“Ma’am, it’s been a pleasure.”
Jubal kept the crowd covered while Evan brought Sam’s horse closer to the hotel. Sam stepped over the railing and dropped down into his saddle. That done, he covered the crowd with Evan while Jubal descended from the scaffold and mounted up.
“Let’s go,” Sam said, and the McCall brothers spurred their horses into a full gallop before someone decided to go ahead and play hero.
They rode hard for several hours and then stopped and checked their back trail. Even a hastily formed posse would have been left far behind, and they took a moment to catch their breaths and rest their horses.
“Not that I ain’t glad to see you fellas,” Jubal said, “but just how did you manage to ride into Prosper right on time?”
“We were looking for you,” Evan said.
“When we heard that some young fool was about to get himself hanged,” Sam chimed in, “we figured it had to be you.”
“Well, thanks…I think,” Jubal said. “Now maybe you can tell me why were you lookin’ for me. Time for a family reunion all of a sudden?”
“Sort of,” Sam said, and handed Jubal the telegram. Sam and Evan waited silently while their younger brother read the news.
“What the hell—” Jubal said, looking up at both of them.
“That’s what we intend to find out,” Sam said. “Are you with us, little brother?”
“You know I am, Sam,” Jubal said, handing the telegram back. “We’re all gonna be wanted in Wyoming after this, you know. I think old Seth Folk was killed when he fell off that balcony.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Sam said, “but that’s something we can worry about after we find out what happened in Vengeance Creek. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Jubal said, and they both looked at Evan.
“Well,” Evan McCall said to his brothers, “sitting here isn’t getting it done, is it?”
Part Two
Vengeance Creek
Chapter Five
Dude Miller stared out the front window of his store at the dusty main street of Vengeance Creek, Texas. It had been two months since he had sent all those telegrams, hoping that one of them would find their way into the hands of Sam McCall. Each day Dude spent a few hours watching the street, waiting for the tall figure of McCall to ride down Main Street, with or without his brothers. Dude had the feeling that if Sam McCall did come back to Vengeance Creek, it would definitely be in the company of his two brothers, Evan and Jubal.
Although the McCall boys were spread far and wide through the west—and sometimes the east—dude Miller knew that their sense of family would remain intact. Up until their deaths Joshua McCall and his wife remained proud of all three of their sons, speaking of them often to anyone who would listen.
The boys all decided to travel, led by the exploits of older brother Sam. Soon after Sam left Vengeance Creek, Evan followed, to make his own name. Later, when he was old enough, Jubal followed in the footsteps of his brothers—or tried to. Jubal was not the man Sam or Evan was; he had spent too much time in their shadows, trying to be like them, to develop his own personality. Perhaps by this time he had.
Dude Miller’d had several motives for sending the telegrams. For one, he did not believe that the real solution to the deaths of the McCalls had been found. Second, he was curious about what had become of the McCall boys.
Sam, of course, had become the stuff of legend, and Dude wondered just how much of it was true. He had heard less of Evan and nothing of Jubal over the years. He had known them all as boys, and he’d known none of them as men—and he wanted to.
Miller’s business was on the order of a general store, except that he carried a wider array of goods. For that reason he was often interrupted from his reverie about the McCalls to service a customer. The time he spent looking out the window, however, did eventually add up to hours.
Looking out the window now he saw Lincoln Burkett step from the bank. Over the past nine months Burkett had become the most powerful man in Vengeance Creek. Just before the deaths of the McCalls he had purchased Joshua McCall’s ranch. Knowing how much it meant to the McCalls to keep the ranch so that their sons would have a home to come back to, Dude Miller had been suspicious of the sale ever since. He had been unable, however, to wrest the truth from Joshua McCall about the reason for the sale. A month later, the McCalls were dead, under what Miller considered suspicious circumstances. The powers that were in Vengeance Creek, however, led by Lincoln Burkett, had come to their decision fairly quickly, and there had been no investigation into the matter.
That would change when Sam and his brothers arrived.
And they would arrive.
Eventually.
Lincoln Burkett stepped from the bank and took a moment to slip his wallet into his jacket pocket. As he did so he looked across the street and saw Dude Miller watching him from the window of his store. Burkett frowned, staring back at the man, but that did not deter Miller, who stared back boldly.
Dude Miller was one of the few people in VengeanceCreek who resisted what Lincoln Burkett could do for this town. The man didn’t realize that the more powerful Burkett became, the more he could do for the town, and the faster the town would grow.
Burkett knew that Miller was one of those people who worried about how to get there, while Lincoln Burkett merely worried about getting there, period. That was why Dude Miller would always be a storekeeper, and why Lincoln Burkett would eventually become one of the most powerful people in Texas—and maybe in the whole damned country.
Burkett stepped down from the boardwalk in front of the bank and started walking toward the saloon, where he was to meet his son, John.
Lincoln Burkett was a big man, still robust enough at sixty-three to give the town whores a ride or two. It was to his everlasting consternation that his twenty-two-year-old son seemed to be most interested in those same whores than in following in his father’s wake.
John Burkett was Lincoln Burkett’s only child, a child who came along late in life to Burkett and his wife. The birth had been very hard on the forty-year-old Virginia Burkett. She had survived it, but had never been the same after it, and eventually died when the boy was four. At that time the Burketts had a ranch in the Dakotas, and Lincoln had too much to do building his empire to spend much time with his son. The task of raising the boy had fallen to a governess, and too late Burkett realized his error. A boy raised solely by a woman would have a woman’s values. When the boy was fourteen Burkett dismissed the governess and took charge of the boy himself. Unfortunately, in his efforts to make up for his earlier error, he rode the boy too hard, and ended up with a defiant young man who resisted his father’s ideas of what constituted manhood.
The Burketts eventually were forced by circumstances to leave the Dakotas’through no fault of their own, of course—and had come to Texas. Here, Burkett hoped to build himself a more lasting empire. He also hoped that his son, in this new environment, would come around and realize where his future lay.
So far, all the boy was interested in was what lay between the thighs of the whores in the town cathouse.
Of late, though, Burkett had decided that he could reverse that by buying the cathouse, and that was the deal he had just completed in the bank.
Of course, the madame, Louise Simon, had resisted his offers to buy, but he had finally made her an offer she found impossible to resist: sell, or be burned out.