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  Accused of stagecoach robbery, Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos had no choice but to run for their lives. It was just plain bad fortune that in so doing they ran smack into a wagon train heading across the desert for a mining town called Tarbuck.

  The wagon train was no ordinary outfit. It was made up of forty women, all bound for Tarbuck to meet the men they’d agreed by mail to marry.

  Big Rosie Moriarty immediately took a shine to Brazos … but Benedict’s attention was taken by the beautiful Libby Blue.

  There was just one problem.

  A kill-crazy outlaw called Kain Ketchell had broken out of prison with one goal in mind – to kill Libby, the woman he blamed for his arrest and incarceration. And nobody killed like Ketchell!

  BENEDICT AND BRAZOS 25: NOBODY KILLS LIKE KETCHELL

  By E. Jefferson Clay

  First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  © 2021 by Piccadilly Publishing

  First Electronic Edition: October 2021

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

  Chapter One – The Killing Machine

  A DARK COACH hitched to two black horses stood in the driving rain at the corner of Chimney Cliff’s Oxbend and Gulliver Streets a few doors along from Jackson’s Funeral Parlor. It could have been a funeral coach judging from its somber appearance. But it wasn’t.

  The sodden horses had their heads bowed in bleak submission to the elements. The vehicle’s running lights burned weakly, but the interior was dark. Cigar smoke drifted from the half-open windows.

  Ed Winter sat in one corner of the coach facing the bank that would be robbed when Wainright and the others got through eating at the Silver Spoon. Winter, a new man in the outlaw band that had once been bossed by the notorious Kain Ketchell, couldn’t understand how anyone could eat at a time like this, even allowing that twenty-four hours had passed since their last meal. Winter’s insides were a solid knot of tension beneath his shabby leather coat. He had never felt less like eating in his life.

  Trig Alta sat opposite, watching the dim lights of the eatery as he probed his teeth with a worn whalebone toothpick. The owlhoot veteran looked huge in a belted army greatcoat and a white ten-gallon hat slanted at an angle over his mean yellow eyes. Even his pock-scarred face looked oversized, and the hand holding the cigar looked strong enough to crush bean cans. In contrast to Winter, the giant badman was totally relaxed; this was old stuff for dangerous Trig Alta.

  A towering, broad-shouldered drunk staggered past. His battered Stetson was pulled low, completely concealing his features.

  The drunk stopped abruptly, leaned against a wheel and gave himself over to the luxury of a hacking, lung-clearing cough. The horses started to fidget.

  Trig Alta lifted the curtain and said, “Move along, rumdum!”

  The drunk turned. “It’s a free country, horse-face!”

  “I said move.”

  “Make me!”

  Alta swung the coach door open, then grimaced as the rain hit him. Sliding back into his seat, he jerked his thumb at Winter. “Get rid of the clown.”

  Winter stepped down and moved quickly around the horses. He was a short, thick-set man with a muscular spring to his step. Alta saw him approach the drunk, then a short body punch dropped Winter as if he’d been shot.

  With a curse, Trig Alta reefed the coach door open and leaped down, a yard-wide Hercules in a massive army greatcoat, ready to teach a drunk a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a lifetime.

  The drunk slewed around, then lurched towards him. Alta was cocking his fists when something odd about the motionless Winter caught his eye. He stared and saw that Winter’s chest was a mass of glistening crimson.

  Big Trig Alta knew then that this was no drunk. Too late he saw something glitter in the stranger’s lightning-fast right hand. Then cold steel entered his heart.

  His life rushing away on a black tide, Trig Alta stood frozen, staring into the satanic face a bare inch from his own. Recognition hit him as he went spinning into eternity. “It can’t be ... it can’t be ...”

  Ketchell caught the slumping hulk in his powerful arms and bundled it inside the coach with ridiculous ease. Two towners were coming along the walk as he went back for Winter.

  “Hey, here we go, pard,” he chuckled as he heaved the corpse erect. “Have you home in no time, and then it’s a gallon of black coffee for you.”

  “Drunken louts,” one of the citizens sniffed.

  “They’ll be sorry in the morning,” his companion righteously opined—happily oblivious that two of the infamous Wainright gang were forever beyond regret, sorrow, lust and greed.

  The coach door slammed on the dead. Then, getting the canvas wrapped rifle he had stashed against the back wheel, the killer padded along the sodden walk in the direction of the Silver Spoon.

  The six outlaws were just starting on dessert under the eatery’s polished brass lamps when Kain Ketchell burst into the little room carrying the sawn-off Winchester repeater.

  Beck Bogard and Jim Cooper died even before they realized what was happening.

  The killer swung the smoking muzzle in the quest for more kills as Bob Seegar screamed, “It’s Ketchell!” and snatched at his shotgun propped against the table. Then, hit twice in the chest, Seegar skittered against the ashen-faced King Crimson, ruining whatever chance that badman might have had of getting his .45 Peacemaker clear.

  Ketchell shot Crimson between the eyes.

  Gangling Dan Montrose had been at the table when Ketchell exploded into the room; but, bending to retrieve a dropped cigar, he had escaped the first blasts of fatal lead. With bodies thudding down all about him, Montrose hurled himself behind the fragile cover of an overturned table, hauled out his Colt and got one shot away.

  Normally, Montrose was a most reliable shot. But this was no normal situation. His bullet howled a good twelve inches clear of Kain Ketchell’s broad-boned face and demolished the big plate glass front window that was the Silver Spoon’s special pride. Then the table erupted under a blistering scythe of rifle bullets and Montrose rolled onto his back, his face shot away.

  The eighth man was Bo Wainright, the top Judas himself.

  A flicker of movement in the corner of his eye sent Ketchell dropping low as a Colt churned from behind the servery doorway. Stunned as much by the sight of Ketchell as he was by the incredible slaughter, slab-faced Bo Wainright had gained cover with a desperate leap, but had been too dazed and bewildered to open up until now.

  The bullet furrowed Ketchell’s left shoulder, but he didn’t flinch. His first shot hit Wainright in the chest and he grunted in satisfaction. Then his mouth worked and he started pumping shot after shot into Wainright’s heavy body until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and Bo Wainright was a torn and bloody thing against the doorway.

  His face blank now, Ketchell uncoiled to his feet and walked to the nearest table. Picking up a heavy lamp, he hurled it with all his
strength at Wainright’s body. The lamp exploded and flames licked at the window drapes. The short order cook who had been cringing behind his stove since the first shot cracked out, screamed, then threw caution to the winds and dashed for the rear door, expecting a bullet in the back from the mad-dog killer’s six-gun with every plunging stride.

  But the last shot had been fired. Judases were the quarry that had brought Kain Ketchell to Chimney Cliff after his bloody break-out from Starkwater Penitentiary. Now, with eight Judases dead, he had no interest in short order cooks.

  A short time later, the killer forked his chestnut stallion in a darkened back street and touched its flanks with steel. In another five minutes he had his mount loping across Dunstan’s Hill west of town. Far behind, the Silver Spoon Eatery was a towering pillar of cinders, smoke and flames.

  “Hold it right there, pilgrim!”

  Mac Doobie wasn’t much happier than the next man, but the deep voice that seemed to come from nowhere as he made his slow way home down gloomy Cayuse Alley, brought him around with a gasp, his hand going clumsily towards his six-gun.

  A towering shadow drifted from the abandoned Sunsmoke Feed and Grain Barn, then a hard finger prodded him in the chest with the authority of a gun barrel.

  “Relax, pilgrim. All I want is a word or two with you.”

  Doobie took his hand away from his gun butt and swallowed painfully, none too reassured. A portly little card dealer from Sunsmoke’s Wagon Wheel Saloon, he usually made his way home along well-lit West Street. Tonight, however, because of the rain that had been soaking all the Dakota Territory since sundown, he had elected to take a short-cut through the alley. He was wishing he’d taken the long, wet way home now as he peered up at the dim face and battered hat outlined against the stormy sky.

  “What—what can I do for you, stranger?” He knew the giant was a stranger, even if he couldn’t see him clearly. A dealer’s business was to know every man in town, and Mac Doobie certainly wouldn’t have forgotten a set of shoulders like that.

  “First I need a light.”

  Doobie fumbled for his matches. The stranger took them with a grunt, cracked a match on a thumbnail and held it to the Bull Durham cigarette dangling from his lips. Mac Doobie found himself staring at a face that wasn’t easy to forget.

  It was a broad face that was at the one time youthful and rugged. The young giant’s skin was burned a deep bronze and his shaggy, collar-length hair was the color of new rope. There were little scars about the eyes and mouth. From beneath heavy blond brows, bright blue eyes watched him over the dying match flare.

  The stranger returned the matches and exhaled a great gust of smoke. “I’m lookin’ for a feller, pilgrim.” His voice was pure Texas, soft now as he rested his weight on one out-thrust hip and fingered his battered hat back. “I hear tell you know him.”

  “I ... I do?”

  “Feller by the name of Claydell.”

  Doobie gulped. “Stacey Claydell?”

  “That’s the party. He still in town?”

  His breath tight and constricted in his throat, Doobie suddenly had a hunch who this giant stranger might be, and he didn’t need any part of him.

  “Sorry, stranger ... I—I’m just a dealer, and customers are only shirts and faces to me. I don’t know who—”

  A powerful hand seized his shirtfront and screwed it up tightly around his throat, half choking him. He was hauled up onto his toes until the big brown face was but inches from his own.

  “Claydell has been here, pilgrim. I know on account of me and my pard followed the no-account here from Durant. He left Durant about ten minutes afore we found out that he’d rung a marked deck in on my pard and cleaned him of two hundred iron men. Now, as soon as I started askin’ after him here, folks started tellin’ me as how Claydell and you used to work the riverboats together afore the war, so I figured Stacey might have looked you up when he hit town.” The powerful hand gave him a shake. “I still reckon it, short stuff, on account of you’re shakin’ like an aspen clump.”

  Under circumstances more conducive to light conversation, Doobie might well have argued that any one-hundred-and-fifty pound dealer who found himself hauled onto his toes by a two-hundred-and-fifty pound stranger in a dark alleyway, might shake without necessarily being driven by guilt. But Doobie was too scared to attempt any verbal hedging now as he stared into chilling blue eyes.

  “Are you Benedict or Brazos?” he managed to get out.

  “Hank Brazos, pilgrim. So Claydell did see you, huh?”

  “Yes. He ... he came to the Wagon Wheel just on dark and asked if I could buy him a stage ticket while he lay low. He was excited and scared. He—he knew you were after him. No real harm in old Stacey, you understand, stranger, but he just never could settle down and play a straight game with any—”

  “You bought him a ticket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where to?”

  “Chad City.”

  “The stage gone yet?”

  “It left about three hours back.”

  “Night stage?”

  “Yes. They drive direct to Welcome, change teams, then head across Raglan Pass and raise the Chad City flats around sunup.”

  At last the powerful hand released his shirt and Doobie gratefully felt his heels touch earth again. Running a finger around his collar, he stared up into Brazos’ hard face which was briefly illuminated as he pulled on his smoke. Then Brazos spun on his heel and strode towards the street.

  Thankful to find himself still alive after one of the most frightening experiences of his life, the pudgy little dealer couldn’t help calling out:

  “Will you be goin’ after Stacey, Mr. Brazos?”

  The giant paused briefly against the misting glow of the street-light. “You know it,” his soft voice drifted back. Then he was gone, leaving Mac Doobie to make his way home on the shakiest pair of legs in Sunsmoke.

  Though they had split up on Main Street for the specific purpose of doubling the ground they could cover in the urgent search for Stacey Claydell, big Hank Brazos wasn’t all that surprised to find his flashy trail partner standing dry and out of the rain on the porch of the Sunsmoke Hotel with a girl, who, to Brazos, looked no better than she might be.

  “You know, you beat all, Benedict,” Brazos growled without preamble as he came looming out of the rain, kicking great chunks of mud from his boots and sweeping water from his hat. “You lose our grubstake to a cheat, you sound off about what we’ll do when we run him to ground, and then you loaf about like a gold-plated gentleman of leisure while I get the wettest backside in Dakota—if you’ll pardon me, ma’am.”

  The girl giggled, at the same time appraising the Texan’s Herculean bulk with a professional eye.

  “Oh, I’ve heard lots worse than that in my time,” she assured him. “Duke, you didn’t tell me your friend was so cute.”

  “Cute?” Duke Benedict managed a half-smile. “Undoubtedly cute, Marissa, my lovely, but also a trifle peeved at the moment, I fear. I’m sure you won’t mind running along while we, er, confer?”

  The girl pouted, but then she brightened when Benedict assured her that he would catch up with her later at the Wagon Wheel. She kissed his cheek, ran a fingernail lightly down Brazos’ bare chest where his unbuttoned purple shirt gaped wide, then headed saloonwards with a provocative roll of nicely rounded hips.

  Brazos’ heavy jaw sagged as he watched her walk away. Then he shook his head. “How do you do it, Benedict? I swear, if we were stranded atop Pike’s Peak in the middle of a Blue Norther in January, you’d find some female hidin’ in a holler tree or somethin’.”

  Duke Benedict smiled easily as he rested a well-tailored shoulder against an upright and took out his silver cigar case. “They call it technique, Johnny Reb,” he said in the superior tone he reserved for such occasions. “Any time you feel like a few lessons, I’d be happy to oblige.”

  A quick blush crossed the Texan’s face. When it came to womenfolk, he an
d Benedict were more at odds than they were about anything else. And that covered a lot of ground for two men of totally divergent background, education, character, talent and style.

  “Any time you want a lesson on how a lady should be treated, you come to me, Romeo,” Brazos retorted.

  Benedict struck a match, the glow lifting his brilliantly colored bed-of-flowers vest from the gloom and gleaming on the white handles of his twin Peacemakers.

  “You consider Marissa a lady?” he said mockingly. “Glory—was I ever that young and innocent ...?” He applied the light to the Cuban and then turned serious. “Any luck, Reb?”

  Brazos sighed. No matter how much in the right he might be, Duke Benedict was invariably the winner in a verbal interchange, so he decided to quit before he lost too much ground.

  “I tracked down that Doobie pilgrim,” he said. “Claydell took the night stage for Chad City.”

  Though Benedict’s white teeth flashed in a smile, there was a hard glitter in his steel-gray eyes as he straightened and clapped Brazos on the shoulder.

  “Fine work, Reb. I knew I could count on you. Well, let’s not shillyshally, man. Go fetch the horses and I’ll just say a brief farewell to Marissa at the Wagon Wheel.”

  “Just a minute,” Brazos growled. “What’s the plan?”

  “Why, we pursue the stage of course. I’m quite sure that with your renowned trailsmanship, it will prove easy enough for you to map out a course whereby we shall be able to run friend Stacey down before he reaches Chad City.”

  Ignoring Benedict’s patronizing tone, Brazos replied, “Stages don’t haul up and deliver nothin’ or nobody out on the trail—even one that happens to be carryin’ a shyster gamblin’ man. Matter of fact, it seems to me that any stage driver worth his feed who sees a pair like you and me come out of the tall and uncut, will take off like his tail was afire. And if Claydell gets to—”

  “Damn it all, Reb, where is your imagination?” Benedict broke in impatiently. “Having gone to all this trouble to run Claydell down, we are certainly not going to be put off by any pettifogging formalities when the time comes.”