ONE MAN’S SHADOW
Brad Dennison
Author of The Long Trail and Tremain
Published by Pine Bookshelf
Buford, Georgia
One Man’s Shadow 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 2013 by Bradley A. Dennison
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design: Donna Dennison
Copy Editor: Kay Jordan
To Donna, as always.
And to Megan and Seth, who I would be lost without.
THE McCABES
The Long Trail
One Man’s Shadow
Return of the Gunhawk
Boom Town
Trail Drive
Johnny McCabe
Shoshone Valley (Coming Soon)
JUBILEE
Preacher With A Gun
Gunhawk Blood (Coming Soon)
THE TEXAS RANGER
Tremain
Wardtown
Jericho (Coming Soon)
CONTENTS
PART ONE
The Trail
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
INTERLUDE
The Cabin
24
25
26
PART TWO
The Valley
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
PART THREE
The Tin Star
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
PART ONE
The Trail
1
He pulled open a wooden drawer, and scooped out a load of folded socks and handkerchiefs and dropped them into a trunk lying open on the floor. He then grabbed a stack of union suits, also neatly folded like Aunt Ginny had taught him to keep them, and they joined the socks and handkerchiefs. In the trunk beside them was a hat box.
The final item in the drawer was a leather gunbelt. The belt was rolled up, the cartridge loops filled, and in the holster was a .44 caliber Colt Peacemaker. The holster had actually been designed for an older model Colt cap and ball revolver. But on a trip to New York he had seen the Peacemaker in a gunsmith shop, and after sampling it, found the balance too incredible to resist and coughed up the cash.
The money had been left over from what Aunt Ginny had provided him to purchase text books with. He doubted she would approve of him buying a gun with it, but the gun had almost called to him. He was, after all, the son of Johnny McCabe.
His name was Jackson, after his father’s grandfather, and even though Aunt Ginny called him by his full first name, everyone else called him Jack.
He had been raised on the family ranch in Montana, and could ride a horse as well as most men walked. He was not the wizard with a gun his father was, but he could clear leather quickly enough, and shoot straight and hit his target most of the time.
His fellow college boys here at Harvard knew the name Johnny McCabe. It was being spoken on a level with Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. There were even a couple of dime novels written about him. This brought Jack a sort of fame about campus. He found himself invited to fraternity parties that he would otherwise not have been.
When he had bought the Peacemaker, he traded in the older model the holster had been originally designed for. He had originally brought the older gun with him from Montana.
Aunt Ginny had said, “Jackson, I understand why a man needs a gun out here in the West. Your father has long convinced me of the practicality of a man walking about with a gun belted to his hip. But you are going to one of the finest Ivy League schools. You will hardly need that there.”
She stood barely to his shoulder in height. Mid-fifties, with spectacles perched on her nose and speech that reflected her classical education.
“I suppose not,” he said. “And yet, I would somehow feel incomplete without it at least nearby.”
That statement disappointed her, he knew. She was generously paying for his education with a small fortune she inherited from her father, a shipping magnate in San Francisco. She saw his departure for college as leaving behind a world of leather and guns and branding irons, and embracing a future of books, classrooms and eventually, a career in medicine. And yet he was the son of Johnny McCabe, and that would always be with him no matter where he went.
His shoulders were wide and strong from working alongside his father in the years before college, and from belonging to the college boxing team and rowing team. His shoulders had once filled out a range shirt, and now as he stood in his room at Harvard, they filled out a gray blazer.
He stood with his trunk open before him and took a long look around him at his room. The room that would soon not be his anymore.
Summer break was upon him, and he was heading home for a visit, as he often did in the summer. He had told no one, but this time he would not be coming back.
“Hey, Jacko,” a voice came from the doorway behind him.
Jack recognized it immediately. Darby Yates, his roommate for the past two years. A tangle of red wavy hair on top of his head, and with freckles decorating his nose and cheeks. Darby was always quick with a laugh, and even moreso once he had downed a few mugs of beer. He held a paper bag in one hand.
“Darby,” Jack said, without turning around.
“That gun is so radically impressive,” Darby said. “You know, I’ve never actually seen you strap it on. Like a cowboy, you know?”
“And you never will.” Jack set it gingerly into the trunk, not dropping it like the other items. He kept the gun loaded, even here at school.
Pa had said once an unloaded gun is of little use to you. You keep it loaded and treat it as though it is loaded. Never carelessly.
“Hey, Jacko, why so dour?”
Jack shrugged. “Got a lot on my mind.”
Darby stepped in and placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder.
Darby said, “My friend, I wish I was going with you. I’ll be playing croquet and watching polo with the family back on their estate in New York, but you’ll be out west, riding the range alongside your father. The legendary gunfighter.”
Jack stood a little taller than Darby, with chestnut brown hair. He wore a white shirt under his gray jacket, but contrary to campus rules, he had yanked off his tie and it was folded and tucked into a jacket pocket.
“I so envy you,” Darby said. “You’ll have to tell us all about it in the fall. We’ll have to hoist some mugs of beer and you can tell us all about your adventures in the west. Maybe you’ll get to ride on a posse. Maybe get into a gunfight with outlaws.”
Jack said, “Killing a man is never a thing to be taken lightly, Darby.”
“Hey, Jacko.” Darby gave a light punch to Jack’s shoulder. “I’m just funning with you, my man. You need to lighten your mood. I mean, the semester’s over. We’re free fo
r the summer. And I, for one, need the break. I think you do, too.”
Jack nodded, and forced a half-smile. “That I do.”
Jack closed the trunk and latched it shut. “Well, I’d best be going. My train leaves in an hour.”
“I got you a little going-away present.” Darby handed the package to Jack.
Jack reached into the paper bag and pulled out a pint of Kentucky bourbon. He couldn’t help but smile.
Darby said, “I’m a scotch man myself, but I know you have a taste for it.”
“I’m sure I’ll find some use for it.” Jack opened the trunk and tucked the bottle into one corner.
He then extended a hand to Darby.
Darby grasped the hand, but his smile faded. Darby said, “Why is it I have the feeling that this is not just ‘so long for the summer?’ That it’s somehow really good-bye?”
Jack shrugged. “You never know what the future holds.”
“Now, that’s cryptic.”
Jack pulled a gray tweed flat cap on over his head. “Sorry. Don’t mean it to be. Take care, old friend.”
“Yeah, Jack. You too.”
Jack gripped the trunk by one handle and slung it over his back. Darby was amazed at the strength Jack had, handling the trunk easily. Darby had boxed and rowed alongside Jack, but he couldn’t match Jack for sheer bull strength. All those muscles built cowboying on that ranch in Montana, he supposed.
Darby watched as Jack turned a corner, and then disappeared down a stairwell.
Jack had been a great drinking buddy, and more than once a passport for Darby into a fraternity party. More importantly, Jack had been a friend. They had lain awake many a night, simply talking of dreams. Of future hopes. Of women.
And yet, there had always been something somehow mysterious about Jack McCabe. There were times when Jack would just stand silently in the window, looking off toward the western sky.
Jack was gone, down the stairs and out to hail a carriage to take him to the train station. Then, he would be off for the wilds of Montana for a summer of sitting on a horse and cowboying, or, as he called it, punching cows. Then, in the fall, Darby would be seeing his old friend again. They were both signed up for one more year in this dormitory room.
Yet, for some reason, Darby had the feeling he was never going to see his friend again. There had been something somehow final in that handshake. Something intangible, but it spoke to Darby’s gut. Somehow, he knew something had just ended.
Darby went to the window and looked down at the street below, and watched his old friend toss his trunk into the back of a carriage and then climb in. The carriage moved off, the shoes of the horse clattering along the cobble stones of the street.
2
Jack stepped off the train in Cheyenne.
This town had originally been a railhead - a place where drovers brought herds up from Texas to meet buyers who had come west from Chicago. Brothels and saloons had sprung up to help relieve the drovers of their money. Some railheads closed up, but Cheyenne had hung on and a small town had grown and become somewhat respectable. However, when a herd arrived, that respectability went out the window as the town reverted to its railhead roots. The saloons and brothels swung into full action, and the drovers ran wild and mothers kept their daughters inside behind locked doors.
Some towns like this were little more than a single street of single-floor wooden buildings slapped together, but Cheyenne actually had numerous streets, and many of the buildings were beginning to take on a feeling of permanency. Peaked roofs were numerous. A bank was housed in a brick building. The town actually had a fully functional train station.
Jack was now four days out of Harvard. There had been train stations where he could stop and stretch his legs, but much of the trip had meant sitting and watching the world go by out the window.
However, as he stood on the platform of this train station, his trunk over his shoulder and his tweed cap pulled down over his hair, he knew this would be the last one. This was as far north as the railroad went. The rest of the journey from here to the tiny town of McCabe Gap would be by stagecoach.
He stepped off the platform and crossed the tracks and made his way across the dirt street. The sign over one doorway read, TRAIN WHISTLE SALOON. He went no further.
He stepped into a dimly lit barroom. At the far wall was a mahogany bar, and behind it was a painting of a nude woman reclining in a bed of flowers. It was still early in the afternoon and the barroom was nearly empty. A bartender was milling about, waiting for business.
Jack crossed the floor and stopped at the bar and dropped the trunk onto the floor beside him.
The bartender was maybe forty, a thin man with thinning hair but a thick mustache, and an apron was tied about his middle.
He said, “What’ll you have?”
“You have bourbon?”
The bartender shook his head. “Scotch.”
“That’ll do.”
The bartender set a glass in front of him and poured a shot. Jack leaned one elbow on the bar, and downed the whiskey in one gulp.
He had experienced his first drink in a little saloon three miles from the ranch where he had grown up. The saloon was owned by an old friend of his father, name of Hunter. Biggest man Jack had ever seen, with an even bigger smile, and a huge, bushy beard. But Jack had learned to drink at Harvard, alongside Darby.
“Want a refill?” The bartender said.
“I wouldn’t refuse.”
This time, Jack took the whiskey a little more easily, letting the taste fill his mouth. As he did so, he decided he was going to take a break from his journey home. He had been traveling for four days, and had probably seven more in a bouncy stagecoach ahead of him. He decided he would stay in Cheyenne for a day. Maybe even rent a horse from the livery and ride about the countryside.
He could not allow himself more than a day in Cheyenne, though. The family would be expecting him. Most every summer, once school let out, he headed home. A few weeks in the little valley in the foothills of the Montana mountains. He had to admit, though, this year he was not feeling enthusiastic about returning home. In fact, had he not already promised Aunt Ginny in a letter that he would be spending his summer at the ranch, he probably wouldn’t be returning at all.
As it was, he had delayed coming home by a full month. There were some projects a couple professors needed help with. He would be home for only about six weeks this summer. Part of the reason for the delay was to help the professors. And part of it was he just didn’t really want to go home.
Jack knocked back the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the table. The bartender glanced at him and Jack nodded. The bartender strolled over and filled the glass a third time.
Two men approached the bar. One bellied up, and the other stood sideways, leaning one elbow on the bar. They each ordered a glass of whiskey. The man leaning on his elbow was unshaven, with a shirt and vest that were covered with dust. But what caught Jack’s attention was he wore his gun like he knew how to use it.
Before Jack had gone east to further his education, he had learned at the school of Johnny McCabe. The school house had been under the open sky, often involving riding through the wooded ridges surrounding the little valley where his family made their home. Sometimes he and his father camped for days in those ridges.
His father’s lessons had been about survival. And one of the most important tools of survival was the skill of observation, primarily noting details that were out of place, such as the way this man at the bar wore his gun. Another skill was to adequately deduce what this meant.
In this case, the man was no cowhand looking for work. He was a gunhawk.
“Howdy, boy,” the man said. “You look a little out of place, here. All dressed up in your fancy duds.”
“I don’t want any trouble,” Jack said.
The man grinned. The man had a long face, with a long, blade-like nose. His grin showed no humor.
The man said, “Didn’t say I w
anted trouble, boy. What makes you think I want trouble?”
He thinks I am afraid, Jack thought. He sees the jacket and the cap, and thinks I am a dude from the east. He doesn’t know who I am.
As if the bartender were reading Jack’s thoughts, he cut in and said, “Mister, don’t you know who that is?”
Jack hadn’t introduced himself, but he had stopped in this town every time he returned home for a visit. Word got around as to who he was.
“I don’t care who he is,” the man said.
“That there is the son of Johnny McCabe.”
The man blinked with surprise at the bartender, then gave Jack a longer look.
The bartender said, “I wouldn’t want to do nothing that might give Johnny McCabe cause to come gunnin’ for me.”
The man said, “If I was you, I’d mind my own business. I ain’t afraid of Johnny McCabe, and I sure ain’t afraid of some dude like this, who’s still wet behind the ears.”
The man who had come in with him said, “I don’t know, Cade. I mean, Johnny McCabe. Think about it.”
“I don’t have to think about nothing. It’s time people got to know the name Lewis Cade. It’s time people started thinking about not wanting to do anything that might cause me to come gunnin’ for them.”
Jack wasn’t in a good mood, and he had his father’s temper. Not the best mixture.
He should not egg this man on, he knew. But the man thought he was afraid, which grated on him a little, and Jack simply found he had no patience for this man’s posturing.
“I know who you are, Cade,” Jack said, turning away from him, and back toward the bar. “I’ve heard your name. Now, get away from me.”
“What’d you say to me?”
The second man said, “Cade, don’t start nothing.”
“Why? You afraid of him? I don’t see him wearing no gun.”
Jack said, “I don’t need a gun to deal with the likes of you, Cade. Back off.”
One Man's Shadow (The McCabes Book 2) Page 1