Benedict and Brazos 2

by E. Jefferson Clay

  “What about Duke Benedict?” California Nick asked after a thoughtful pause.

  “Him, too,” Dutch declared, sending the second whiskey after the first and letting go with a shattering belch. “I’m through pussy-footin’ around. We got the men to do it. When we make our move, we’ll kill ’em both!”

  Eleven – Secret of Willow Flats

  Brazos tipped his chair back against the jailhouse wall until it was standing on two rear legs. From beneath his tilted hat brim he looked both ways along Front Street and wrinkled his nose. Quiet as a graveyard. He didn’t like quiet. He felt at his best when things were humming.

  A restless mood came over him. He got up, went inside. Benedict glanced up from the desk where he was playing solitaire. Brazos twisted a cigarette, his eyes drawn to the dark stain on the floor by the wall. Fresh whitewash had been put over the marks on the wall that morning, but no amount of scrubbing with lye soap would get all trace of Pretty Boy Tyler’s blood out of the boards.

  “Take a card,” Benedict offered. “Any card.”

  Brazos only grunted and went back to the door. Benedict looked at his broad back and said, “You’re jumpy. Just relax. Dutch will get around to you sooner or later.”

  “I’d as druther it be sooner ... if I’d my druthers.”

  “Why, so would I. Maybe if she makes her play we can kick the dust of this flea trap off our boots. Or is that asking too much?”

  Brazos didn’t answer. He lit his smoke and slouched off down the street. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and kicked a can as he stepped off the jailhouse porch. The blacksmith was banging a shoe into shape at his red forge across the street. Next door to the smith, the undertaker’s shades were drawn. No doubt he was catching up on some sleep. He’d been kept pretty busy of late.

  Brazos scowled and kicked the can hard, paused to scratch at the twenty feet of bandages under his shirt, then moved on.

  Benedict was right. He was getting edgy waiting for Dutch to make her play.

  Why hadn’t she made her move yet? It was sixteen or seventeen hours since Pretty Boy had gone out with a bang. He’d expected Dutch to come after his scalp long before this—and so had the whole town.

  It was too bad about Dutch, he brooded, eyes playing over the vacant front of the Rawhide. Despite what Benedict and others said about his boss lady, he liked old Dutch and didn’t believe a lot of the hog swill he heard about her. Sure she was rough and hard, but then so was he. People laughed at her behind her back because she couldn’t read or write, just like they did to him. Maybe that’s why he liked Dutch, he mused; they were sort of two of a kind. Too damned bad about Pretty Boy Tyler. He was confident he would have been able to make it up with Dutch even if Tyler had gone to jail, but he couldn’t see much chance of that happening now. He’d like to go see her and talk about things, but she’d likely blow his head off before he could say howdy do.

  Retracing his steps to the jailhouse, he found a battered old buckboard standing outside. Flicking away a butt, he went up on the gallery, looked curiously at the rig, then stepped inside. He grinned with pleasure and surprise when he saw old Jesse Rickey standing by the desk talking to Benedict.

  “Why, howdy there, bucko,” the old-timer greeted, sticking out his hand. “Still in one piece, eh?”

  “Shore enough am, Jesse. Hell, but it’s good to see you again, you old cracker. What brings you to town?”

  “I was just about to explain that to Duke,” Rickey replied. “But now you’re both here it’s all the better. I guess you could say I’m here on account I reckon one good turn deserves another.”

  Benedict and Brazos exchanged a puzzled glance as Rickey took off his hat, mopped his brow and sat down. The old sourdough looked keenly from one to the other for a time before going on.

  “Been gettin’ all the news of what’s goin’ on here off the mail rider. You two sure been raisin’ the dust ain’t you?”

  “Some,” Benedict conceded. “What’s on your mind, Jesse?”

  Rickey took out his pipe and sighed. “I guess I kinda owe you boys an apology, y’know. The truth is, when you come after this law job in town, I figgered all you was interested in was the money. But from all what I hear since, I was dead wrong about that. Seems you’ve gone and got yourselves up to yore ears in what’s goin’ on hereabouts. It was when this finally got through to me that I elected to come see you and come clean about somethin’ afore you get yourselves done in.”

  “Come clean?” said Benedict.

  Rickey nodded. “Yeah. About what I know about Heck Harmer.”

  Brazos’ eyes sharpened. “You did say Heck Harmer, Jesse?”

  “Yeah, that feller you got yourself interested in.” The old man got up and moved about as he spoke, still a little stiff from his ordeal with Shallert’s bunch. “You see, boys, Heck and me was tolerable good pards when I was livin’ over this way ... afore I got sick of all the feudin’ and such and took meself off on my lonesome. Well, I hadn’t seen old Heck in quite a spell, until a couple of weeks back when he rode over with a bit o’ quartz he wanted me to assay. I looked it over, told him it was top quality silver and natcherly asked where he got it. He hedged about a bit, then told me as how he’d got it from Willow Flats.”

  “I thought Willow Flats was all played out,” said Brazos.

  “So’d I. But that sure enough ain’t so, on account Heck chipped that hunk o’ pay rock outen a vein he found on the old lease in the rough hill country off on the northern side.”

  “How did he find it?” Benedict wanted to know.

  “Jest fossickin’. He was always pokin’ about, Heck, a real prospector he was, poor boy. He told me he come across that there vein under a slab o’ rock right at the foot o’ the biggest cottonwood in that part of the hills. And what’s more, somebody else knew about it on account there was other chunks chopped off besides his’n.”

  Brazos frowned heavily. “Well, all this is mighty interestin’ I guess, Jesse. But what’s it all add up to?”

  “I think it adds up to the key of the whole thing,” Benedict said quietly, taking out a fresh cigar. “Stop me if I’m wrong, Jesse, but it seems to me that somebody else found that seam, and that somebody else has been doing their best to kick the miners off the lease so they could take over.”

  “Right,” Rickey said, turning his head to expectorate out the window again. “Daid right in fact.”

  “The Two-Bar?” Brazos hazarded, always appreciably slower than Benedict to follow a line of thought.

  “The Two-Bar,” Benedict confirmed. “Or at least they’d have to start short favorite.” He turned back to Rickey. “But I still don’t figure why you came to tell us all this, Jesse.”

  The old sourdough shrugged.

  “Then you ain’t as smart as I had you figgered, Duke. I come to tell you so you boys would stop snoopin’ around and most likely end with your fool haids blowed off. Now you got a fair idea of what’s behind all the goin’s on, then maybe you’ll be satisfied and pack your traps and get out while you’re still in one piece.”

  It sounded a reasonable course of action to old Jesse. But he didn’t understand just how deeply his young friends had become involved in what was happening in Harmony. And as soon as they’d bought him a meal, thanked him for coming forward with his information about Harmer, then saw him on the trail home, they put their heads together and decided it was time they took a closer look at Willow Flats.

  There was some debate about who should go at first, but Benedict finally convinced Brazos he was in no condition to ride any place. Benedict would be the one to go.

  After seeing Benedict off from the livery at around nine o’clock, Brazos returned to the jailhouse, fixed a pot of coffee but didn’t get to drink it. For belatedly, he realized the full significance of what Jesse Rickey had told them. If what Jesse had said was in fact true, he reasoned putting on his hat and heading for Rawhide, that Evans Maclaine was up to his armpits in murder—and Evans Maclaine was a
friend and business associate of Dutch Amy’s.

  He’d been searching for some way of making up with Dutch after killing Pretty Boy and here it had dropped right in his lap. He was no judge of people at all if Dutch wouldn’t be prepared to bury the hatchet after he did her the good turn of telling her just what sort of a dangerous, conniving varmint she was mistaking for a friend. No judge at all ...

  Benedict dismounted when at long last he sighted the huge cottonwood looming against the sky a quarter of a mile ahead. He cached his black horse in a draw, and went on afoot.

  It was quiet on the lush ground above Willow Flats. The stars were brightly studding the sky and a gentle wind was blowing in off Whipple Creek, stirring the trees. Below Benedict and to his left dimly visible in the starlight, were the workings of the old mines. He moved through an area of low scrub-covered hills which grew steeper as he approached the broad rocky ledge where the giant cottonwood stood.

  He got to within some thirty yards of the ledge before spotting the sentry. The dark figure was pacing up and down a narrow rocky ledge some twenty yards beyond and above the cottonwood.

  Crouching in the brush, Benedict watched the man for a full minute. He couldn’t make out whether he was a miner or a Two-Bar cowboy, but his very presence seemed to substantiate Rickey’s story. Why in hell else would a man be walking sentry duty up here among the rocks unless there was something valuable to guard?

  He spent another minute in deep thought, watching the sentry make his slow deliberate way to and fro against the sky. One part of him told him that he should head back to town because he’d found proof of what he’d come for. Yet the other and more dominating part told him to get in there and take a look so he’d really be sure. He plumped for the latter course, as he supposed he knew he would all along. Bellying backwards away from the shrub, he cut silently away to the left and for the next ten minutes picked his silent way through scrub, rock and brush until with infinite stealth he reached the cover of a rock less than ten feet from the pacing sentry’s path.

  The sentry reached the far point in his patrol, turned and trod slowly back. Starlight glinted on the big rifle in his hands and his spurs made tiny chinking sounds against the rocks. He was a cowboy.

  Benedict waited until the man stopped and was turning before he leapt from cover, gun upraised. The cowboy heard something, half turned, then buckled at the knees as the gun barrel crunched into his hairline. Benedict caught him and lowered him silently to the ground, looked left and right. Nothing moved. Gun in hand he snaked down the slope and towards the cottonwood.

  It took only a handful of seconds to spot the slab of rock that Rickey had described, and not much longer than that to shift it and see the hole chipped in the rock surface. He picked up a piece of stone the size of an egg. It shimmered with rich mystery in the starlight. He slipped it into his coat pocket, replaced the stone and was coming erect when a sudden shout sounded from above.

  “Hey, somebody’s slugged Carson!”

  There was more than one guard! Rising to a half crouch, Benedict sped along the rock ledge. From above, in the direction of the Two-Bar fence, came hoarse shouts, the thump of running boots. Obviously Maclaine kept only one sentry on the site so as not to attract the attention of the miners, but kept a considerable force of men on hand farther up on his own property in case something went wrong.

  Something was going wrong now, with bells on, Benedict had no doubt as a gun coughed in the night and a bullet snarled overhead.

  He changed directions and angled across fifty yards of hillside shale, kicking up a cloud of red dust. There was a timbered section dead ahead. If he could make it there, then he could lose himself and cut around to his horse.

  He made it to his objective but as he reached the first tree a figure suddenly loomed up before him. The cowboy cursed and swung up his gun. Benedict slammed into him, chopping to the head with his Colt. The cowboy going one way and his gun the other, Benedict leapt a boulder. A gun snarled close by and hot fire plowed into his thigh, a flesh wound that sent him tumbling over and over through the trees. For an agonized handful of seconds he lay numbed in pain, then struggling up, hobbled on. Behind him, the hill slopes were coming alive with the snarl of gunfire. Lead chopped the dark trees above and beside him. Sweating with pain, he ran on at full speed, a flashing shadow through the trees with bullets zipping and ricocheting about him like angry hornets.

  And then quite suddenly there were no more bullets. The guns were still yammering, the cowboys were still shouting, but now the trees shielded him completely.

  He forced himself on. With eyes accustomed to the gloom of the trees now, he worked his way to the clump of elms where his horse was cached. The sounds of pursuit were growing louder. Snapping the lines free, he scrambled into the saddle, pain wracking his leg. Gritting his teeth, he raked with his spurs and pointed the black’s head for town leaving a confused and angry bunch of cowboys beating the brush far behind him.

  But the cowboys’ confusion at that moment was nothing to what it was ten minutes later when they finally brought cowboy Carson around and they discovered that the intruder hadn’t been one of the miners from Whipple Creek like they’d thought. Carson had got one good look at that tall joker hurtling out of the darkness at him in the split second before the roof fell in.

  “That weren’t none of Mick Briskin’s bunch,” the groggy cowboy avowed, clutching at his spinning head. “That there was that gun slick gamblin’ pard of Brazos’, Duke Benedict!”

  Brazos spread his hands and shrugged. “So that’s how it is, Dutch. I’m downright sorry I had to be the one to bring you the bad news, but I guess you’re a country mile better off knowin’.”

  Dutch Amy just stared at him, mouth hanging agape, eyes glassy with disbelief. Her weather-beaten visage had been tight with unspilled anger and deadly suspicion when she’d granted him an audience ten minutes back but she’d been wearing that glassy look ever since she’d begun to get the gist of the purpose of his visit. For a while she’d suspected he was pulling her leg, yet for the life of her she couldn’t doubt the honest goodwill in his battered, serious mug now.

  “You okay, Dutch?” Brazos said after she went on sitting there for a full minute with that weird expression, looking like some obscene toad that had been hit on the head with something hard and heavy.

  The agate eyes blinked. Dutch Amy closed her mouth with a sound like a rat trap going off. She fumbled around for matches on her littered desk and put one to her cigar. That was a sure sign that Dutch was off balance. She hadn’t lit a cigar in years.

  After she’d taken a couple of huge lungsful she felt composed enough to say, “Let me get this straight, big boy. You figured I’d be mad about Pretty Boy, so to make up for it you’ve come along to tell me that Maclaine is up to something sneaky out at Willow Flats? That is it, ain’t it?”

  “Shore enough, Dutch.” Brazos scratched the back of his head. “I felt bad about Pretty Boy. I tried to spare him, but that ranny was bound and determined to buy himself a slice of Boothill. I’ve been wantin’ to come across and say as how I was sorry, but I figgered you mightn’t perzackly take kindly to it.”

  No, she guessed she perzackly wouldn’t have. But at the moment Dutch Amy wasn’t even thinking of Pretty Boy Tyler. All she could think of was the incredible stroke of luck that had brought her repentant badge packer to her with his unasked for piece of news.

  She put on a grin which certainly didn’t come easy. “You—uh—you ain’t told nobody about what old Rickey told you, have you, big boy?”

  “Only Benedict.”

  Only Benedict. Dutch swallowed and tried to smile again but it wouldn’t come off. “I see. Where’s Benedict now?”

  “Out takin’ a look at Willow Flats. We want to make sure about this ’fore we do anythin’ about it, Dutch. But don’t you worry none, we’ll take care of things, if it turns out the set-up’s like Jesse says.”

  He came to the desk and thrust out his ha
nd. “Friends, huh, Dutch?”

  Dutch Amy had a big six-gun in the desk drawer inches from her right hand. Her hand actually moved towards the drawer then stopped. No, that would be too risky. He might be dumb but he sure as hell wasn’t slow.

  “Sure,” she said, in a strangled voice, taking the proffered hand. “Sure, no hard feelin’s big boy. And thanks. Thanks a million.”

  Brazos grinned happily and went out. Dutch listened to his heavy steps going down the stairs, Then she flung her cigar away, took out the outsize gun rig and buckled it around her wide hips.

  Ten minutes later she was heading east for the Two-Bar ranch-house with seven of her Rawhide men and a worried California Nick. There was no time left for finesse now; they had to get out to the Two-Bar as quickly as they could, alert Maclaine, round up every available man, then come back to town and take care of Benedict and Brazos.

  Their ride turned out to be far shorter than they expected, for a little over halfway to their destination they met Evans Maclaine and the entire crew running their horses fast, heading for town with the news that Duke Benedict was wise to Willow Flats.

  There was no need for a conference on what should be done after they’d exchanged news. Between them, Dutch Amy, Evans Maclaine and California Nick had killed over a dozen men in their hungry ambition to drive the Whipple Creek miners off the Willow Flats leases and open up the new seam for themselves. They sure as hell weren’t going to let any saddlebum or card-shark blow the whole deal.

  “Check out your guns!” was all Dutch Amy had to say before leading them fast back toward town.

  It was after midnight as Eleanor Barry hurried up from her house on Peach Street and turned onto Front, heading for the hotel. The girl was carrying a canteen of hot soup. The kitchen staff at the Harmony House Hotel had all been asleep thirty minutes before when she and Brazos had taken Benedict upstairs after an hour on Doc Kelly’s surgery table. Rather than arouse the staff to prepare soup which she had personally diagnosed as the next step in the Benedict treatment, Eleanor had hurried home to make it in her landlady’s kitchen.