The Avenging Angels

by Michael Dukes

  THE AVENGING ANGELS

  THE AVENGING ANGELS

  MICHAEL DUKES

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Dukes II

  All scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the King James Bible.

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Dukes, Michael (Michael Paul)

  Title: The avenging angels / Michael Dukes.

  Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018004736 | ISBN 9781432846008 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781432846015 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432846022 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-4602-2

  Subjects: LCSH: Outlaws--Fiction. | Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency--Fiction. | GSAFD: Western stories | Historical fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3604.U438 A94 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004736

  First Edition. First Printing: August 2018

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-4602-2

  Find us on Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website—http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star Publishing at FiveStar@cengage.com

  Printed in the United States of America

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  “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.”

  —Proverbs 14:12

  “All the world likes an outlaw. For some damned reason, they remember them.”

  —Jesse Woodson James

  CHAPTER 1

  A savage night had fallen upon the Appalachian foothills by the time Gabriel Kings and his Avenging Angels found shelter at last. Within the flimsy walls of an abandoned creek mill, the young men, fresh from their first bank robbery, slept among the horses to stay warm as a tree-bending wind howled outside and rainwater leaked in through the cracks in the roof. Despite their less than glorious habitations, they had reason to celebrate. The operation itself had been child’s play compared to the games they’d all grown accustomed to over the last few years. For five of the six, as Southern-born veterans of the War between the States, going from enemy of the state to fugitive of the law seemed a welcome demotion of sorts.

  At ten o’clock the previous morning, Kings, Leroy Brown-well, and Dave Zeller had burst into the First National Bank of Scarboro, North Carolina, a depository owned by traitorous scalawags and largely filled with scalawag money. The men had their hat brims tugged low but, beginners as they were, hadn’t bothered to hide their faces with sacks or kerchiefs. Their unbuttoned coats flapped wide to show heavy revolvers in army-issue flap holsters. The sight was enough to make the speechless patrons reach for the ceiling without being told and move back against the walls. With so little resistance, the outlaws drew their weapons only because they felt they should.

  Outside, Tom Seward and Sam Woods, mounted on fine pacing horses, passed each other along the main street. Beneath their greatcoats, their hands lay near holstered guns, ready to pull and drive off curious bystanders at a given moment. One street over, Andy Yeager stood behind a hitch rail directly across from the saloon in which the town’s occupying troops loitered. Against Union army regulations for former Confederates in the Reconstruction South, he openly cradled a Henry rifle, which the soldiers were thus far too busy drinking to notice.

  While Brownwell held a shotgun on the bank crowd, Kings strode to the teller’s cage with Zeller a step behind. The latter shoved a gunnysack across the counter as Kings leaned in with a Navy Colt and said, “I was told you’re the man to see about a withdrawal.”

  The teller eyed the octagonal barrel of the .36-caliber revolver with a mixture of disbelief and fear. He sputtered and asked who they were and what the hell they were planning to do.

  Zeller, for whom aggression came more easily, slid his own pistol barrel through the grate and leveled it with the man’s nose. “Unless you wanna get shot, you’ll hop to, and don’t ask no more stupid questions.”

  Now with two guns on him, the teller glanced at Kings, who seemed the calmer of the pair, but he found no comfort in the man’s eyes. “And h-how much exactly do you wanna withdraw, sir?”

  “Well, now, how much would you say?”

  “Sir?”

  “How much would you say,” Kings repeated, “that federal paymaster deposited here yesterday?” He paused, allowing his apparent omniscience to resonate.

  Zeller crowded closer. “And just you remember,” he said, jacking his gun hammer back for emphasis, “what the Good Lord said about lyin’.”

  The citizen’s answer came slowly. “I’d say around seven . . . thousand dollars.”

  “We’ll take the lot,” Kings said. As the teller hurried to oblige, he posed another question: “Say, how them blue-bellies been behavin’ themselves? They treatin’ y’all like human bein’s?”

  For a moment, the teller forgot he was speaking to a robber and was quick to divulge to his fellow Southerner that the town of Scarboro could expect no fair treatment from the occupiers.

  “You be sure to tell ’em there won’t be no use followin’ us,” Kings said. “Not if they wanna make it back to their families up north. Tell ’em they didn’t get us all. They never will.”

  The teller paused in the middle of transferring a portion of the money from the safe to the sack. “And . . . who shall I say you are, sir?”

  Kings considered that, then, in a moment of inspiration, answered, “Why, we’re the Avenging Angels of the Shenandoah.”

  As the teller went back to filling the sack, Zeller turned to Kings, chewing on one end of his stringy mustache and fighting a smile. “Kings?” he said.

  “Zeller?”

  “I think this is gonna be a pleasure.”

  Ninety seconds later they stepped into the leather and whipped their horses into a gallop. Although they went unchased by the bluecoats, the Avenging Angels of the Shenandoah didn’t slow their mounts to a walk until they crossed the border into Tennessee. That night, by the light of a fire in the abandoned creek mill, they listened to the downpour and divided their spoils as evenly as possible. The die was cast by the passing of a bottle of sour mash.

  The Wanted bills were posted two days later, on October 8, 1866, in every town, lumber mill, and general store window within a ten-mile radius. They lacked any attempt at an artist’s rendering, for Scarboro contained no artists, but at the bottom of the bills the populace was instructed to contact Col. Thomas Spooner, of the Military Department of the Carolinas, with any information that might lead to an arrest or capture.

  WANTED!! IN CONNECTION WITH ROBBERY OF FIRST NATL. BANK, SCARBORO, ASHE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, OCT 6. ROBBERS, CALLING THEMSELVES THE AVENGING ANGELS, ES
CAPED WITH SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. MADE OFF TOWARD TENNESSEE LINE. TWO OF SIX THIEVES IDENTIFIED. DESCRIPTION AS FOLLOWS:

  GABRIEL KINGS. 6 FEET. BLACK HAIR, BROWN EYES. SCAR ON LEFT CHEEKBONE, CROOKED LITTLE FINGER ON RIGHT HAND. SAW ACTION AS CAPTAIN IN 1ST VA CAV UNDER JEB STUART. ALSO WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN MURDER CASE OF ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY LAWYER.

  ZELLER, FIRST NAME UNKNOWN. 5 FEET 10 INCHES, FAIR HAIR, BLUE EYES, SMALL MUSTACHE. SERVICE RECORD UNKNOWN.

  FUGITIVES CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. $500 REWARD PER MAN OFFERED BY U.S. MILITARY. DEAD OR ALIVE.

  CHAPTER 2

  The wind picked up, causing the big campfire in the lower reaches of the Glass Mountains—a twenty-four-mile-long range located on the southern edge of the Delaware Basin—to bend and gutter. Outlaws hunkered silently about the flames, slurping bourbon-laced coffee, gnawing on jerked salt beef or corn dodgers, and waiting on their captain to finish his reconnoiter.

  Alone with his thoughts and demons, Kings sat cross-legged a hundred yards out on the limestone caprock. With his back to the campfire, he took in the dips and swells of the land that lay ahead of them, searching for irregularities through a pair of old field glasses with the well-weathered initials CSA embossed along one side. It was a nightly ritual, a necessary precaution, but it had grown too dark to see anything now.

  Lowering the glasses, he felt the icy caress of the wind along the back of his neck and huddled deeper into his heavy buffalo coat with a sigh. Tonight was as cold as that first night out had been, and as many years as he’d been in this hard country, he despised it still for its unpredictable weather—its brutally hot summers, numbingly cold winters, heavy rains and light snows in some places. As a whole, he thought the state of Texas held no candle to the place of his birth—by now a place he’d hardly recognize, it had been so long.

  His were humble beginnings and his parents, humble people, salt of the loamy earth from which they sprang. His father, Jonathan McCauley Kings, had been the most recent in a line of soldier-farmers dating back to the French and Indian War. He’d worn U.S. Army blue during the conflict with Mexico and had in fact been absent from Gabriel’s life from the ages of five to seven. As soon as he had the smell of the Shenandoah back in his nostrils, though, Jonathan Kings quickly made up for lost time.

  He lived by an upright and hard-nosed moral code passed down by his ancestors. Gabriel’s mother, Mary Aubrey Kings, had done the best she could in her husband’s absence to plant these seeds of morality in their boy’s mind: to stand up for what was right and that, save one’s devotion to Almighty God, nothing came before family or the home.

  So when the call to arms came to those who called Virginia home, young Gabriel was one of the first to leave his family’s small farm—not so much to preserve the oppression of slavery, as to resist the exploitation of his beloved commonwealth and to preserve the rights of every Southern state to rule its citizens as they deemed fit. Kings reached the Harpers Ferry district, covering three-quarters of the distance by horse, the other quarter by ferryboat, to enlist on July 18, 1861, as a member of the 1st Virginia Cavalry, under the flamboyant but tenacious West Pointer, J. E. B. Stuart.

  The colonel’s zeal was infectious, and a man couldn’t help but feel proud, nothing short of invincible, riding with him. Among the gaggle of genteel, academy-educated tuckahoes that flocked to Stuart’s command, Kings had found many of his own kind—young farmers, rough-hewn boys down from the hills and across the dark-leaf fields whom necessity would form into battle-hardened cavalrymen. Leroy Brownwell and Andy Yeager, then two-week privates, welcomed him into their confidence, and a strong bond was forged over a pot of weak coffee and a twist of tobacco.

  Three days later Kings took part in Stuart’s daring charge and pursuit of routed federal troops at Manassas Junction. He also received his first wound there, in sight of Henry House Hill. It might have been his last, were it not for Brownwell dragging him from beneath the weight of the horse that had been shot from under him. The following summer Kings was singled out by Stuart himself for his efforts during the Northern Virginia Campaign and promoted to sergeant. Three months after, he made captain and was elevated to Stuart’s escort, the only member who had never attended a military academy.

  Stuart, by then a major general, had established a reputation as an audacious leader, garnering the admiration of his men the way a hard-working farmer garners a good crop. Kings found himself no less smitten with the general than the lowest private. The only time he’d ever questioned Stuart was when, for reasons never fully understood, the man separated three of his best brigades from General Lee’s troops in July of 1863, at Gettysburg—when they were most needed.

  Stuart’s actions, later reprimanded and then forgiven, left their commander totally blind to Union movements, resulting in a shattering loss for the Confederacy. Kings had listened, unconvinced, to the general’s side of the story and had been the sole adjutant who did not approach Stuart afterward to commiserate. He’d left Stuart’s tent without a word, found Brown-well and Yeager, and thought of the men who died on Cemetery Hill.

  Squatting there with his fellows, brooding on the debacle, Kings had hoped—not for the first time—that their cause would prove worth the fight. How many good Virginia boys had he seen fall since Manassas? More than that, how many good American boys had fallen, whatever color they wore in the fighting? Thousands, and not at the hands of a foreign-born enemy, but an enemy who worshiped the same God, shared the same history, had been brought up on the same legends and tall tales.

  Although the 1st Virginia would continue to fight bravely, the bitterness that found Kings in the immediate aftermath of Gettysburg was only a taste of things to come.

  Stuart’s death at Yellow Tavern the following May devastated General Lee and deprived him of his most experienced cavalry commander. Eleven months later, Lee relinquished his sword. All Confederate forces were called in to surrender and, by the grace of President Lincoln, allowed to go home and rebuild what might be left standing.

  So it was that thirteen long years ago, Gabriel Kings had relinquished his own sword. Following Lee’s example, he forgave the North and returned to the land that spawned him, with plans to marry and work the ground till the end of his days.

  When he arrived in Rockbridge County, travel-stained and half-starved, he found the farm and graves of his parents desecrated. His coon-dogs and the hired man were nowhere to be found, and where fields once stood was a railhead depot, half-constructed, with tracklayers hard at work.

  He pounded on the door of Clive Parker, a lawyer and acquaintance of his father’s, but even as he prevailed upon the man to bring the guilty parties to trial—on charges of land theft, unlawful purchase, anything—Kings knew it was too late. It was only when Parker told him to lower his voice that Kings ceased his supplications and started asking questions. How had the railroad gotten permission to build in the first place? Before he died, his father had made Parker executor to his will and caretaker of the land deed, to be kept under lock and key until his son returned from service.

  The truth was that Jonathan Kings hadn’t even been a week in the ground before Parker burned the will and sold the twenty acres to the railroad for a handsome sum. And while Gabriel could never prove it, Parker’s inability to give a straight answer told Jonathan’s sole surviving heir all he needed to know.

  In a rage, Gabriel stormed out of Parker’s office, mounted up, and thrashed the eleven miles back through the greenwood to what had once been family property, where he threatened the construction foreman with a sling blade. He gave the man and his crew twenty-four hours to pack up and git, only to be clubbed over the head from behind by one of the laborers. While he lay recovering from the blow in town, the last remnants of the Kings farm were razed to the ground.

  A fortnight later, after the doctor pronounced him fit to walk, Kings was seen begging supplies off various businessmen on credit—the sort of supplies one stocks up on before embarking on a long trip. By w
eek’s end, he was gone, in search of a handful of trusted men.

  At first, Kings’s crusade had brought a meager sense of justification, especially when he’d looked into Parker’s terrified eyes and pulled the trigger on the night of September 25, 1866. The Virginia Central Railroad executive with whom the wretch had been enjoying a Havana cigar handed his wallet over readily enough. It might have come as a surprise to the executive, given his compliance, to be promptly hurled out a side window. He broke his collarbone on the landing and was still groaning as Kings emptied a bottle of whiskey over the walls and floor of the private car, then set fire to it. His accomplices, mounted on fretting horses outside, couldn’t help but shudder at the look on his face when he came down to rejoin them. Stone-faced as the Egyptian sphinx, Kings may as well have stepped on a spider.

  Eleven days and a few hundred miles of track later, he and those same boys hit the bank in Scarboro for a much needed road-stake. It had all been so glorious—so defiant and bloody—but looking back, he realized that he’d never stopped to consider the consequences of his bold and violent actions. He’d only meant for there to be one job, but one thing led to another, as happens, and before any of them knew it, what began as a simple case of retribution became an addiction.

  In those times of day or night when a man has no one else to turn to but himself, Kings could honestly say he regretted nothing and did not feel the need to mourn the thirteen departed souls he had to his name. At one time, he might have lamented the absence of a voice of reason, one that might have steered him down a different, less permanent path. But the only way Kings had known to settle a score was with a weapon, and he hadn’t been in a healthy state of mind when he blew the top of Parker’s head off.

  Now, twelve years older and feeling every long month, Kings stood, a shadow among shadows, faceless in the black of night. He went down the precarious length of the craggy escarpment, half-sliding, half-creeping, boot heels scuffing and clacking like clogs all the way to where the scarp bottomed out.