Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  “Look, who is that crowd of people being whipped along by boys? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I see a white face or two among them.”

  “Slaves,” Werner said. “Comanche slaves always bring up the rear of the column.”

  “But the white people . . .” Kate said, horrified.

  Werner’s face was empty of emotion, displaying a professional soldier’s stoicism.

  “White slaves don’t last long,” he said. “Unlike Mexicans and other Indian captives.”

  “But—”

  “There’s nothing we can do for them, Mrs. Kerrigan.”

  “Can you talk to them, Lieutenant?”

  “Sure I could, with a regiment of cavalry and a battery of cannon behind me.”

  “Then it’s a pitiful sight,” Kate said.

  Werner nodded.

  “Remember it well, Mrs. Kerrigan, for you may never see its like again.”

  Kate finally slept and lay abed until late morning, a thing she’d never done before in her life.

  But her qualms of conscience vanished when she and the children enjoyed a fine breakfast in the hotel dining room, served on a long, broad table covered in snow-white linen.

  “If this is an example of the hospitality of Mr. Hagan, I think we are going to find ourselves enjoying this journey more than we might have expected,” she said.

  She picked up a piece of bacon on her fork and held it suspended between plate and mouth, lost in thought.

  Finally she said, “I find myself more and more curious about the man. Such a level of effort on our behalf, and welcome, and hospitality. Could there be some motive beyond his gratitude toward Joseph in all this?”

  “Do you know what I think, Ma?” Trace said. “I think he’s doing this because he really believes in what he has set us to doing. He’s sure we Kerrigans can create our own empire in Texas in the cattle trade.”

  “Your son is right,” said Brock Davis said, who was seated near Trace and Kate, and having difficulty keeping his eyes off the vivid beauty of the latter.

  “Once you get to know Mr. Hagan you’ll understand all this better, see that it fits with his manner and his way of doing things. The Cornelius Hagan I know is a gentleman through and through and I would have been surprised had he not extended such a level of welcome and support for you.”

  “He must be quite an extraordinary man,” Kate said.

  “Extraordinary indeed, Ma’am.”

  “And what will be your role in this, once you have delivered us to our most singular benefactor?”

  “I will be your wagon master, Ma’am. Since it is well known to me, I will scout the trail that takes you to your new home in Texas.”

  “Will I be able to start the building of my home before the winter sets in?” Kate said.

  “You’ll find that that won’t be necessary. That task is in progress already, even as we speak here this morning. The boss sent builders ahead to start work on a cabin for you and the children. It will be small, but it will be the start of something grander, I’m sure.”

  “It will be,” Kate said. “Of that I am certain.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The house that was home to Cornelius Hagan was very much more than the usual plains cabin.

  It stood on the flatlands of Kansas like some medieval palace, lifting its towers and spires toward the heavens and giving silent voice to the unquestionable wealth behind it. As Kate Kerrigan first saw the Hagan mansion her thoughts turned inward, back to that fateful day Joe had the courage and will to lift a wagon off an injured woman.

  The young Irishman’s good deed—and strength—had set the wheels in motion that led to this very day. She thought that if only Joe could be here to share in this grand adventure with their children it would make her happiness complete.

  Kate rode in one of the private carriages that had arrived at the hotel where the reunited Kerrigans had spent their first night.

  Two four-wheelers drawn by strong horses and driven by expert coachmen had carried the family across gently rolling grass country with occasional oak and hickory trees.

  Trace was the only Kerrigan not in a carriage, opting instead to stay in the saddle, as he had grown accustomed to riding since his flight from Nashville.

  From the hotel the journey had seemed swift and easy, and the astonishing mansion and nearby town of Haganville had come into view sooner than Kate had expected.

  As she gazed out the window at the place to which the carriages were taking them, her daughter Ivy spoke to her from the facing seat. “He sure admires you, Ma.”

  “Who are you speaking of, dear?”

  “Mr. Davis. He cares for you. I can see it in how he looks at you.”

  “Oh, Ivy, if I believed that every man who looked at me in the way that so many do actually cared for me, I would live in a confusing world indeed. Perhaps he is taken with me at some level—that has been the case with many a man I’ve known. But that is far from him caring for me in any notable way.”

  “I don’t know, Mother. I’ve seen other men look at you, and watch you because you are pretty, and whisper to each other about you. But Mr. Davis is different. There is more to it with him. I think he may be falling in love with you.”

  Kate laughed. The romantic evaluations of a nine-year-old girl . . . what value or true insight could they have? True, she herself had detected a certain intensity in the way he looked at her and spoke to her . . . but . . .

  No. It was silly. A child’s imagination and a child’s chatter.

  As the carriage steadily neared Haganwood, though, Kate couldn’t help but turn the matter backward and evaluate it from her own perspective. What did she think of Brock Davis?

  He was a fine looking man in a rugged, weathered, very western kind of way. Dark hair with a few traces of gray beginning to touch the temples and the fine dragoon mustache he was obviously so proud of. His neck was sturdy and powerfully set on a pair of broad and muscled shoulders. He was a man of strength, no doubt of it. Quite an attractive gentleman of plains and trail—this was how he struck her.

  Was she attracted to him? She had to admit that in a small way the answer was yes.

  But taking that attraction seriously, believing it held any meaning or prospect for future growth, that was entirely another matter.

  She had to admit to herself, though, that she had been pleased to hear that Brock Davis would guide their journey to Texas.

  He would be a capable guide and was good with a gun. Of that she was sure.

  Whether his status might grow into something beyond that was a question only time could answer. She’d never given serious thought to being partnered with any other man than Joseph Kerrigan, who still held her heart and devotion, but now from the far side of the grave.

  Such thoughts were brushed aside when the carriages at last entered the arched entrance into the inner yard of the mansion grounds, and came to a stop on a fine cobbled driveway.

  The coachmen descended from their seats and stood in almost militaristic rigid fashion beside their lathered coach horses.

  As the carriage doors were opened by footmen who had moved out from the mansion into the drive, Kate was suddenly conscious of the age and shabbiness of her dress, and the well-worn, tattered look of her children’s clothes.

  Against the backdrop of such a fine place, the Kerrigans looked exactly like what they were: an impoverished Irish family, more fit for the potato farm or the thatch field than the parlor and sitting room.

  She remembered one of her husband’s favored sayings, “Keep your dignity and forget your pride.”

  There was a difference between the two, he had always maintained. Kate had never been certain she grasped that, but now she thought she might.

  Blinking in the bright day, she held herself tall and straight and reminded herself that she was a woman of admired beauty, never mind what kind of garb she was in.

  And surely, if he was any kind of sensible and worldly man at all, Hagan would hold no
expectation that guests who were at the end of a long journey from a city hundreds of miles away would be anything but disheveled, uncombed, and grubby.

  She brushed some dust off her dress, bucked up, smiled, and readied herself to make the best of things, however they went.

  “It’s very grand, this house, isn’t it, Ma?” Ivy said.

  “Indeed it is,” Kate said. “Very grand.”

  “Will our new house in Texas look like this one?”

  Kate laughed.

  “Lordy, child, I very much doubt it.”

  “But it will, one day, huh?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “One day it will. Only grander, with four columns out front and a huge stable to house our coaches and four.”

  Kate and the children were guided forward by dignified domestics and steered through an ornate door and down a mahogany lined corridor.

  Trace, hat in hand, trailed behind them, staring at the pictures on the walls.

  Ivy was breathless, excited, Shannon big-eyed and openmouthed. Niall tried to look in all directions at once and Quinn was solemn, like some junior statesman come to visit a rich potentate.

  Brock Davis had shed his gun belt at the door and walked in with the family.

  He was utterly at ease, clearly having made this pilgrimage many times before. For the Kerrigans it was something very near to being called in to meet royalty. For Brock, it was just another day in the service of his boss, who happened to be an extraordinarily wealthy man.

  By the time they reached the doorway beyond which lay the broad, plush office of Cornelius Hagan, Kate had put aside her doubts regarding the family’s readiness to meet the mysterious man who had so changed their lives.

  And she was still anxious to know the reason for such generosity and royal treatment, as though she was Queen Victoria come to tea.

  The doors opened and Kate and the children were ushered into a huge study that smelled of wood polish and more faintly of cattle.

  The desk behind which Hagan sat, his head lowered as he studied a ledger, very nearly matched the expanse of the big table where the Kerrigans had dined recently in the hotel.

  The carpet was a deep dark red and the heavy, mahogany furniture gleamed like port wine in a glass. A gun rack took up part of one wall and above that a painting of charging buffalo.

  “Sir?” a man who appeared to be a butler said to the distracted Hagan. “The Kerrigans are here.”

  Hagan lifted his gray head and smiled.

  Kate stared at the man behind the desk, who stared back at her in turn, intently, obviously liking what he saw.

  Hagan, wearing dusty range clothes, extended a hand.

  “I’m so very glad to see you here, Mrs. Kerrigan. And your fine family.”

  “And glad I am to be here,” Kate said. Despite her shock, she added, “May I have a chair?”

  Hagan looked stricken.

  “Why of course you can,” he said. “How remiss of me.”

  A flunky immediately supplied an armchair for Kate and she sat gratefully.

  “Mr. Hagan, I have many questions to ask, but first let me say that you bear a strong resemblance to my late husband.”

  Hagan smiled. “Do I indeed?”

  “Yes, you do. When I first saw your face it was . . . well, a shock.”

  “Am I so ugly then?” Hagan said.

  Now it was Kate’s turn to smile.

  “No, not at all. It was the resemblance that so shocked me.”

  “Well, we both hail from old Ireland and perhaps back in the mists of time a Kerrigan and a Hagan could have gotten together in the light of the moon under a greenwood tree.”

  “That could well be the case,” Kate said.

  Hagan hesitated a moment and sorted out the words in his head.

  Then he said, “Mrs. Kerrigan, you catch me at a bad moment since I’m occupied with business matters. But rest assured, I have only the good of you and your family at heart.”

  “That is indeed good to know,” Kate said.

  “My house is your house, so please relax and enjoy yourself. Do as you please, and if you need anything my servants will assist you.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “You make us feel very welcome.”

  “You are welcome, and we will speak again tomorrow.”

  Hagan lifted his steel pen and smiled.

  “Until tomorrow then,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  For the Kerrigan children, the lodgings in which they were housed for the night, rooms along an entire hallway that was theirs alone, the experience was beyond their wildest fancies of grandeur.

  That the hallway and rooms were in fact merely an unused stretch of servant quarters was completely lost on youngsters who were used to shared, cramped rooms, and roofs that often leaked in the rain.

  The plain, utilitarian rooms with their army cot beds and undecorated linens were to the younger Kerrigans the epitome of luxury.

  No sharing of beds, no toenail scratches inflicted by a flailing fellow sleeper, no snoring from someone else’s throat and nose . . . nothing could be finer, no sleep more satisfying.

  When morning came and sunlight filled the rooms, the children were loathe to rise and give up the most blissful night they ever had enjoyed.

  From elsewhere in the big house, though, the scent of cooking sausages floated through, enticing the reluctant risers out of their blankets at last.

  Kate had slept not in a humble servant room, but in a guest bedroom the centerpiece of which was a tall, canopied bed that to her looked worthy of a queen’s sleeping chamber.

  She had slept little, though. Her mind had been too busy trying to accommodate astonishing things she had learned in a lengthy conversation with her host, a man the sight of whom had stricken her as no other sight ever had.

  He had come to her room in the wee hours of the morning, still in his range clothes, and told her what she needed to know.

  As he stood at the door to leave, he hesitated.

  “I had thought to leave what I’d told you until tomorrow, but I reconsidered and thought it of the greatest moment that I tell you tonight,” Hagan said.

  “And for that I am eternally grateful,” Kate said, sitting in her old, worn robe.

  She now possessed an understanding that she’d not had before, answers to questions that could only have come from Cornelius Hagan’s own lips.

  Yet it all seemed so amazing, so impossible, that she simply couldn’t shake off the feeling that she might close her eyes in this place and open them again to find herself back in her old widow’s bed in Nashville, alone, or even on a rag heap on the floor of an unventilated Five Points tenement.

  When she did awaken, though, she was still in the Hagan mansion. The bed and magnificent chamber was real, and the rank foulness of Five Points was a thousand miles and a lifetime away.

  She rose and wrapped herself in her robe she removed from a closet the size of her old Nashville bedroom.

  Following the same delicious odors that had drawn her children, she made her way to the dining hall where breakfast was being served.

  Sausages, eggs, fruits, a variety of breads, jams, flavored butters . . . never had such a breakfast been laid before her.

  “We will reach Texas as fat as pigs!” Kate said, drawing laughter from her children.

  “Maybe we can just curl our fat selves up into balls and roll all the way down to Texas,” suggested Niall.

  Kate smiled at her youngest son and tapped his forehead. “The intelligence of this family you are, Niall.”

  “I know that, Mother. I’ve always known that.”

  Trace and Quinn joined in the laughter of the others, but only fleetingly. Their manner and whispered conversation was of a more serious variety.

  “The others are too young to remember well enough to have noticed,” Trace said. “But you and me, and certainly Ma did . . . she saw it clear.”

  “I know I did,” Quinn said. “He doesn’t really look lik
e Father—yet he does. So much so around his eyes that it’s almost like seeing pa himself. I caught myself wondering for a moment if somehow it really was him. That maybe he hadn’t died after all, and had gained all this wealth somehow. Then I knew it couldn’t be.”

  “I had the same kinds of thoughts, and I think Ma must have, too, which is why she looked the way she did. And needed that chair in a hurry. The shock of it.”

  “Trace, I know it can’t be him, but how do you explain it? It can’t just be some accident that they are so alike.”

  “I can’t explain it, Quinn. But maybe Brock Davis knows something.”

  “Let’s make a pact, Trace: we’re going to figure this out. Whatever answer there is to find, we’ll find it.”

  Under the table, the brothers quickly shook hands, and then returned to their breakfasts.

  There had been no anticipation on the part of the Kerrigans that they would remain for any extended period at the Hagan mansion before launching their southward odyssey to Texas.

  Factors related to their preparations, though, intervened.

  Two wagons were being constructed by a top-quality wagon builder to transport them on the journey, and problems with wheels delayed the work.

  Also, one of the drivers recruited and hired for the journey suffered a failure of the heart and died, and it took extra time to hire a replacement.

  The delays prompted no complaints from the youngsters of the family, who luxuriated in the unfamiliar opulence around them.

  Kate worried privately that they would become spoiled by the easy living, less fit than they would have been to make the arduous trek across southern Kansas and then through the Nations.

  Even when they crossed the Texas border there would still be many miles farther to go before they reached the place where Hagan had already planned the ranch the Kerrigans would operate on his behalf.

  Kate worried but did not dwell on it.

  She would not deny her children this opportunity to live in a way they might never encounter again.

  Even if her fondest dreams of building a successful Texas empire were realized, at its best it was unlikely to match the splendor of the Hagan mansion and the life lived by its founder and master.