[Texas Rangers 04] - Ranger's Trail (9 page)

He figures like I do, Rusty thought. They’ll be coming after her.

“
Let’s pick up the pace a little,” he said. “We can cover a lot of miles before dark.”

Rusty did not ride boldly into the Monahan headquarters. He reasoned that Corey Bascom would expect them to head straight for Alice’s home. Though it was unlikely, there was a chance that he and his brothers might have pushed hard and gotten here first.

He watched a while to be sure everything looked normal. He saw Evan Gifford riding a hackamored young horse around and around in a corral. Geneva stood on the porch and shouted for Billy to come home. He climbed down reluctantly and trotted toward her.

Rusty eased. “I don’t see anything amiss.”

“
Let’s hurry,” Alice said. “I want to see Mama.”

As they rode in, James Monahan came out of the barn, a bridle in his hand. Seeing Alice, he quickly hung the bridle across the top of a fence, then trotted to meet the three riders. “Alice!” he shouted. “Baby sister!”

He had every right to be angry with her, and some recriminations might come later, but now was not the time. He lifted her down from the saddle and hugged her as if she had come back from the dead.

“
Mama is goin’ to be tickled to see you. She’s liable to get up and come runnin’ when you walk in the door.”

“
How is she?” Alice asked anxiously.

“
Fair to middlin’. She’ll do better now.” He looked up at Rusty and Andy. “Did you have to kill anybody?”

“
Not yet.”

“
Where’s Corey?”

Rusty looked behind him. “Back that way, somewhere. We figure he’ll be comin’ for Alice. We just don’t know when.”

James gave his sister a searching look. “When he does, will you be wantin’ to go with him?”

“
I’d rather kill him than go back there.”

“
We’ll try to see that you don’t have to do either one.” James reached up to shake hands with Rusty, then Andy. “Fellers, I ain’t got words enough to thank you.”

Rusty said, “It wasn’t much trouble to get her away. Keepin’ her may be somethin’ else.”

“
We’ll keep her. We’ve fought off rebel hangmen and Comanche Indians and horse thieves. Corey Bascom ought not to be that much of a challenge.”

Alice said, “You haven’t met the rest of his family. Especially his mother.”

James frowned. “I don’t see how one old woman could give us much trouble.”

Andy said, “You’ll think different if you see her. When she dies and goes to hell even the devil is liable to take out a-runnin’.”

Geneva saw Alice and hurried down from her house, throwing her arms around her sister. “Thank God you’ve come back.”

“
Thank Rusty and Andy. I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t come and fetched me.”

Geneva turned to express her thanks to Rusty. She held onto his arm long enough to stir old feelings he had hoped he had put behind him. He was almost relieved when Evan came up to join his wife.

Josie stepped out onto the porch in response to the racket. Recognizing Alice, she came running. She embraced her sister with tears in her eyes. “You’re the best medicine anybody could’ve brought for Mama.” When she released Alice she hugged Rusty. “And you’re the doctor who fetched it.” She looked up at the boy. “And you, Andy.” She turned back to her sister. “Come on, let’s go show you to Mama.”

The family trooped into the big house. Andy started to follow, but Rusty raised a hand to stop him. “This is for the family,” he said.

Andy nodded, seeing the rightness of it. “But you’re one of the family too, just about.”

“
Not yet, not ‘til Josie and me stand up in front of Preacher Webb. Right now there’s no tellin’ when that is liable to happen.”

C
orey Bascom was in a dark mood as he and three younger brothers approached the long picket house that had been their home since soon after they had left Arkansas just ahead of some angry horsemen. The bank for which he had held considerable hope had been a disappointment. With the muzzle of a pistol in his face, the bank’s president had stammered that local farmers had made only a mediocre crop the previous fall and most of their money had already been spent. The county government should have had some funds on deposit, but the outgoing officeholders had absconded with most of the money. “We’ve got nothing but a toenail hold,” he had said, “and hopes for a better year.”

Frustrated, Corey had promised to come back in the fall, after harvest. “You’d better have somethin’ here worth the takin’. Otherwise you’d better start learnin’ how to play a harp.”

His brother Lacey then forced the sweating banker to go to his knees and beg for mercy. It was a bluff, but Lacey took pleasure in his ability to frighten people. He especially enjoyed it when he could make them wet themselves, which the banker did. Corey sometimes worried that Lacey would get carried away and really kill someone. He had come close. So far the Bascom brothers’ crimes had stopped short of murder. So far.

Before leaving town the brothers had paused to rob a mercantile store but found its till was as poor as the bank’s.

Lacey shot out a window glass as they left. “Somethin’ for them to remember us by,” he had explained. It was an unnecessary gesture. Nobody ever forgot a visit by the Bascoms.

The only bright spot Corey could see in this whole trip was the prospect of getting back to Alice. He had enjoyed women before, usually with payment involved, but this girl had awakened a hunger in him that never remained satisfied for long. She had been shy and uncertain the first few times, and he had gotten a little rough. He had occasionally been rough with other women but considered that to be his right inasmuch as he had bought and paid for them. He suspected this treatment was the reason Alice had become increasingly reluctant about his attentions as the weeks passed. He had tried to be gentler, but he didn’t know how.

This trip had kept him away for four days—and four long, lonely nights. He hoped his absence would have made her more receptive. He would keep working on the gentleness thing and see if it helped.

He saw smoke rising from the chimney and realized he was hungry for more than Alice. Though Ma’s cooking wouldn’t get her a job even in a hole-in-the-wall chili joint, when a man’s belly was empty her beans and cornbread were welcome. Nobody ever complained, at least where she might hear. Though her sons were grown, she felt obliged now and again to take a quirt to one or another of them just as she did when they were little. To Ma they would always be “my boys,” to be praised highly or punished severely, whichever the situation called for.

Praise came sparingly. She had come near taking a quirt to Corey when he brought Alice home unannounced. In her view he had no right to get married without her approval, especially to a pampered girl who was obviously a misfit, unlikely ever to find a comfortable place in this close-knit family. Bessie Bascom had tried hard to weld her boys into an insular unit, mutually shielding one another from the rest of the world. To her it had always been “us against them.” Anyone outside of the family was a potential enemy, not to be trusted.

She always preached that old Ansel Bascom had died because he trusted others too much. Someone had betrayed him to the damnable state police. He had died with a dozen bulletholes draining his life’s blood into the dirt street outside of a two-bit bank that had not been worth the gamble in the first place.

“
Never take nobody into your confidence outside of family,” she had told her boys again and again. That prohibition included Alice, whom she regarded as a potential Jonah, if not a Judas.

Corey had been reluctant about being away from Alice so long, leaving her in Ma’s less than gentle hands, but family needs took precedence over his personal desires. He would make up for lost time tonight. In his mind he was already in bed with her.

He noticed that the Monahans’ brown horse was not in the corral where he had been kept penned and fed, handy in case Ma needed to saddle him and go somewhere in a hurry. The gate stood open, which struck him as odd.

Bessie Bascom heard her sons’ arrival and came striding out from the picket house. Her long steps and grim face told Corey that something had gone awry. He had expected her to raise hell when she found out how little money they had brought home, but it appeared she was not going to wait for the bad news.

She went immediately on the attack, shaking her finger in his face. “I told you that little hussy didn’t belong here. Well, the buttermilk has done been spilt now. She’s gone.”

Corey swallowed hard. She could not have hit him harder if she had struck him with a club. “Gone? Where?”

She touched her fingers to her chin. “See this bruise? She put it there. Hit me with her fist, she did, then rode off with two men bold as brass. And they wasn’t even her brothers. Told you she wasn’t no good.”

Corey did not care about the bruise. He cared about Alice. “What men? Who were they?”

“
She said they were friends of her family. I told her it wasn’t fitten for a married women to do such a thing. I told her it was agin the Book.”

Corey struggled to absorb what his mother was telling him. Damn it all, how could Alice just up and leave like that? She belonged to him. She had no right to do anything or go anywhere without his say-so.

“
Did they tell you where they were goin’?”

“
Back to her folks, they said. But from what you’ve told me, that’s at least two days’ ride. That means two nights, layin’ out with two men. It don’t take much imagination …”

The image was too ugly for him to contemplate. He clenched a fist. “Stop it, Ma. She wouldn’t do that.”

“
She did it with you, didn’t she? I’ve heard the two of you many a night, and I’ve seen you slip into the barn with her in the daytime when your brothers was out workin’, like
you
was supposed to be. She’s a tart.”

“
Did you hear her call them by name?”

“
I heard her call the oldest one Rusty. The other one was just a big boy, but I expect he’s old enough to know what to do with a woman like her.”

Corey tried to remember. Rusty. He had heard the Monahans mention that name often. Rusty Shannon, it was. Had an understanding with Alice’s sister Josie, as he recalled. He had been a ranger for a long time. Had a farm way down south somewhere. Alice had told him the Monahans stayed on that farm during part of the war, getting away from Confederate zealots who had killed Lon Monahan and a young son named Billy for Unionist leanings.

Corey tried to push his conflicting emotions aside and think. If Rusty Shannon was going to marry Josie, it seemed unlikely he would do anything untoward with Alice no matter how many nights it took them to get back to the Monahan farm. As for the boy, though, he must be the one they said had lived with the Comanches. A boy brought up on Indian ways was something to worry about. There was no telling what he might do.

He demanded, “How long they been gone?”

“
Left about this time yesterday. They got a long start on you if you’re figurin’ on goin’ after them.”

“
Damn right I’m goin’ after her.”

Bessie nodded. “I told her you would. Told her you’d come draggin’ her back by the hair of the head.”

“
Them Monahans may not give her up easy.”

“
You better get her back, or else shoot her. She knows too much about our business. If she talks to the wrong people it’s liable to cause us a lot of trouble.”

“
I couldn’t shoot her, Ma.”

“
I could. Wouldn’t bat an eyelash. And you’d better be ready to do the same thing. You don’t need her. You can buy plenty of women better than her for the price of whiskey.”

Corey felt sick at his stomach. He had not dreamed the girl would go off and leave him. “Love, honor, and obey,” the chaplain had said.
Obey
was the word that stuck in Corey’s mind. She had pledged to obey him no matter what. As his wife she was property like his spurs and saddle and guns, like his horses. A man didn’t let somebody run off with what belonged to him and not do something about it.

He turned to Lacey. “You boys go rustle us up some fresh horses. Soon as Ma fixes dinner we’re goin’ after Alice.”

Lacey grinned in anticipation. “You goin’ to take a quirt to her, Corey? That’s what you ought to do, is take a quirt to her.” Lacey had been on the receiving end of many a smart whipping from Ma, and deserved most of them. He enjoyed seeing somebody else get it.

Bessie said, “Lacey, you and Newley and little Anse bring up a horse for me, too. I’m goin’ along with you boys to make sure you do the right thing.”

Corey had rather she didn’t go. She was not a good traveler, always finding fault. He said, “It’ll be a hard trip, Ma.”

“
I’ve made many a hard trip before. I want to see you give little missy what’s comin’ to her. And if you don’t do it, by God I will.”