Thunder of Eagles Read online

  “On the count of three,” Titus said. Then he counted aloud. “One, two, three!”

  Titus pushed the door open quickly; then he and his two brothers rushed into the parlor.

  “What the hell?” Cletus said, turning toward the front door as the three lawmen burst in. “What are you—”

  For a moment, it looked as if he was going to reach for his gun, but before he could do so, Titus Calhoun stepped up to him and brought his pistol down sharply on Cletus’s head. Cletus went down.

  “What did you do to my brother?” Ray shouted angrily, getting up from the couch.

  “Easy, there, big man!” Calhoun said, swinging his pistol toward Ray. “You’re too damn big for me to pistol-whip. I’d have to shoot you.”

  “No,” Ray said, sitting back down and putting his hands up. “No, there ain’t no need for you to be doin’ anything like that.”

  “Get Maggie in here,” Titus ordered.

  Travis stepped out on the front porch to call out to Maggie. When she came inside, she was no longer holding the handkerchief to her face and the cut, such as it was, was no longer bleeding.

  “Did they do any damage to your place?” Marshal Calhoun asked.

  Maggie looked around the parlor, then shook her head. “Nothin’ that I can see,” she said.

  “Which one of them cut you?”

  “I’m not sure which one it was,” Maggie said. “But I think it was him.” She pointed to Deke Mathers.

  “I didn’t do no such thing!” Mathers said.

  “Or it could’ve been him,” she said, pointing to Reeder, “Or him,” she added, pointing to Cletus, who was just now beginning to get up.

  “Damn, Maggie, you’ve pointed to everyone but Ray. Are you sure it wasn’t Ray?”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t him,” Maggie said. “I would have remembered if it was him.”

  By now, the five other women had come downstairs. Even if Titus did not know what kind of an establishment this was, he would have been able to tell by the makeup and dress, or more accurately the undress, of the women.

  “Were any of you women hurt?” Titus asked.

  “No,” one of them answered. “We were scared, but we weren’t hurt.”

  “Did any of you see which one of them cut Maggie?”

  The women all looked at each other, then shrugged.

  “None of us seen it,” the oldest of the bunch said. She looked nearly forty, though Titus knew for a fact that she was not yet thirty. The dissipation of her occupation had taken a severe toll on what had once been a very pretty young girl.

  “Well, pick one of them,” Titus said. “I can’t make an arrest unless you press charges.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to do that,” Maggie said.

  “You aren’t going to do what?”

  “I’m not going to press charges,” she said.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I’m trying to run a business here, Marshal,” Maggie said. “If I pressed charges every time someone got a little rowdy, I wouldn’t have any customers.”

  “Ha!” Cletus said. “I reckon that means you ain’t got nothin’ on us. So, why don’t you just go on back to mar-shalin’ and leave us alone.”

  “Get out of here,” Calhoun said.

  “We’re goin’, we’re goin’,” Cletus said. “Come on, boys, let’s go over to the Hog Waller. The girls over there ain’t as pretty, but they’re a hell of a lot more friendly.”

  “No,” Titus said.

  “No? What do you mean, no? No what?”

  “No, you aren’t goin’ over to the Hog Waller,” Titus said. “When I told you to get out of here, I mean go on back to your ranch. I don’t want you in my town tonight.”

  “You got no right to run us out of town,” Cletus complained.

  “You’ll either leave town, or spend the night in jail,” Titus said.

  “On what charges?” Cletus asked. “You already heard Maggie say she wasn’t going to press no charges.”

  “I’ll press charges myself.”

  “Oh, yeah? And just what would those charges be?”

  “I would charge you with pissing me off,” Titus said. “Now, go on, get!”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Titus looked over at Ray. “There ain’t neither one of you got as much sense as your youngest brother. But Billy isn’t here, and you seem to be a little smarter than Cletus. Get him out of here, Ray. Get him out of here, or I’ll throw his ass in jail, then shoot him in the middle of the night for trying to escape.”

  “What?” Cletus shouted. “Ray, did you hear what that son of a bitch just said?”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Ray replied. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, I—”

  That was as far as Cletus got before Titus pointed his pistol at Cletus, then pulled back the hammer. The clicking sound of the pistol being cocked stopped Cletus in mid-sentence.

  “Come on, Cletus,” Ray said. “Let’s go.”

  With his eyes glaring hatred at Marshal Calhoun and his two brothers, Cletus reluctantly followed his own brother outside.

  Titus, Travis, and Troy went out on the front porch with them, then watched them mount up and ride away, amidst the cheers and catcalls of the crowd gathered there.

  “Troy, Travis, get yourselves a rifle,” Titus said. “If any one of those men come back into town tonight, shoot them on sight.”

  “Gladly,” Travis said.

  “Thank you, Marshal,” Maggie said. She smiled. “I thank all three of you. In fact, you three have one free visit coming,” she added. “You can choose any girl you want.”

  Overhearing Maggie’s offer, the men in the crowd laughed out loud.

  “What about us, Maggie?” one of the men called. “Don’t we get a free visit?”

  “Sure,” Maggie said.

  “Great!”

  “When pigs fly,” Maggie added, and her comment was met with good-natured laughter. “Come on in, boys,” she said. “We’re open for business again.”

  Titus watched several of the men go back inside, but there were still several milling about on the street outside the whorehouse.

  “All right, boys, the show’s over,” Titus said. “Let’s break it up. Go on back about your business, unless going to see one of Maggie’s whores is your business.”

  When the crowd broke up, Titus, Travis, and Troy started back down toward the marshal’s office, where Travis and Troy could get a long gun for the rest of the night’s patrol.

  “Hey, Troy, did you give Maggie’s offer a thought?” Travis asked.

  “Are you kidding? Lucy would kill me. If fact, if she even hears the offer was made, she’ll be on me like a duck on a june bug.”

  “Damn,” Travis said, laughing. “What do you think, Titus? Is our brother henpecked or what?”

  “He doesn’t have to worry about Lucy,” Titus said. “If I caught him taking Maggie up on her offer, cheatin’ on a good woman like Lucy, I’d bust his head myself.”

  The three brothers laughed and joked as they walked down the middle of the street. The sounds of merriment from the two saloons, loud and raucous from the Hog Waller, and a bit more reserved from the Golden Nugget, told them that the town was having another normal night.

  Chapter Five

  Over the last twenty-five years, Ike Clinton had bought, stolen, and bullied his way onto one hundred thousand acres of good grazing land. He did this by the sweat of his own brow, and with the blood of the Mexicans and Indians who got in his way. With a sense of irony, he named his ranch La Soga Larga, or “The Long Rope,” a tacit admission that he wasn’t always too careful about whose calves he rounded up for branding.

  His wife, Martha, had been appalled by her husband’s ruthlessness and greed, but she was a good woman who would never think to leave her husband, or to tell anyone else of his misdeeds. Adhering to the Biblical injunction to honor and obey her husband, she lived her short married life witho
ut complaint, no more than a shadow within the shadows. Martha died when the youngest of her three children, Billy, was five years old.

  She didn’t live to see any of her sons grow up, and they, especially Ray and Cletus, were the worse for it. Perhaps the ameliorating influence of a good mother would have made Ray and Cletus good men instead of the pompous bullies they became. Billy, everyone agreed, was made of better stuff.

  Having invited all the neighboring ranchers over for a meeting, Ike was now standing by the liquor cabinet, leaning back against the wall, looking out over the gathering. His arms were folded across his chest, and his hat was pushed back on his head. He was smoking a thin cheroot as he watched the others arrive.

  “Ike, what’s all the secrecy? I mean, why are we meeting here, instead of at the Morning Star at our usual time?” one of the ranchers asked.

  “I reckon enough of you came to take care of what we need to take care of,” Ike said. “So, if you’ll all get settled, we’ll get started.”

  While waiting for the meeting to start, the visiting ranchers had gathered into conversational groupings to exchange pleasantries and information. With Ike’s call to them, the little groups broke up and everyone started looking for a place to sit. Ike waited until all were settled and quiet before he continued.

  “I’m sure that by now nearly all of you have met a fella in town by the name of Wade Garrison,” Ike started.

  “Garrison, yeah, I know who he is,” one of the other ranchers said. “He’s a pretty nice fella.”

  “Yeah, he’s a real nice fella,” one of the other ranchers put in.

  “Got hisself a real pretty daughter, too.”

  “Tell you what, George, you keep that up and Louise is likely to use a frying pan to knock out what few teeth you got left,” one of the others said, and all laughed.

  Ike, perceiving that the meeting was getting out of control, held up his hands to call for quiet.

  “We ain’t here to talk about Garrison’s pretty daughter,” he said.

  “Well, what are we here to talk about?”

  “The railroad.”

  “The railroad? What railroad?”

  “The one that Wade Garrison is plannin’ on buildin’ between Higbee and La Junta,” Ike said.

  A couple of the ranchers let out a whoop of joy.

  “No kiddin’?” one of them said. “We’re gettin’ us a railroad? Why, that’s wonderful news!”

  “No, it ain’t good,” Ike said. “It ain’t no good a’tall. We got to stop this from ever happening.”

  The other ranchers looked confused.

  “Now, why in the Sam Hill would this be a bad thing?” a rancher named Phillips asked. “If we could take our cows into Higbee, instead of La Junta or Benton, think how much easier that would be.”

  “And think how much money it’ll cost us,” Ike said. “Don’t you see? If Garrison gets control of the railroad, he can hold us up for any amount he wants.”

  “What makes you think he would do that?” a rancher named Warren asked. “The other railroads don’t do such a thing.”

  “All the other railroads already have the tracks laid and their routes formed. They make enough money they don’t need to hold us up. It’s different with Garrison. He’s tryin’ to do all this on his own. It’s costin’ him a ton of money and trust me, he’s goin’ to be wantin’ to get it all back from us. He’ll hold us up for as much as he can get from us.”

  “Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that,” Warren said. “It could be you are right.”

  “You say we have to stop him?” Phillips asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, my question is, how do you plan to do that?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” Ike said. “He is going to have to have cattle to ship, in order to make a profit. All we have to do is deny him cattle to ship. If we don’t ship any of our cattle—if we don’t use the railroad for freight, he’ll be done for. A railroad can’t make it on just passengers.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” Warren said.

  “Mr. Clinton, I have to ask this. Suppose he goes ahead and builds the railroad,” a man named Lassiter said. “How far are you willin’ to go to stop it?”

  “If he finds out that we are all determined not to use it, he won’t build it. He’s not going to just throw his money away.”

  “But what if he does start buildin’ it, how far are we goin’ to go to stop it?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when it happens,” Ike said.

  Higbee

  Wade Garrison was a former general in the Army of the Confederacy. Before the war, he had been a major in the United States Army, a graduate of West Point with a degree in engineering. He had built railroads for the army; now he was planning to build a railroad for himself.

  “These are damn good doughnuts, General,” Simon Durant said. Durant was a banker from Denver, one of four bankers who were gathered in Garrison’s Higbee office.

  “You’ll have to thank my daughter for that,” Garrison replied. “She made them.”

  “All right, General, you got us all here,” one of the other bankers said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “This,” Garrison said, pointing to a large map that was tacked up on the wall of his office. The map covered Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, and it was crisscrossed with blue lines, and one red line.

  “Gentlemen, on this map, you see the railroads that serve our fair state, and in fact, connect our state with both coasts. Those railroads are represented by the blue lines. I propose to add to that network by building the CNM&T from La Junta, Colorado, to Big Spring, Texas,” Garrison said. “On the map, the CNM&T is represented by this red line.”

  “The CNM&T?” one of the bankers asked.

  “The Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas,” Garrison said. He stepped up to the map. “As you can see, that will open up all of Southeast Colorado, Northeast New Mexico, and Northwest Texas. That would provide service to several thousand miles of country not now served by rail. And the connections at either end, with existing railroads, will mean that we can ship our cattle from here to Chicago, we can import fruit from Florida, or we can buy a ticket to San Francisco or New York and be there within a matter of a few days.”

  “If I might ask a dumb question,” one of the bankers said.

  “Greg, as I used to tell my junior officers, there are no dumb questions,” Garrison replied. He paused for a second, then added, “Just the dumb-assed people who ask them.”

  For a second, the four bankers looked surprised. Then, realizing that it was a joke, they laughed appreciatively.

  “Go ahead, ask,” Garrison said.

  “If you look at that map, you will see that there are very few towns or even settlements along the proposed route. Where will the business come from?”

  “Ah, the railroad will generate its own business,” Garrison said. He pointed to the state of Nebraska. “Gentlemen, when Nebraska was admitted to the Union in 1867, it had a population of just over one hundred thousand people. Today, it boasts over one million. That is a tenfold increase in two decades’ time, and that increase is due to the railroad.” Again, Garrison pointed to the route of the CNM&T Railroad. “Our railroad is covering twice the area of the Nebraska railroads, which should mean at least twice as many people.”

  “You are painting a rosy picture, General,” one of the bankers said. “But let’s get right down to it, shall we? You are going to need financing.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “I’ve worked it out very carefully,” Garrison said, “taking into account right-of-way that must be purchased, as well as right of way that will be provided by grants from the federal and state governments. I have also considered the cost of supplies and labor.”

  “How much?” the banker asked again.

  “Twenty thousand dollars per mile, which means ten million dollars,” Garrison said without blinking an eye.

  “Ten
million dollars?” one of the bankers replied, blanching at the prospect. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Yes, it is,” Garrison said. He smiled. “That’s why I have brought four of you here. I’m not asking you to compete for the loan, I’m asking you to share it. This way, you would only have to come up with two and a half million dollars each.”

  One of the bankers laughed. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the words ‘only’ and ‘two and a half million’ mentioned in the same sentence.”

  The other bankers laughed as well.

  “Gentlemen, I’ve done an economic analysis of ten Western railroads. I had Mr. Denham, publisher of the Higbee Journal, print out the report for me.” He passed out four printed packets, then pointed to a stack of them on the table. “When you go back home, you can take several of these with you to present to your boards. You will see that, in every case, the railroads recouped their investment within the first eighteen months after construction.”

  The bankers began examining the booklets.

  “To secure your cooperation, I am prepared to issue stock, equal to forty-nine-percent ownership of the railroad, to be divided among those who contribute financing, in accordance with the amount of their investment. Gentlemen, within four years, you will double your investment.”

  “I’m in,” one of the bankers said, dropping the booklet on the table. This was C. D. Matthews, of the First Colorado Bank and Trust.

  “Thank you, C.D.,” Garrison said. “For how much?”

  “If nobody else comes in, I’ll take all of it,” C.D. said.

  “Not so fast,” Dan Michaels said. “I’m in as well.”

  “So am I,” Durant said.

  “That leaves you, Percy. Are you in or out?”

  “You think I could have another doughnut?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Garrison said, handing him one of the confections.

  Percy took a bite, then licked the end of his finger. “These sure are good,” he said. “Yes, I’m in.”

  “I’ll be damned,” C.D. said, laughing. “Boys, we’ve just seen a two-and-a-half-million-dollar doughnut.”