A Texas Hill Country Christmas Read online

  The impact jolted the coach enough to make it bounce on its thoroughbraces, and Evelyn lost her balance on the step. She screamed as she toppled forward.

  Porter sprang to catch her, but the collision knocked both of them off their feet. They sprawled in the muddy street. Evelyn let out a cry of dismay.

  Ace saw that from the corner of his eye but couldn’t pay much attention to the happenings because he had his own hands full. Hudson hadn’t dropped the gun. He slashed at Ace’s head with the barrel.

  Ace jerked aside so that the blow didn’t stove in his skull, but it landed on his left shoulder and made pain shoot through that arm for a second before it suddenly went numb.

  His right arm still worked, though. He slammed that fist into Hudson’s midsection as hard as he could. The gunman grunted and bent forward as the blow drove the air out of his lungs.

  Evidently, Hudson was an experienced brawler. He took advantage of his bent-over position to butt the top of his head into Ace’s face. That knocked Ace backward and gave Hudson room to bring his gun to bear. His features were contorted with rage, and as Ace fell back a couple of steps, he realized that Hudson was about to shoot him.

  Before Hudson could pull the trigger, Chance snatched the stage driver’s whip from its socket on the side of the box and brought it down with a flicking motion that wrapped the leather around Hudson’s wrist. Chance jerked the whip back, burning the skin on Hudson’s wrist and making him let go of the gun. It sailed away and landed in the street.

  Hudson bellowed furiously, caught the whip, and yanked Chance toward him. Taken by surprise, Chance didn’t let go of the whip in time. As he stumbled forward, Hudson sprang at him and swung his left fist in a brutal blow that crashed into the younger man’s jaw.

  Driven back by the punch, Chance tripped over the fallen Porter and Evelyn and sprawled in the street, too. Hudson went after him, obviously intending to kick and stomp him.

  As Hudson’s booted foot swung at Chance’s head, Porter reached up, caught hold of it, and heaved. That threw Hudson off-balance and caused him to lurch against the stagecoach. He grabbed the open door to keep from falling and pulled himself upright again.

  By now some of the feeling was coming back into Ace’s left arm. He could use it well enough to bore in on Hudson and snap a couple of left jabs into the man’s face. Hudson moved to block a third such punch, but it was only a feint and left him open for the roundhouse right that Ace threw.

  Ace packed all the strength he had into the punch. It landed cleanly on Hudson’s jaw, snapped his head back, and bounced him off the stagecoach again. As Ace stepped back, Hudson fell to his knees, swayed for a second, and then toppled over on his side like a falling tree. Ace felt some satisfaction as Hudson’s head hit the street. This had been a hard fight.

  That sense of triumph was tempered almost instantly as Evelyn cried, “Oliver!” and scrambled on hands and knees toward him. Her dress was already wet and dirty from the muddy street, and it was in even worse shape by the time she reached him. She lifted him and pulled his upper body into her lap. He was out cold and his head lolled loosely on his neck.

  “Oliver, darling, please be all right!” she begged as she cradled his head against her. She glared up at Ace, Chance, and Porter as the latter two climbed to their feet. “You brutes! You awful, terrible brutes!”

  “Evelyn, please—” Porter began.

  “Stop it, William! I don’t want to hear anything you have to say to me.”

  Porter looked devastated by that rebuke, like a child whose favorite toy had been snatched away.

  “I hope you’re all proud of yourselves,” Evelyn went on scathingly. “It took all three of you to overpower Oliver. How brave of you, to attack a man with three-against-one odds!”

  “Miss Channing, he’s the one who pulled a gun on us,” Ace pointed out.

  “Because he knew he was outnumbered and might have to defend himself from a vicious assault!”

  Ace saw that talking to Evelyn wasn’t going to do any good. Whatever she felt for Hudson blinded her to the reality of the situation.

  And the way things had worked out, it was true that the fight had been three against one . . .

  “Evelyn, you have to listen to me,” Porter tried again. “Surely you can see what a dangerous man Hudson is and how you shouldn’t be involved with him—”

  “Just go away, William.” She sobbed as she stroked Hudson’s hair. “I never want to see you again!”

  “You heard the lady,” a hard voice said from behind Ace, Chance, and Porter.

  Ace and Chance looked around and saw a stocky, gray-haired man standing there with a shotgun in his hands. A lawman’s badge was visible under his coat, pinned to his vest.

  “Sheriff—” Ace began.

  “Marshal,” the star-packer interrupted. “Tim Covington, marshal of Johnson City. Which means you’re in my jurisdiction, mister, and I got the right to tell you to get the blazes outta town!”

  “But we just got here,” Chance protested. Thunder rumbled again, not far off, prompting him to add, “And it’s about to storm again.”

  “Should’ve thought of that before you started a fight,” Marshal Covington said.

  “We didn’t start it,” Ace said. “Hudson pulled his gun—”

  “Like the young lady just said, maybe he did that because of the odds. Anyway, I don’t care all that much about who’s right and who’s wrong. I just don’t want any more trouble, and since that fella’s out cold and you three ain’t, you’re gonna be the ones to get out of town.” Covington gestured with the scattergun’s barrels. “Now.”

  Ace could tell that it wasn’t going to do any good to argue with the marshal. The man’s mind was made up, and the law badge he wore—along with the shotgun he carried—gave him the upper hand in any dispute.

  Besides, Porter ought to be able to see by now that they were wasting their time. He was never going to convince Evelyn to choose him instead of Hudson.

  Ace sighed and nodded, then said, “All right, Marshal, we’re leaving.”

  “I’m not going anywhere!” Porter objected.

  Covington squinted at him and said, “Your only other choice is sitting in my jail for the next thirty days, mister. I’m pretty sure the justice of the peace’ll go along with that sentence.”

  Porter swallowed and said, “Jail?”

  “That’s right. Don’t like the sound of it, do you?”

  Porter had to shake his head. He said, “All right, we’ll leave.”

  “Our horses are over at the stable,” Ace said. “We’ll have to get them.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Covington said, “just to make sure there ain’t no delays.”

  Porter held out a hand toward Evelyn and said, “Please, my dear . . .”

  She wouldn’t even look at him. She just kept stroking Hudson’s hair and talking softly to him. He was starting to stir a little.

  “Move,” Covington snapped.

  Carlton must have seen them coming. He was saddling the horses when the men walked into the livery barn.

  “Sorry to see you boys go,” he said as Ace, Chance, and Porter mounted up a few minutes later. “No refunds, though.”

  They rode out of the stable. Ace and Chance started to turn east, back toward Austin, but Porter surprised them by heading west.

  The brothers fell in alongside him. Chance asked, “Where do you think you’re going, Will?”

  “Fredericksburg,” Porter replied grimly. “Where I set out to go.”

  “Are you really that loco?” Ace asked him. “You haven’t given up yet? Will, that girl doesn’t want anything to do with you!”

  “She’s just mixed up,” Porter insisted. “Blinded somehow by Hudson’s charm, which I must admit I find totally lacking. I just have to get Evelyn to realize that, too.”

  Ace glanced toward the stage station as they rode past. Hudson was conscious and on his feet again, being helped by Evelyn toward the building. He pau
sed to look at the three riders, though, and Ace saw the killing hatred in his eyes.

  “Will, this is a bad idea,” Ace said.

  “A really bad idea,” Chance added.

  “If you believe that to be true, then you’re free to return to Austin,” Porter said. “I release you from whatever bonds of friendship exist between us. But as for me, I have no choice but to follow the dictates of my heart.”

  Ace and Chance reined in and looked at each other as Porter rode on. They both knew that Porter probably wouldn’t last a week on his own. Considerably less than that, more than likely.

  They didn’t have to say anything. They just nudged their horses into motion and caught up with Porter.

  The rain started falling just outside of town, big, fat, hard drops that promised another good soaking.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The stagecoach carrying Smoke and Sally Jensen left Fort Worth and went west to Weatherford, stopping once along the way at a station atop a mostly bare, windswept hill to change teams. In Weatherford, the coach stopped again and fresh horses were hitched to it. The passengers had lunch there at a café on the busy courthouse square.

  Farther along the route, the driver explained to the passengers, the stops wouldn’t be quite as close together so he would have to ask more of the horses, and because of that their pace wouldn’t be quite as fast. They would still make it to Mason in approximately three days, however, barring unforeseen delays.

  “Three days?” Sally said to Smoke as they set out again. “That’s a long time.”

  “Texas is a big place,” he replied with a smile. “Lots of ground to cover.”

  He understood why Sally sounded a little dubious about the trip. She had ridden stagecoaches before, but it wasn’t easy to get used to the vehicle’s swaying, jolting tempo. Not only that, it was drafty, and the weather was cool enough at this time of year to cause chills. The stage line provided blankets for the passengers to wrap up in, but they were thin and not very warm, plus there was the added worry of not knowing what sort of varmints previous users might have had.

  At least the rains of the fall and early winter meant that there wasn’t much dust. At the height of summer, folks in a stagecoach almost choked on the dust that swirled in endlessly.

  West of Weatherford, the coach crossed the Brazos River at a low-water ford. Rugged hills loomed to the northwest. Smoke recalled hearing old-timers from Texas talk about the Comanches and knew it hadn’t been all that many years since bold warriors had ridden all over those hills, making it dangerous for any settlers who dared to venture beyond the Brazos.

  Not long after fording the river, the coach reached a crossroads and turned south. As the driver had warned, the going was a lot slower now. The roughness of the terrain contributed to that, too. They had to cross a long stretch of hills, so the coach was nearly always going either up or down a slope.

  That made it easier for the group of men on horseback to follow the stagecoach without being seen. All they had to do was make sure they weren’t skylighted against one of the ridge crests.

  Six men were in the bunch. Riding slightly in the lead were rawboned, lantern-jawed Harlan Gunderson and his stockier brother Karl. Four abreast behind them were Jed Lavery, Simon Dawson, Grady Kirk, and a kid who called himself Tioga, after the Texas town a good ways north of here where he’d been born. He was the only one of the six who hadn’t done time in the state penitentiary at Huntsville, but that didn’t mean he was any better than them. He’d just gotten started on a life of crime later, that’s all.

  Between them, they had robbed banks, rustled cattle, burned down barns, and murdered sodbusters. They had shot men from ambush for pay. Harlan Gunderson had beaten a man to death because he had one blue eye and one brown eye and it would have been wrong to let such an abomination live. His brother Karl had strangled a whore in Gainesville because she’d tried to steal his poke. The others had similar sordid, violent pasts.

  They had been riding together for seven months, and today they had their sights set on holding up a stagecoach.

  “You sure there’s gonna be enough money on that coach to make it worth riskin’ our lives, Harlan?” Karl asked.

  Harlan Gunderson tamped down the annoyance he felt. His brother had a whiny way about him, guaranteed to get on the nerves of anybody who had to spend much time around him. He asked the same questions over and over, too. This was at least the fourth time since they’d left Fort Worth that he had brought up the matter of how much loot they could expect to find on the coach.

  But Karl was blood kin, so Gunderson couldn’t just shoot him in the head the way he felt like doing sometimes.

  “You know what that fella from the bank told us,” Harlan Gunderson explained with greater patience than he really felt. “There’s a shipment of greenbacks hidden in the boot, bound for the bank in Stephenville. The driver don’t even know about it. He thinks that valise just belongs to one of the passengers. The bank manager worked out the deal with Ferguson at the stage line. There’s supposed to be ten thousand dollars in that bag, and that ain’t even countin’ what we’ll take off the passengers and outta the mail pouch. You saw some of those people were dressed pretty fancy. They ought to have money.”

  “But what if that bank clerk was lyin’?” Karl persisted.

  Harlan Gunderson laughed and asked, “Do you really think he was up to lyin’, what with all the blood leakin’ out of him from where we carved him up?”

  Karl scratched his beard-stubbled jaw, frowned, and said, “No, I reckon not. I forgot about that. I forget a lot of things, don’t I, Harlan?”

  “Don’t worry about it, little brother. You got me around to remember ’em for you.”

  Harlan Gunderson wasn’t likely to forget torturing that bank clerk anytime soon. It had been grisly work, sort of like slaughtering hogs back on the farm in Arkansas where he and Karl had grown up. What had been left of the clerk had gone to the hogs, too, so nobody would ever find the remains and the clerk’s disappearance would be just one of those unsolved mysteries.

  “It’s gettin’ kind of late in the afternoon,” Grady Kirk said from behind the Gundersons. “If we’re gonna stop that stage, we better find a place to do it.”

  Harlan Gunderson hipped around a little in the saddle as he rode and said, “I’ve been thinkin’ about that. I’ll bet they’re gonna lay over for the night at the station in Morgan Mill and go on to Stephenville in the morning. Like I just reminded Karl, the driver don’t know he’s carryin’ as much money as he is. He’s got no reason to push on after dark just to get to Stephenville.”

  “So what’re we gonna do?” asked Tioga. “Ambush ’em in the mornin’?”

  “That’s exactly right,” Harlan Gunderson said. “We’ll ride on around Morgan Mill and set up an ambush in the hills on the other side. They won’t be expectin’ a thing.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Jed Lavery said. He was a dour man who seemed to find no joy in life, or any mercy, either. “Kill the driver and the guard first thing, then we can take our time with the passengers.”

  “We gonna kill ’em all, Harlan?” Karl asked.

  “Best way not to hang is to never leave no witnesses behind,” Harlan Gunderson said. “You don’t want to hang, do you, Karl?”

  Karl hesitated in answering, as if it were a trick question, then said, “Uh . . . no, I don’t reckon I do.”

  The others all chuckled at that, except for Lavery.

  The road dipped down from a long ridge into a valley about a mile wide. A line of trees marking the course of a creek meandered along the valley’s center. From the stagecoach’s window, Smoke spotted a church steeple and knew they were coming to a settlement.

  At this time of year the sun went down early, and some clouds that had thickened up during the afternoon meant that evening would come sooner rather than later. For that reason, Smoke wasn’t surprised when the jehu brought the coach to a halt in front of a stone building and leaned over o
n the seat to announce through the windows, “We’ll be stoppin’ here overnight, folks. This is Morgan Mill.”

  Smoke saw a large building on the bank of the nearby creek and figured that was the sawmill that gave the place its name. The settlement also boasted a Baptist church, a Methodist church, their respective graveyards, a general store, and a blacksmith’s shop, in addition to the stage station. Houses and cabins were scattered haphazardly in the trees along both sides of the creek.

  Arley Hicks, the young, redheaded cowboy, was the first one out of the stagecoach. He swung open the door and jumped to the ground with an obvious eagerness to stretch his legs after the long ride from Weatherford.

  Smoke knew how Arley felt. He could spend all day in the saddle without any ill effect, but riding a hard bench seat in a stagecoach for hours on end was a different story.

  Smoke got out next and turned back to help Sally and then Mrs. Carter climb down from the coach. After that, though, he backed off to let Donald Purcell disembark and assist his wife Mildred. Mrs. Purcell might not want a notorious gunman giving her a hand, Smoke thought dryly.

  The patent medicines salesman, Herman Langston, was the last one out of the coach. Smoke said, “You don’t seem any the worse for wear, Mr. Langston.”

  The drummer grinned and said, “When you’ve ridden thousands of miles on these contraptions like I have, son, your hindquarters toughen up and get as hard as steel.”

  Mildred Purcell sniffed audibly at that comment.

  Langston touched the brim of his bowler hat and added, “Beg your pardon, ma’am, for my crudity.” He looked at Sally. “Yours, too, Mrs. Jensen.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Langston,” she assured him. “I’m around rough and ready cowboys all the time, back on our ranch in Colorado. I promise you I’ve heard much worse.”

  Arley Hicks slapped a hand on his thigh, grinned, and said, “I’ll just bet that you have, ma’am.”

  A short woman who seemed as wide as she was tall came out of the stone building, wiping her hands on the apron she wore. She had graying auburn hair and a broad face with a friendly smile on it.