A Day for Fools to Die (Benedict & Brazos 30) Page 2

  “Well, mebbe you’re right about that, young Hank,” he ventured. “But I still don’t reckon anybody’s changed as much in them years as you. I always figured it’d take the old man with the scythe to take that sunny smile off your kisser. What happened to that grin of yours, cowboy?”

  “You might ask Sherman that, or Grant,” Brazos replied grimly, fitting foot to stirrup as towners, drawn by the disturbance, began closing in from Trail Street. He nodded emphatically. “Yeah, nothin’ like four years of gettin’ the sand kicked out of you by Union cavalry to take the laugh out of a man ... unless of course it’s Reconstruction.”

  That last word was one that could buy a man an argument anywhere in the South those days, but Shad Martin was far more interested in the man than what he was saying.

  “Boys!” he hollered to the townsmen. “Take a look at who’s showed up after six years, just in time to pull old Shad out of a tight spot.” He gestured. “Say howdy to Hank Brazos!”

  The name meant nothing to some of those gathering around for they had come to the county since the days when old Joe Brazos had been the county’s greatest character, his massive son its smiling strongman. But those who remembered stood staring at the rider in awe but were discouraged by his flinty stare.

  “Big Hank Brazos!” exclaimed blacksmith Lucas Donner. The bearded smithy shot a quick glance at the motionless figure on the street, then at Martin’s bruised face, finally back to the horseman. “What’s been happenin’ here, Shad?” he wanted to know.

  “Nothin’ I couldn’t handle,” supplied Brazos.

  “And that ain’t nothin’ but the simple truth,” Martin confirmed. “Buck Swift tried to roll me for my cash, Lucas, but Hank here dusted him off in jig-time.”

  “Well, ding-dang it, this calls for a celebration,” teamster Griffin Snell insisted, drawing closer to the appaloosa. “You comin’ along to have a welcome home drink with us, Hank Brazos?”

  “Maybe later,” said Brazos. Then he added, “I mean to be here for some time.”

  There was no friendliness in his manner, no sign of pleasure at seeing familiar faces again. Resentment stirred in Lucas Donner as he shook his shaggy head.

  “You sure as hell have changed from the old days, Hank,” he opined.

  “That seems to be the only song they’re singin’ hereabouts these days,” Brazos retorted, lifting his heels from his horse’s side.

  “Ain’t nothin’ but the simple truth though, Hank,” Martin chimed in. “You’ve changed an awful lot ...” Then suddenly uncertain again under the horseman’s intense blue stare, he added lamely; “You’re ... you’re bigger.”

  “Bigger,” Brazos repeated quietly, kicking his horse forward. “Good word.”

  Chapter Two – Town Afraid

  The news that Hank Brazos had come back to Wildhorse caused a stir all the way from the tarpaper shacks of the disposed homesteaders along Bad Blood Creek, clear down the broad length of Trail Street to the town’s western limits at the foothills of the Shoshone Mountains.

  Not that Wildhorse those days was in any way short of subjects for gossip, or indeed violent incidents. Far from it. Lying in the heart of the cattle country, Wildhorse, always a turbulent town for one reason or another, was those days the focal point for something named Reconstruction, the ugliest word in the South.

  To the citizens of Wildhorse, the cattlemen and businessmen, the cowhands and their women, Reconstruction, as the Yankees enforced it, had come to mean something like slavery. The signing of a scrap of paper in Appomattox Courthouse had made victors of one half of the nation and vanquished of the other. However, Reconstruction had not, allegedly, been conceived in vindictiveness. Lincoln had declared again and again that defeat on the battlefield was punishment enough for the rebellious Confederacy. But Lincoln was dead now and the new man in the White House neither knew nor cared that Reconstruction, in remote Texas, had become the excuse for suppression of a defeated people.

  So Wildhorse, Texas, in the summer of ’67, was anything but a sleepy rural backwater, but even so there was enough about young Hank Brazos and the dramatic manner of his return home to push Reconstruction into the background and give the citizens a fresh topic of conversation the following day. They would have been happy to see another boy back home from the war but having encountered Brazos again in the Three Dimes the previous night, old Flint Calvert decided that “mebbe it would’ve been best if thet young feller had stayed away fer keeps.”

  Calvert, as Wildhorse’s leading gossip, made his observation next afternoon around the cracker barrel in Shad Martin’s store.

  “Why do you figure he came back at all, Flint?” asked the storekeeper.

  “Trouble,” Flint decided after due consideration.

  Trouble, Flint’s audience reflected solemnly. Their memories of Joe Brazos’ son were those of a rambling young rangeland giant who, at seventeen, was already regarded as the strongest man in the county. Some of those seated around Martin’s cracker barrel that afternoon had been on Trail Street that memorable day six years ago when Hank Brazos and some seventeen other young men had ridden off for Austin to join the Texas Brigade with high hopes of victory and brave smiles.

  Hank Brazos had been the biggest man in the cavalcade and in time his deeds had become the best known. Before a year’s fighting was done, Brazos’ war record had firmly established him as the hero of Wildhorse County, and there had been much lamenting when he hadn’t returned home with the pitifully few survivors of the Brigade after the war. A year had dimmed the high sentiments with which a conquered people had welcomed home its brave fighting men, but there was always a hero’s welcome awaiting Henry Houston Brazos whenever he might choose to return.

  Not anymore. The subject of a welcome home celebration hadn’t even been broached to the big young man who’d ridden out of nowhere into Trail Street last night. The man who’d put Buck Swift in Doc Winslow’s hospital obviously hadn’t come home to steep himself in nostalgia. A man only had to look into this strangely changed Hank Brazos’ frosty blue eyes to know that, as usual, old Flint’s assessments were dead on target.

  Trouble, the big man’s manner spelt out ... and Wildhorse considered itself a town that had had more than its share of that commodity of late without Joe Brazos’ son turning up to add to it.

  And while he was being discussed from one end of town to the other, the subject of all this talk strolled into Shad’s store and ordered two boxes of .45 shells.

  The tobacco-chawing company fell silent, staring. “Bigger,” was Shad Martin’s description of his young Samaritan from Coyote Street, and they saw immediately that the word fitted neatly.

  Hank was a big man, by any standards, over six feet tall with massive shoulders. Even before he’d gone to war, they had called him the Frog Hollow giant and he’d put on a lot of beef since then, most of it in the chest and shoulders. He wore a faded purple shirt, and shotgun chaps over his crumpled Levi’s and sported a single Colt in holster worn on a hand-tooled Mexican gunbelt.

  Yet, despite his size, it was Brazos’ face that drew attention most. It was a face that seemed to have been stamped out of bronze, hard and humorless. Hair and brows were sun-bleached blond and his eyes were of the clearest, coldest blue as he looked them over as though they were total strangers. Standing there relaxed and unmoving as Martin hustled about to fill his order, he looked indeed like trouble with a capital T.

  “That damned war,” muttered Conway Wintergreen, “turned boys into old men.”

  “T’ain’t the war that done most damage, but what come after,” insisted Joe Harris, one of the town’s most vociferous anti-Reconstructionists. And then to the alarm of his companions, little Joe called out, “Hey, Brazos, you hear anythin’ about ’em sendin’ in the cavalry to tidy things up hereabouts?”

  Brazos pocketed his shells and change, then came towards them.

  “No, I never,” he said quietly, the light sheening on the harmo
nica slung about his neck on a rawhide thong. “There’s been talk of that?”

  “Some,” Harris conceded. “Sure is a bad thing when somebody licks you once, then starts talkin’ of doin’ it again on account everybody don’t toe the line like so many damned cavalrymen.”

  “Here’s one here that won’t be toein’ any stinkin’ Yankee line, old man.”

  Hank’s words brought a keener look to the eyes of his audience as he tossed a coin and caught it.

  “Reckon you don’t have no love for them Federals, eh, Hank?” Shad Martin asked, rejoining the circle.

  “I never signed no stinkin’ paper at Appomattox,” came the flinty reply. “I never admitted to nobody I was licked, least of all to no dirty Reconstructionist.”

  A silence fell. That sort of talk was dangerous these days, yet those who heard it, heard Brazos’ harsh declaration with pleasure. For here was a battle-honored veteran standing before them saying openly and fearlessly, what they all believed.

  The silence held, and then Harris was about to speak again when silver haired Doc Winslow came in to join them.

  Wildhorse’s medic scowled when he saw Brazos, and came on more slowly to the barrel.

  “Howdy, Doc,” said Flint Calvert. “Kinda late today ain’t you?”

  Winslow looked steadily up at Brazos. “I’d have been along sooner, only Swift started bringin’ up blood again.”

  “He’s lucky he’s not bringin’ up lead, Doc,” Brazos retorted, turning to go. “Next time he could be.”

  “I doubt there’ll be a next time,” Winslow called after him. “I reckon that man’s best days are behind him, thanks to you, boy.”

  Brazos paused in the doorway, head slightly bent to avoid the lintel. “Then all I can say is that his best were none too good, Doc ... mebbe like a lot of the yeller-belly Yankee-lovers in this man’s town.”

  He spoke to his dog and they were gone.

  Talk was resumed around the cracker barrel and then broke off suddenly. Getting quickly to their feet, the townsmen stared out as horsemen approached. Here in force was the flower of Alamo Ranch, the biggest in the county. Amongst the party were some old saddle partners of Hank Brazos, now working for Chard Ringerman, and riding at their head, Hayes Denham.

  Denham, a big shambling man with wide, sloping shoulders, was ramrod of the cattle outfit, a gun-quick, two-fisted man with a reputation for toughness. Denham, they thought, looked mighty tight-lipped, and not for a moment did his hard stare leave the Three Dimes porch. It wasn’t until they made out the big figure of Brazos lounging in the shadow of the saloon’s porch overhang that they guessed at the reason for the Alamo riders’ arrival and Hayes Denham’s plainly dirty mood.

  “Judas,” Shad Martin said as the cavalcade of horsemen jingled past, “we should have known Denham would come snortin’ in sooner or later, him and Buck Swift bein’ so damned thick and all.” His faded blue eyes brightened as he watched Brazos lazily touch a light to a cigarette, then flicked the match towards the approaching horsemen. “Boys, I calculate as how we’re about to see ourselves some fireworks.”

  Chapter Three – Trail Street Fury

  Through a drifting cloud of cigarette smoke, Hank Brazos watched the riders draw up before him in a line. Dust from the hoofs fogged past him, carried on a hot breeze. Saddle leather creaked loud in the silence, and his dog Bullpup’s neck-hair bristled as though he too felt the tension in the air.

  “Easy, boy,” Brazos murmured, and replaced his cigarette between his lips and moved the edge of his shoulder to a more comfortable position against the porch upright.

  Hayes Denham rested his hands on his saddle horn and hunched his heavy shoulders. A pair of agate colored eyes surveyed Brazos with hostility.

  On the ramrod’s right, cowboy Cory Wellsmore and Ryan George wore carefully expressionless faces. They had known Brazos in the past, but hadn’t been a member of his wild bunch as had several present-day Alamo riders, including Holly Goffin. Newer hands, Mace Morton and Frank Carr, taking their first look at Goffin’s old partner, were openly curious.

  Holly Goffin sat a flashy palomino on Denham’s left side, and was the only one of the six who wore a smile. Goffin was of Brazos’ own age, a trim, well-built man a little below average height but with athletic shoulders and narrow waist. His face was lean, good looking and tanned, with guileless brown eyes. He dressed quietly, like a cowboy, but the tied-down Colt and the fluent grace with which he dismounted strongly hinted at what Holly Goffin did best.

  “Howdy, Hank,” he smiled, mounting the steps.

  “Holly.”

  Goffin hesitated just a moment, then extended his hand. Brazos looked at the hand, then engulfed it in his big fist. Goffin’s sunny smile broadened and he clapped the bigger man on the shoulder.

  “Well, damned if it isn’t real good to see you back home, Hank,” he drawled amiably. “Where the hell have you been since the shootin’ stopped?”

  “Here and there.” Brazos inclined his head at the brooding figure of Denham. “Who’s your pard, Holly?”

  “Meet Hayes Denham, ramrod of Alamo,” Goffin said, gesturing. “Hayes, say howdy to my old amigo, Hank Brazos.”

  Sensing trouble, Brazos gave no acknowledgment of the introduction. Denham grunted and dismounted, passing the reins to Cory Wellsmore. The way Wellsmore took the lines showed to Brazos that big Denham was a man of some authority. Tough too, if he were any judge.

  Denham hitched at his gunbelt and jerked his chin at Goffin, who moved to one side. Then he said flatly, “What brings you back to Wildhorse, Brazos?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Now take it easy, boys,” Holly Goffin put in, but Denham motioned him to silence.

  “I’ll handle this, Holly,” the ramrod said. The agate eyes drilled into Brazos. “You beat up a friend of mine last night, Brazos,” he said. “That don’t pleasure me none at all.”

  “So that’s the way it blows,” Brazos drawled. He’d set out to make waves in the waterhole and it seemed he was succeeding already. He rubbed Bullpup’s back with a scuffed range boot and added lazily, “Well, I’ll allow I might have roughed that gent up some. But I’m peculiar that way on account I’ve never had no patience with dirty, two-bit thieves no how.” The blue eyes challenged Denham. “The same goes for any friend of any dirty two-bit thief come to that.”

  A flush suffused Denham’s thick neck and began moving slowly up over his face. The mounted Alamo riders glanced nervously from Denham to Brazos and back to Goffin. Holly Goffin was chewing a straw and looking over the street as though either bored or indifferent to what was building up.

  And what was very plainly building up under the Three Dimes’ overhang, was a head of steam that was bound to blow. “You’ve got a big mouth there, mister,” Denham grated.

  “I’m a big man,” Brazos replied nonchalantly.

  “I’ve seen bigger.”

  “Do tell. For instance?”

  “You’re lookin’ at him.”

  “You don’t say.”

  The Alamo ramrod drew in a deep breath. “Mister, I didn’t come to town to trade words with any saddlebum. I heard Buck Swift got himself worked over, heard who done it then heard a few more things about you from Holly and the boys here. Now, like I said, I don’t like seein’ friends of mine get hurt, but I was prepared to give you a lookin’ over before I made up my mind about Buck. I don’t like what I see, saddlebum, and I’m tellin’ you I reckon the wisest thing for you to do is ride, and take your big mouth with you.”

  “You’re still talkin’ like you were bigger than me, Denham.”

  Denham’s flush deepened. “I boss thirty men, pilgrim, includin’ some of the best gun-toters in the county. By my book, that makes me the biggest man around.”

  “I see we got different ideas about what makes a man big,” Brazos drawled. “You’ve got a passel of boys behind you. Well, I had some boys in the old days back h
ere, Denham, but I sure as hell never called on ’em when I was bracin’ a man.” Brazos’ eyes flicked over the horsemen then came to rest on Goffin. “Where do you stand in this turkey-shoot, Holly?” he demanded.

  Holly Goffin smiled, a picture of lazy grace as he leant against an upright. “You’re right in what you just said, amigo. But you seem to have forgot that I just never did take to bein’ barked at.”

  The warning was there, a steel fist in a velvet glove. And Hank Brazos was quick to heed it, for few knew better than he that Holly Goffin feared no man who walked.

  “That’s tellin’ him, Holly,” said Denham with gruff approval.

  “I wasn’t tellin’ him nothin’, Hayes,” Goffin replied. “Just remindin’ an old pard that we’re still pards is all. Right, Hank?”

  “I reckon,” Brazos confirmed. “You ride for Denham’s outfit, Holly. Does that mean you’re here with him to back his play?”

  “This is personal between you and Hayes, Hank,” Goffin told him. “Me and the boys just come along for the ride.”

  The mounted men looked uncertain, but before they could comment, big Denham claimed the floor again.

  “This is beginnin’ to sound like an old woman’s meetin’,” he growled. “So I’ll say it just once more, Brazos—I want you gone. This place’s got more troubles than any six counties you can name, and we’re not lookin’ to buy more. That’s your reason, if you reckon you got one comin’. So there it is, now what’s your answer?”

  “Go fry.”

  Denham scowled. His heavy right hand went snaking towards his hip. But Brazos’ hand was already wrapped around the thorn wood grip of his .45, his big body coiled for action.

  “Don’t try it, Denham!” he warned.

  Denham looked undecided for a moment, and then Holly Goffin was moving forward, big rowel spurs jingling. “Better do like he says, Hayes.”