Benedict and Brazos 2

by E. Jefferson Clay

  A dark figure came snaking from a doorway with his gun flaring orange and wicked in the half gloom. Wearily now, Brazos lifted his gun, but before he could squeeze the trigger, a shot crashed from along the gallery and the gunman buckled and fell. A second man came bouncing out behind to die even quicker. Brazos’ smoke-reddened and astonished eyes focused on the dim figure coming swiftly along the gallery, then snapped wide at a familiar voice.

  “Come on, let’s get going, saddle tramp. We don’t have all night.”

  A moment later Doc Christian was there beside him, cool and unruffled in the midst of chaos. He was half-smiling though why in hell he should, Brazos had no idea. The little gambler looked downwards as his foot bumped Benedict’s leg. He peered closer. “Is he dead?”

  “No, just passed out. He—”

  Brazos got no further, for suddenly the doors and windows were filled with wild-eyed, panic-stricken and gun-blasting men.

  Almost nonchalantly Doc Christian passed Brazos a loaded Colt from his belt and together they cut loose. Back to back they sent deadly bullets into everything that moved. Christian accounted for two cowpokes with two shots, then with his third drilled Evans Maclaine squarely between the eyes as the big rancher made a desperate lunging dive for the balcony.

  And still the killing went on, moments of incredible slaughter, of mechanical cock and fire, of bucking guns. Screams and explosions and blood and killing, until it was no longer killing any more but some sort of an unreal stage play.

  “What the hell, Christian?” Brazos breathed as a brief lull gave them the chance to reload. “Did you light that goddamn fire?”

  “Nice strategy, eh, saddle tramp?” Christian replied, then ducked as a bullet whined close. He squeezed off a shot, heard a man cry and fall, then went on: “I got the idea when I heard all the guests had quit the hotel as soon as the shooting started. I doused the upstairs corridor with coal oil and one match sent it up like the Fourth of July.”

  Christian gestured carelessly in the direction of the store next door. “Then I got up on Miller’s roof, tossed a plank across to the gallery and joined the party. Strategy.”

  There was no time for any more questions. The flames were already licking out through some of the doors and gallery windows now. The heat was growing intolerable. Christian touched his elbow.

  “Time to go. I nailed a couple down the street. But there’s still a couple more. We’ll have to take our chances with them.” He jabbed a finger at Benedict. “He’s alive you say?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “Always was lucky. Okay, grab him up and let’s go.” Brazos hefted Benedict across his shoulder as if he weighed nothing and they sped towards the store end of the gallery, leaping bodies, choking through smoke. A figure as broad as it was high came lunging from a flaming doorway, cursing like somebody demented with twin guns blazing. Brazos and Christian fired together. Dutch Amy reeled back through the doorway. Hungry flames enveloped her, a single scream, then nothing but the hungry jaws of the fire.

  Brazos lunged on. He reached the edge of the gallery and totally disregarding the weight of his burden, clambered up onto the plank then staggered across over the twenty-foot drop to lay Benedict safely on the roof of the store. He turned and yelled for Christian to hurry. No answer. Without hesitation he pounded his way back along the plank and plunged back into the smoke. He found Christian leaning against the railing, firing with one hand, the other pressed to his side.

  “The day of the fool,” he was muttering. “Imagine being shot by a rough-house biddy like Dutch ...”

  “You ain’t dead yet,” Brazos rapped, and slinging him across his shoulders as he’d done with Benedict, mounted the railing again and staggered along the board to the comparative safety of the porch roof of the store.

  Stepping over Benedict, he slung Christian to his feet as the hotel began to collapse in a mighty roar behind them. “I’m goin’ to jump to the street, with Benedict, Doc,” he yelled above the tumult. “Then you jump and I’ll catch you, got it?”

  Doc Christian made no reply, just stood there grinning foolishly as if at some huge secret joke. Brazos grabbed up Benedict and launched himself into space. As they plummeted downwards, guns snarled again. He hit hard and rolled, spilling Benedict in the dust. He blasted at a Two-Bar ranny, saw his hat fly from the fatal impact of lead, saw him fall. Then with a gust of wind clearing the smoke a little, he saw the other firing up towards Christian. He shot him twice, once through the head, once through the heart. Brazos staggered to his feet. No more shots. The street was empty in the brilliant glare of the flames. He lifted his arms. “Jump, Doc, jump!”

  “Anything you say, saddle tramp,” came from above and a moment later Christian came leaping down.

  Hank Brazos was spent, used up and weakened beyond all belief. Yet there lived in him a fierce gratitude, an indebtedness to this man. He held out his arms and knew he would not stumble. He would not drop Doc Christian, though he had not an ounce of strength to hold him up. His legs buckled under the impact, but he remained upright. He held Christian’s small body close, protectively.

  And then knowing how embarrassed a man like Doc would feel, he grinned and made to place him on his feet.

  The grin faded, and something that might have been a tear ran down Hank Brazos’ smoke-blackened face as he met the sightless eyes. Doc Christian was dead.

  It was Bullpup who finally cut short their convalescence. The day after the biggest burying Harmony would ever see, the dog chewed up Jobie Fletcher’s pet hound just for laughs. Fletcher was incensed, but nobody else seemed much concerned. After all that was Hank Brazos’ dog, they pointed out and right then Hank Brazos was Harmony’s number one hero.

  People weren’t quite so amused next day when Bullpup raided the butcher’s emporium and sank his great jaws into Miller Porter’s personal rump before swaggering out with a forequarter of prime beef in his teeth. And they grew decidedly testy when Bullpup buffaloed the entire membership of the Harmony Ladies Aid Society at their meeting hall that night and chased fat Mrs. Gilmorgan the length of Front Street barking like a bull seal.

  If somebody had had the nerve to try and tie him up, things would have been all right, but who had an arm they could afford to lose? The only person who dared go near the creature, lay wrapped up in bandages recuperating at Eleanor Barry’s, while Duke Benedict was recovering under the tender care of Miss Annabelle up at the hotel.

  It didn’t take Bullpup long to realize that with his master out of action, he had the town at his mercy. Excess followed excess until on the fourth day he was directly responsible for stampeding the teamers that had drawn the county marshal’s stage to town. The marshal had come down to investigate the circumstances of the showdown with Dutch Amy, but instead found himself nursing a broken leg at Doc Kelly’s after the stage mounted the porch of the Red Dog Saloon and overturned, with Bullpup still nipping the heels of the terrified teamers.

  Obliged at last to leave his sick bed after that unfortunate incident, Brazos found himself stronger than he’d figured and decided it was time to hit the trail, if Benedict was strong enough.

  Benedict wasn’t, but was ready to leave immediately nonetheless, for despite Annabelle’s tender attentions, the gambling man had done little over the past few days but brood glumly on Bo Rangle’s trail which he sensed by now was gone from cold to frigid.

  But it wasn’t easy to leave, as Hank Brazos realized the next morning as he said goodbye to Eleanor at the picket fence of her landlady’s house. The big drifter sensed only then that without being aware of it he’d been looking for a girl like this in every wild town, along every lonesome trail. Now when he’d finally found her, he had to ride on.

  Eleanor didn’t understand why he had to go, yet she knew he must. And she was matter-of-fact about it. “You’ll come back to Harmony one day, Hank,” she told him as they held hands at the little white gate. “I know it ... I feel it.”

  Brazos felt it, too, ye
t that hardly lightened the weight in his chest as he held her to him for a final moment before turning suddenly and striding away to where the horses stood.

  “She’ll forget you before your dust settles,” Duke Benedict drawled mockingly from his saddle.

  Brazos’ face was as hard as a stone carving as he threw a big leg across his saddle and met the gambler’s eyes.

  “How would you like to shut your mouth or lose every one of those fancy big white teeth?” he offered.

  The force of his response surprised Benedict, though it shouldn’t have. Anybody with half an eye should have been able to realize that Hank Brazos and Eleanor Barry had fallen in love, that the long trail ahead of them would never seem to Brazos so long and so cold ...

  Eleanor dabbed at her eyes and waved in the sunshine as they rode out. They took the back streets out of town as there was a rumor that the grateful citizens of Harmony were preparing to give them a formal farewell. Neither man was of the breed to accept gratitude comfortably and farewells, formal or otherwise, just weren’t their speed.

  Cutting around Hanrohan’s corner with Bullpup leading the way with the air of a conqueror, they met old Jesse Rickey and his daughter Betsy coming in on their battered buckboard to pick up supplies. Jesse’s leathery old face split into a grin of greeting and Betsy smiled though she felt more like crying. Jesse told them that the miners were already busy at work on the rich seam on the hill section of their Willow Flats lease, cause of all the bitter bloody feud. Their whole attitude had undergone a remarkable change just in a couple of days. Now there was food, money and hope out on Whipple Creek once again; prosperity was sounding the death-knell to their hatred and resentment against the world. California Nick’s secret assay of the new seam samples had been discovered in his effects and indicated that the Whipple Creek men would be digging pay dirt for many a long day to come.

  Neither rider spoke until they reached a high crest on the north trail a mile from town. There they reined in and looked back. Under the morning sun, Harmony looked so peaceful and secure that it was hard to believe so many men had died so violently here. Yet for Brazos there was a great sense of achievement in the knowledge that when they’d ridden into that town a few days back it had been torn apart with hate and fear and mystery. Now they were leaving it in peace.

  He said as much, but Benedict only smiled cynically around a freshly-lit cigar. “Sure, peaceful—until the next Dutch Amy comes along.”

  Brazos gave him a stony look. “You don’t believe in any goddamn thing do you, Yank?”

  “I believe in two hundred thousand in gold,” Benedict said indifferently, turning his horse. “Let’s go.”

  Brazos swallowed his anger and jerked his thumb at the little fenced-in cemetery that stood on the slope of the hill some two hundred yards from where they’d drawn up. “There’s not all that much damned hurry. I’m goin’ across to pay my last respects to Christian.”

  “The hell with that,” Benedict snapped back. “We’ve wasted enough time already.”

  Brazos paid him no heed, but swung his horse off the trail and rode down to the cemetery fence. His mouth was compressed in a thin hard line as he got down and stepped through all the fresh graves looking for Christian’s. Damnit, but he’d just about had enough of the Yank. There were times when he could be the best man you could ride the river with, yet others ...

  Suddenly he came to a dead halt, his eyes widening in astonishment. Standing out from the score and more raw mounds of red earth, Doc Christian’s final resting place lay before him, surmounted by a simple marker on which were carved the words:

  JAMES HENRY CHRISTIAN

  1830-1866

  THIS WAS A MAN

  Benedict was looking as casual as hell when he rode back to the trail five minutes later. Brazos mounted up and sat staring at him, not saying a word. After a full half-minute, Benedict was forced to say, “Well, what’s eating you?”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Beatin’ around a berry bush never boils any beans, Yank. I seen you comin’ out of the undertaker’s twice yesterday, but I never thought nothin’ of it until I just seen Christian’s grave.” He paused then said quietly, “This was a man. Who’s words are they, Yank?”

  Benedict dropped his air of pretence, and there was a warmth in his handsome face as he looked across at the little Boothill lying quiet under the morning sun.

  “A gentleman named William Shakespeare, Reb. He understood men like Doc Christian.”

  And maybe he was slowly beginning to understand a man like Duke Benedict, Hank Brazos reflected, as they turned their backs on Harmony and rode out.

  About the Author

  E. Jefferson Clay was just one of many pseudonyms used by New South Wales-born Paul Wheelahan (1930-2018). Starting off as a comic-book writer/illustrator, Paul created The Panther and The Raven before moving on to a long and distinguished career as a western writer. Under the names Emerson Dodge, Brett McKinley, E. Jefferson Clay, Ben Jefferson and others, he penned more than 800 westerns and could, at his height, turn out a full-length western in just four days.

  The son of a mounted policeman, Paul initially worked as a powder monkey on the Oaky River Dam project. By 1955, however, he was drawing Davy Crockett—Frontier Scout. In 1963 he began his long association with Australian publisher Cleveland Pty. Co. Ltd. As prolific as he was as a western writer, however, he also managed to write for TV, creating shows like Runaways and contributing scripts to perennial favorites like A Country Practice. At the time of his death, in December 2018, he was writing his autobiography, Never Ride Back … which was also the title of his very first western.

  You can read more about Paul here.

  The Benedict and Brazos Series by E. Jefferson Clay

  Aces Wild

  A Badge for Brazos

  … And more to come every month!

  But the adventure doesn’t end here …

  Join us for more first-class, action-packed books.

  Regular updates feature on our website and blog

  The Adventures continue…