied. “I think the man is already married to his books and his learning.”

  She had paused before adding, “There are men and women in this world who can love but once in a lifetime. I am such a woman, and I suspect Mr. Cheatham is such a man.”

  “He never mentions his wife,” Quinn said.

  “Perhaps his memories are too painful,” Kate said.

  “All we do is work in books and talk about the same kinds of things he talks about when he is here. He says nothing of his former life.”

  “A dull life it must be for him, alone in his house with his dusty books.”

  “I don’t think so, Mother. He seems very content.”

  “God bless him, then. I cannot see for the soul that’s in me how anyone could be happy like that. I mean, do not all of us want family about to call one’s own?”

  “Not everyone thinks that way, Mother. Priests and nuns, you know.”

  Kate remembered then that Quinn had at times expressed interest in possibly entering the priesthood. As a woman who hoped someday to have several grandchildren bearing the surname of her beloved late husband, Kate had avoided thinking much about having one of her sons become a celibate man of God.

  Surely it would be a fine thing for her son to serve the Almighty, but the priesthood?

  It did not fit with Kate Kerrigan’s vision for her male children.

  “Yes, Quinn,” she had said to him. “There are those who are called to turn away from the usual ways of the world and the flesh, but that is a special calling, only for those who are made for it. Perhaps one of them is you, but I must confess both to you and God that I hope it is not. It is a good thing for a man to have a woman and a woman a man, as your father and I had one another. I hope the same treasure will be give to you someday.”

  Quinn had looked around and spoke more softly when he replied. “Mother, I told Trace that I might become a priest, and he laughed at me. He said that I’d not be able to give up . . . give up . . . girls and all such things.”

  Kate smiled. “That is the way God has made us, son. And even though those who put their lives into service of the Church must shun that part of themselves, even it bears no evil in itself. A man and a woman are meant to come together and bring forth life into God’s world, as your father and I brought forth you and your brothers and sisters.”

  “But maybe Mr. Cheatham is different.”

  “He is a creation of God, as I am, and loved of Christ. But yes, he may be . . . different.”

  “But he is good, I think.”

  “He has been quite good to us, saints’ truth! The money he pays you to help him with his books, the schooling he has given all of you—and me, too, just from listening while I sit and stitch—he has been a good man to the Kerrigan family, indeed. As dear Mr. Lundy has been good to us in hiring Trace in his gun shop.”

  The day Alec Lundy killed his own father and then met his own death under the wheels of a wagon, Trace Kerrigan did not go home from the gun shop.

  As he walked along through alleys and back streets, avoiding as many eyes as possible and hiding the fancy Colt beneath his jacket, his mind examined what had happened and put the pieces together.

  It was obvious to him that Alec had shot and killed his own father, using the very Colt now in Trace’s possession, then dropped the weapon and somehow died on the street in front of the gun shop.

  Trace had not had an opportunity to examine Alec’s corpse closely enough to ascertain what had happened. Maybe Arthur had defended himself with his own weapon, and killed Alec even as Alec killed him.

  That was the best surmise Trace could make.

  It was stunning, and terrible—but the worst part for Trace was that he had been seen exiting the gun shop with the gun in his hand.

  He could not hope to avoid suspicion, or to go uncaught if he went home again. He was boy of the streets enough to know places he could hide himself, but somehow he had to get word to his family. And probably get away from Nashville.

  Though he had been unconscious during the final fatal interaction, whatever it had been, no one was left alive who knew that except for Trace himself. Circumstantial appearances were not in his favor.

  From the gun shop, Trace made his way in a half-hour tense hike to an old and empty barn standing behind a boarded-up farmhouse just south of town.

  The house was empty, too, the widower who had owned it and the farm having died nearly two years earlier. None of his children lived in the region nor had interest in doing so, and the property had been put up for sale, at too high a cost for such rough and unpromising property. The usual process of offer and counteroffer had gotten nowhere, the mercenary heirs being unwilling to settle on a realistic price. None of which mattered at the moment to Trace Kerrigan, who cared only that the place was empty, and far enough from the main part of the city to seldom attract residency by vagrants, drunks, and the like. If he proved lucky, he’d find a good, hidden, dry place in which to hide himself for the night and maybe longer if that should be necessary.

  But somehow, somehow, he had to find a way to get news to his mother without going home.

  Certainly the local police force would watch the street where the Kerrigans lived, and the area around it. They might even have paid off some of the people of the street to let them know if Trace was seen, and reveal him.

  It was a trying situation and a dangerous one.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The empty farm was as dark and lifeless as usual, which encouraged Trace but did not make him relax. A dark building could yet hide a man and his bottle of rum or his pipe of opiates.

  Trace himself, after all, was counting on being able to make himself invisible in the shadows without giving hint of human presence in what looked like an empty piece of property.

  So he approached the old farm quietly, the un-curried land around it bladed with moonlight and shadow, and his heart raced.

  From somewhere close, probably in a stand of wild oak behind the barn, an owl asked his question of the night and a pair of hunting coyotes, recent immigrants to Tennessee, yipped back and forth.

  Beyond the sudden yowl of two cats he interrupted in a moment of feline hostility, all was quiet and nothing moved as he approached the house.

  Even so he kept a sharp eye out, glad in that regard for the moonlight even while aware that the same illumination was a danger to him if anyone was in fact in the vicinity.

  He reached the base of the stairs leading onto the roofed front porch of the dark and silent house, cussed softly at the pugnacious cats that had startled him, and climbed to the darkest corner of the porch and sat down there, leaning back against the house.

  He marveled at the level of tension passing like electricity through his body. Trace had never shunned trouble, sometimes almost looked for it, and even at his young age already had a few pugilism scars that seemed destined to linger for life.

  Never before, though, had he faced a situation this dangerous. He almost certainly was already suspected in at least one death.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have run, he thought. Makes me look guilty, I reckon . . . but who would believe what little part of the truth I know? And when the deaths happened, I was out cold on the ground.

  The longer he sat, the more he worried about his mother’s inevitable concern about his failure to come home.

  Every impulse in him told him to go to her, reassure her, but would it be better for her to see him snatched away by con
stables on the street than to live with a time of uncertainty?

  He did not know the answer, and so remained where he was, listening into the night, until he was nearly certain the house was empty.

  He had heard no sound of movement inside, no pricking of the intuition to tell him someone was there.

  Trace rose and his eyes scanned the dark landscape within his view, and he moved to a window just to the right of the door missing the timber slats that covered the others.

  In moments his arm was inside and the latch turned, and in less time than that the window was raised and he was inside, lowering it again.

  He felt more alone inside the house than he had outside, but also more protected with walls around him.

  Knowing he could do nothing to alert his mother as to his situation, and that in fact he truly didn’t really know what his situation was, he decided to sleep, if he could, and leave the facing of perplexing challenges until morning.

  As far as Trace could see in the gloom, no real furniture remained in the house except for a heavily varnished old oak wardrobe, a couple of rickety chairs, and a corncob mattress laid out on the floor in a corner. It smelled like a dirty hay barn, but at least the tick would provide him something softer than a wood floor to sleep on.

  He lay on his back right away, there being nothing else for him to do.

  Sleep, though, was pushed aside for more than an hour by the worries besetting him, and now, for the first time since it had happened, the loss of Arthur Lundy began to play on Trace’s emotions.

  The old man had been very good to him and taught him enough of his trade that Trace felt confident that, even if no grander opportunities ever arose for him, he’d be able to make his way as a gunsmith.

  There was still much to learn about that craft, but Trace’s time with old Lundy had taught him that he had a native talent for gun work, and the ability to enhance it with experience.

  It was a good thing to know in a nation that was expanding westward in a way that would invest much reliance in guns. He owed much to old Lundy.