Deadfall (4 page)

Feather took it in his trembling hands, lifting it to his lips. He gurgled some down.

He only had a chance for the one swallow before Charley took it back from him.

Charley handed the bottle to Roscoe.

“Roscoe here is going to be your whiskey monitor, Feather,” said Charley. “He's going to dole it out to you one swallow at a time . . . until you start to get your senses back. After that, he'll wean you down to nearly nothing. We can't be working with you, Feather, if you're going to stay roostered all the time. You know that.”

This time Feather's nod was a sincere nod.

“I p-promise I'll do whatever it takes, Boss. H-honest . . . I promise,” said Feather. “N-now can we start that one shot at a time b-business before my head explodes?”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

The following morning, after Roscoe had brought Feather to the ranch, barely conscious, slung over the saddle of the little man's own horse, Charley and Henry Ellis saddled up to go in search of several others who might find chasing down members of an international abduction ring a whole lot more interesting than living out the rest of their lives with little or no excitement at all.

“But first,” said Charley, “we need to stop at the telegraph office out at the train station. There're a couple of old friends of mine I'd like to contact, and I'm pretty sure they're still living where they were living the last time I heard from them. Plus I need to wait for an answer to the telegram I'm going to be sending to the governor.”

“I didn't think you liked the governor all that well,” said Henry Ellis.

“That's true . . . I don't. And I don't know him that well, either, Henry Ellis, but he sure knows me. After all the free advertising we gave the great state of Texas last year during the cattle drive . . . he owes me plenty.”

Charley and Henry Ellis had ridden for a mile or so since stopping for Charley to send off his telegrams. They were reminiscing—while their horses trod slowly along the road—about last year's cattle drive, and how proud Henry Ellis's mother and father had been when they were finally able to find Charley and their son after the celebration parade.

The parents were both proudly telling anyone and everyone they passed by on the street that day that Henry Ellis was their son, and how pleased they were for him—his mother conveniently forgetting that if there had been no newspaper coverage or world fame for
The Texas Outfit
at all, she would have been chewing out her father right then and there for allowing her son to be exposed to such a perilous situation.

 

 

Farther on down the road, then four miles east on another rutted thoroughfare, they came upon a small ranch that stood out from the others they'd been passing by on their short journey.

The little white ranch house looked as if it had been freshly painted. The light blue trim added a definite feminine touch to the door and open shutters. Red carnations sprouted from the window boxes. The ranch yard itself was surrounded by a white picket fence with wild flowers growing at pleasing angles at its base. There were two gardens—one for vegetables, the other for flowers—with a recently planted row of fruit trees in the side yard near the clothesline. And the corrals—also painted white—contained mustang ponies, not cattle.

In the ranch yard itself, near the barn, a man lay on his backside under a buggy, working. It appeared he was trying to fix a mechanical malfunction of some sort. When the man heard the riders approaching, he began to slither his way out from under the front wheels.

“Rod,” yelled Henry Ellis, when he recognized the mechanic was Rod Lightfoot.

Rod—a dark-skinned American Indian, Cuban war veteran, with long black hair down to his shoulders—was a want-to-be attorney, who had helped Charley during the previous year's cattle drive in more ways than one by just advising him on matters of the law.

The boy turned to his grandfather.

“You never said we were coming to see Rod.”

“There's someone else you'll be happy to see, too,” said Charley.

He indicated the porch of the house where a young woman in her late twenties was just stepping through the front door.

“Kelly,” yelled the boy. “It's Kelly King!”

“She's Kelly Lightfoot now, son,” whispered Charley. “They were married last winter.”

Henry Ellis dismounted, then he ran toward his two friends, intercepting them both and diving into their open arms.

“Wow,” said Henry Ellis, “it sure is good to see you two.”

 

 

Kelly finished pouring lemonade into the tall glasses she had set up on the table in the shade of the front-porch roof, where everyone was gathered.

“Thank you, Kelly,” said Henry Ellis.

The others chimed in, thanking her as the boy had done.

When Kelly had finished pouring the lemonade, she took her seat between Henry Ellis and her husband, Rod, directly across from Charley.

“Mexico is it?” she said to Charley. “And you're not sure yet just where in Mexico? . . . just that it's Mexico?”

“My daughter . . . Henry Ellis's mother . . . and her husband, Kent, have been abducted, Miss Kelly,” said Charley. “This could turn into a very solemn situation. That's why we rode out here today to ask Rod if he'd like to ride along with a bunch of ex–Texas Rangers and see if we can track down the bad
hombres
who are responsible for this dreadful act.”

“Why were they taken?” asked Kelly.

“Why . . . ?” said Charley. “Hell, I don't rightly know why. Henry Ellis here just showed up on my doorstep and told me all about it. I don't know any more than that.”

She turned to the boy.

“Do you know why your parents were abducted, Henry Ellis?” she asked. “Do you think they knew who the men were that abducted them?”

Henry Ellis shook his head.

“No,” he said. “My mother and father were just as surprised as the rest of us when those men started jumping onto the side of the coach.”

“How did you manage to get away?” she asked.

“My dad told me to jump out of the carriage,” said the boy. “So I jumped.”

“Then, it appears to be obvious that they weren't after you. Just your parents.”

“I really don't know,” said the boy. “Señor Fuerte told me that—”

“Who is Señor Fuerte?” asked Rod, cutting him off. He moved in closer.

“He's a bodyguard,” said Charley. “Henry Ellis's father's company hired him to protect all three of 'em while they were in Mexico.”

“He certainly wasn't very good at his job, was he?” said Kelly.

“Tell me more about this special bodyguard,” said Rod.

“I don't know anything more,” said the boy, “except that he wanted to take me to Don Roberto Acosta's
hacienda
right then, instead of going to the Brownsville authorities.”

“Don Roberto Acosta,” repeated Kelly. “I've heard that name before. Rod,” she said, motioning for her husband to follow her.

Rod got up and followed his wife, while Charley and Henry Ellis watched. The couple stopped to discuss something of importance near the front door.

When they were done talking, they both returned to the table and took their seats.

“Rod's going to go along with you, Charley,” she told him.

“. . . And so am I.”

Her words made Charley a little bit uncomfortable. He squirmed.

“I can't be taking a woman into Mexico, Miss Kelly. This'll be a lot different than the cattle drive. There could be shooting.”

“There was shooting on the cattle drive, too, Charley Sunday, or have you forgotten that?”

“No . . . no,” said Charley, “and I haven't forgotten that you're a pretty fair hand with a gun yourself. But you were with us on the cattle drive to do a job . . . your newspaper reporter job. There won't be any daily reports sent from where we're going, young lady. And besides,” he added, “I thought you quit that newspaper business when you married Rod?”

“The news syndicate where I worked left it open for me to submit whatever stories I thought might be of interest to the public . . . and a bunch of ex–Texas Rangers getting together to rescue an abducted husband and wife from a brutal Mexican bandit gang, below the border, sounds pretty interesting to me. In fact,” she continued, “this story could also be turned into a book, more than a newspaper series like I did with the cattle drive. Plus, I won't have to tell anyone where I'll be going, or what I'm writing about, since I'll be submitting the manuscript way after we get back from Mexico . . . after the story's been written.”

Charley turned to Rod.

“How do
you
feel about your wife coming along with us?”

Rod shrugged.

“Are you going to argue with her, Charley?”

Charley looked away. Henry Ellis was overjoyed.

“That's what I thought,” said Rod.

He turned to Kelly beside him.

“Well, Mrs. Lightfoot, you'd better get to packing. I'm sure these two gentlemen have other places they need to be.”

 

 

Charley and Henry Ellis rode along again, with the boy just as unsure of where they were going this time as he was before their stop at the Lightfoot ranch.

“Is Rod still studying to be a lawyer?” Henry Ellis asked his grandfather.

“Better than that,” said Charley. “Rod's working on his law degree by mail order. Seems these days it's possible for a man . . . or a woman, I suppose . . . to go to college by mail. And that's what Rod's doing.”

How about that
, thought the boy.
And no one will know if he's an Indian or not if they're dealing with him through the mail
. That had been one of Rod's previous problems in his quest to obtain a law degree—certain people's prejudice against Indians.

“We don't have much farther to go, son,” said Charley. “I just wanted to see if we could find Plunker Holliday where he said he was going to be.”

“That's great,” said the boy. “I always did like ol' Plunker.”

“Besides still being as good with a gun as he is at his age,” said Charley, “Holliday is also a person I feel I can trust, even though he's not family.”

“What about Rod, Kelly, Roscoe, and Feather?” said the boy. “They're no relation to us.”

“Maybe there aren't any blood ties between us and them four, Henry Ellis,” said Charley, “but, they're family, by God.”

Charley and Henry Ellis rode down the one-sided Main Street of Spofford, Texas, with Charley checking out the signs on the storefronts until they came to an alleyway with its own sign directing them to:

 

 

The two reined their mounts in between two storefronts before continuing on
.

It wasn't much of an alley. Just the backsides of a few more establishments, spread out here and there along the way. But it was definitely not another street.

They hadn't gone that far when they heard the sound of gunshots.

“That'd be Holliday, I suspect,” said Charley.

They came to a rather large, man-made mound of dirt and stopped. Charley motioned for the boy to follow him as he rode around to the other side.

It wasn't Holliday doing the shooting. It was one of Holliday's customers. He was a man dressed in a three-piece business suit who appeared to be quite good with the six-shooter in his hand.

The man had been reloading from a box of cartridges on a bench beside him when Charley and the boy rode up. When he was ready, the man snapped the gate closed, quite professionally, and began firing at several ragged targets about thirty feet away. When the man had gone through his six bullets and was about to reload again, Charley called over to him.

“Excuse me, mister. Is there a man called Holliday working here?”

The businessman continued to eject brass while he nodded.

“Holliday's my instructor. He's right over there,” he said.

His nod took their attention to the porch of a small wooden shack nearby where the figure of a man dressed in all black was slumped back in a large overstuffed chair, snoring away.

“Sometimes it's hard to think of Plunker Holliday as an instructor,” said the man. “Especially when he's napping, like that. But he's training me to be a real fine shootist, just like he is . . . in spite of that bad eye of his.”

“That's him,” said Charley. “Thanks, mister.”

“It's ‘Thank you, Mr. Mayor,'” cut in Holliday, who was by then standing up and taking off his coat.

Charley tipped his hat to the man.

“Your Honor,” he said.

Charley and the boy dismounted, tied off their horses, and walked across an open area to where Holliday was just starting off toward them. The three of them stopped and shook hands.

“Mighty good ta see you two, Mr. Sunday . . . Henry Ellis,” he said.

Charley answered, “Mighty good to see you, too, Holliday.”

“You thinkin' about puttin' together another cattle drive, are ya?” said the Wild West show sure shot. Because I'm gettin' pretty bored with this teachin' job.”