Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
PRAISE FOR Redemption, Kansas
“Redemption, Kansas, James Reasoner’s newest tale, has everything a truly good Western novel should have—a gritty, likable hero, action as explosive as a Colt .45, a page-turning plot, and prose as smooth and swift as a good saddle pony. It’s no wonder he is considered one of the genre’s best writers. A crackling good story that will have me reading more Reasoner.”
—Bill Brooks, author of The Messenger
“A Western novel with characters you care about and a crackerjack plot. If anybody asks you who’s carrying on the heritage of fine traditional Westerns in the vein of Louis L’Amour and Elmer Kelton, tell ’em James Reasoner’s the man.”
—Bill Crider, author of Murder in the Air
“Redemption, Kansas is a twisty, fast-paced, stay-up-late-and-read-till-mornin’ saga of the West. Grand stuff!”
—J. Lee Butts, author of And Kill Them All
“James Reasoner knows how to tell a story. He has produced a suspenseful, extremely satisfying page-turner, with a hero who is strong-willed but very human. This book reminds me, once again, of why I became a James Reasoner fan.”
—Troy D. Smith, Spur Award-winning
author of The Stealing Moon
“Redemption, Kansas is a wonderful book, wonderfully told. James Reasoner has the gift of words, telling a fast-paced story that reaches into the hearts of his characters . . . and his readers.”
—Frank Roderus, author of Paroled
“Redemption, Kansas is a fast-paced cowboy tale written with the flair of a master. If you’ve never read a Western by James Reasoner, pick this one up. You won’t put this novel down until you’ve finished it, and you’ll be ready for more.”
—Larry D. Sweazy, Spur Award-winning
author of The Scorpion Trail
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
REDEMPTION, KANSAS
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / March 2011
Copyright © 2011 by James Reasoner.
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For Livia, Shayna, and Joanna
This is the first book I’ve been able
to dedicate to them for a while,
but really, everything I write is for them.
Prologue
Redemption, Kansas
1876
The sound of hurrying footsteps on the boardwalk outside his office made Marshal Frank Porter look up from the cup of coffee he had just poured for himself. He hoped the footsteps would keep going, since he was in no mood for trouble tonight, but even before they came to a stop just outside the door, he knew he was going to be disappointed.
The door opened, and Hendrickson, the burly, whitehaired Dutchman who owned the bakery, hurried into the office.
“Marshal!” he exclaimed when he saw Porter standing beside the stove. “This cannot go on! That . . . that man Norris—” The baker broke into a torrent of angry German.
Porter sighed and put his cup back on top of the stove where the coffee would stay warm. He held up a hand and said mildly, “Hold on, hold on. You know I don’t understand that Dutchy talk, Hendrickson.”
Through gritted teeth, Hendrickson said, “Yah, yah. In English I tell you, Marshal, that man must be stopped! He comes to my bakery tonight and demands money. He says I must pay him, or bad things will happen!” Hendrickson threw up his flour-covered hands. “We finally get rid of those verdammt Texans, and now this!”
“All right, settle down, settle down,” said Porter. “What did you do when Zach asked you for money?”
“I tell him I come over here and see you, tell you what he is doing!”
Porter nodded solemnly. “And what did he say?”
“He told me to go ahead, but he said he could not be responsible for what might happen while I was gone.” A shudder went through Hendrickson. “He is an evil man, Marshal. Surely you can see that.”
Porter reached for his hat, which was hanging on a nail just inside the office door. “Let’s go back over to your place,” he said to the baker. “I’ll get this all straightened out.”
Hendrickson sighed and nodded, relief etched on his florid face. “I knew you would put a stop to this, Marshal, just as you stopped the Texans and their cattle from ruining our town.”
Porter put his hat on and stepped out onto the boardwalk, followed by Hendrickson. There was no need for the marshal to strap on his gun belt. He was already wearing it, the walnut-handled Colt Single-Action Army revolver rid
ing easily in the holster. Porter strode easily across the street at an angle, a man on the edge of middle age with blond hair that was turning gray and pale blue eyes that seemed to say they had seen everything, good and bad, that the world had to offer. Hendrickson walked alongside him, hurrying to keep up with the marshal’s longer strides.
Main Street was dark and quiet. Porter had made his rounds hours earlier, checking to see that the doors of all the businesses were locked. By this time, even the town’s lone saloon was closed, and no one moved on the street except the two men. All the windows of the buildings were dark except in Hendrickson’s bakery. The Dutchman rose very early every morning to get started on the day’s baking.
As the two men approached the bakery, another man stepped out through the open door. He was young, lean, dark-haired, with a scar on his left cheek that gave his face a grim cast. As he turned toward Porter and Hendrickson, the light from inside the bakery glinted for a second on the badge pinned to his vest.
“Hello, Zach,” Porter said to his deputy as he stepped up onto the boardwalk. “Hendrickson here has lodged a serious complaint against you.”
Zach Norris’s thick eyebrows lifted in surprise. “What did I do?” he asked.
Hendrickson sputtered in outrage. “You . . . you tell me I have to pay—”
“You misunderstood me, old-timer,” Norris said with an easy smile. “I said that good law enforcement doesn’t come cheap. And you can’t deny that the marshal and I have made this town a safe place to live again since we stopped those trail herds from passing through.”
“But I am not a rich man!” protested Hendrickson. “All the money I make goes back into the bakery, so that I can improve it—”
“Place looks fine to me,” Norris said with a glance over his shoulder into the building.
Marshal Porter held his hands up to silence both men. “Like Zach said, I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding,” he told Hendrickson. “Why don’t we go inside and talk about it? I’m sure we can straighten out the whole thing.”
“We can talk all you want,” said Hendrickson, “but I will not pay. This is not right.”
“I said we’d talk about it,” Porter went on as he steered Hendrickson and Norris into the bakery. He paused just inside the door and took a deep breath, inhaling the delicious aroma of baking bread. A smile touched his face as he said, “That’s one of the best smells on earth. I do love fresh-baked bread.”
“I give you a loaf,” said Hendrickson with little grace. “But nothing else! I will not be bullied, even by a man with a badge!”
Angrily, Norris began, “I never bullied nobody—”
Porter held up his left hand again as he used his foot to push the door shut behind them. “Now hold on, Zach,” he said. “There’s no need to argue. Mr. Hendrickson has made his position very clear.”
Hendrickson was shuffling toward the counter that separated the front part of the bakery from the area in the back where his ovens were. “Yah, yah,” he said without looking around. “I will not pay. Now I must check on my bread—”
Porter slid his Colt from its holster, thumbed back the knurled hammer as he raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet slammed into Hendrickson’s broad back at almost point-blank range, knocking him forward so that he crashed into the counter and fell over it. Porter knew the baker was dead, shot through the heart. He holstered the Colt and said to his deputy, “Give me a hand, Zach. The Dutchman was so worried about his bread, we’ll just put him in the oven with it so he can keep an eye on it.”
Chapter 1
The night was quiet, quiet as the grave. That thought made a shudder run through Bill Harvey as the young cowboy stood up in his stirrups to ease muscles that ached from long hours in the saddle.
Hours, days, weeks . . . it had been so long since he had left South Texas with the cattle drive that time had ceased to have much meaning for Bill. He went from horseback to bedroll, where oblivion claimed him, and back to the saddle after only a few hours of exhausted sleep.
But that’s the life of a cowboy, Bill told himself. You knew what the job was when you took it, you dang fool.
That was when he saw the woman.
The herd was bedded down in a broad, shallow valley. There wasn’t any other kind here in southern Kansas, just a short distance north of the border with Indian Territory. The sleeping cattle stretched out in a dark, unmoving mass across prairie that was deeply rutted from the hooves of countless other drives. The figure Bill saw was walking along the edge of the herd, long pale hair streaming down her back and shining in the faint light from the moon and stars.
What in blazes was a woman doing out here? Bill asked himself. This was his first drive north, but he had heard from some of the other men how soiled doves sometimes came down from the railhead at Dodge City to meet the herds. But they were still a long way from Dodge, and besides, a woman like that wouldn’t show up in the middle of the night. She would meet the chuck wagon as it drove on ahead of the herd, so that she could be waiting when the boys made camp for the night.
Then the woman turned and from a distance of fifty yards or so, Bill saw the jut of a beard and knew that the woman wasn’t a woman at all. She was a man. Bill shook his head. A stranger wandering around the herd in the middle of the night could mean only one thing.
Bill opened his mouth to shout a warning, then stopped short before he uttered a sound. If he yelled out and broke the silence of the night, that would probably be enough to send the cattle surging to their feet and lunging forward wildly.
It didn’t really matter, because the next moment, the long-haired figure jerked up his hand and moonlight shone on what he was holding. Orange flame lanced from the object along with the boom of exploding gunpowder. Bill heard the sound of the shot, but he never heard its echoes roll away across the plains. They were drowned out in the clash of horns and the roar of hooves as the herd sprang up from the bedground and started to move.
Bill threw back his head and bellowed, “Stampede!”
That was the thing feared most by the cowboys who brought the herds up the trail from Texas. Nothing was more dangerous. That was why the drovers rode night herd, endlessly circling the sleeping mass of longhorns, crooning soft-pitched songs that soothed the animals’ nerves and kept them from spooking. Anything could set off a stampede, anything . . . A crackle of lightning, the rattle of a sidewinder’s tail, the snap of a branch under a horse’s hoof.
A gunshot did the job just fine.
Bill jabbed the rowels of his spurs in his cow pony’s flanks and leaned forward in the saddle as the animal broke into a gallop. The only hope of stopping the stampede quickly was to reach the head of it and turn the leaders so that the herd would begin to run in a great circle. If he could do that, the cows would eventually mill to a halt.
Of course, that also put him in front of the herd, so if his horse tripped and fell, or threw him, the pounding hooves of the cattle would chew him into something that wouldn’t even be recognizable as human. Bill hoped the buckskin pony under his saddle was sure-footed. He had drawn the horse from the remuda a few times during the drive, but it wasn’t one of his regular mounts.
Lashing the reins from side to side, he urged greater speed from the buckskin. It was running smoothly and easily, seemingly unbothered by the stampeding longhorns a few yards away. Bill wondered fleetingly what had happened to the bearded, long-haired man who had fired the shot. The man he had mistaken in the moonlight for a woman. Had the stranger already been trampled, or had he been able to get out of the way of the stampede?
The wind of his passage whipped the hat from Bill’s head, but it caught on its chin strap and dangled on the back of his neck. For a second his long brown hair hung in front of his eyes, but then it was blown back behind him as well as he cleared his vision with a shake of his head.
Galloping along in the darkness with the herd like a single massive entity beside him, he felt alone, as if he were
the only human in a thousand miles. But gradually, over the thunder of hooves, he became aware of men’s shouts and the popping of gunfire. The other night herders would be trying to turn the longhorns, too, and the men who had been rolled in their soogans at the camp would be mounted up and joining in the pursuit by now. Somewhere out here in the swirling melee of the stampede were Hob Sanders, the trail boss, and Dorsey McClellan, Hob’s segundo, and all the other fellas—Pete and Santo and Wiley and Red and—
That thought vanished abruptly from Bill’s mind as the pony stumbled beneath him. Bill tightened one hand on the reins while with the other he sought the saddle horn and steadied himself. The buckskin’s racing gait smoothed out again, and the sheer terror that had filled Bill for an instant faded. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the sweeping curve of the herd. He was close to the leaders now. “Run!” he pleaded to the horse. “Come on, come on . . .”
In the inconstant light he saw the brindle steer that was always at or near the head of the herd. He veered the buckskin toward the lumbering steer and freed the coil of rope attached to his saddle. Guiding the pony with his knees, he transferred the rope to his left hand and the reins to his right, then came even closer to the steer. With a shout, he leaned over and slashed at the steer’s flank with the coiled rope. “Hyyaaahh! Get over! Turn, you son of a buck, turn!”
The brindle steer moved away from him, and Bill felt a surge of exhilaration. It was working. He edged the pony toward the steer and swiped at it again with the rope, still yelling. The rangy old longhorn moved once more, turning to its left. The cattle pounding along in its wake followed.
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