Blood in the Dust by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Otis was still waiting outside the shack on the faro dealer’s horse as Hunter hurried out the door and strode across the yard at an angle toward his own mount.

A minute later, mounted on Ghost’s back, Hunter raced around the side of the school and then onto the newly graded trail that rose and fell over two low rises peppered with settlers’ sad shacks, stock pens, and hay barns. As he crested one of these rises and started down the other side, he checked Ghost down slightly. Warren Davenport rode toward him in his red-wheeled, two-seater chaise buggy.

Davenport’s big, raw-boned frame was clad in what appeared a new black suit with a fawn wool vest, bowler hat, and red pocket square. A gold watch chain flashed in the sun. As Buchanon trotted Ghost toward where the man was slowing his own horse, scowling up at him curiously, Hunter regarded the man with what must have been a similar expression. When Hunter, still approaching, saw a spray of brightly colored flowers—a mix of roses and pansies likely recently purchased from a local flower shop—lying on the seat beside the man, his own curiosity swelled inside him.

As the men’s gazes held, Davenport’s brows ridged and his own eyes glinted with suspicion. More than just suspicion—bald disdain and indignation.

Now hearing muffled gunfire crackling from the town center, Hunter batted his heels to the stallion’s flanks, and Ghost shot on up the trail. As he crested the next rise, he glanced back over his left shoulder. Davenport had now stopped his chaise and was talking to Otis Crosby, who’d stopped the faro dealer’s horse beside the buggy. As the two men talked, both men turned their heads to glance along the trail toward Hunter.

Buchanon turned his head forward and galloped on down the rise, not so vaguely musing on Davenport’s destination with that new suit and those fresh flowers, though it took little musing to cipher out that there was really only one place the businessman could be going.

To the home of the pretty new schoolteacher, of course.

As Hunter weaved his way around shacks and stock pens, he absently hoped Laura had a derringer lying around the cabin. Living on her own, she’d need it, and not only to fend off the Cullen boys . . .

As he cut through a break between the bank and the assay office, and swung Ghost to the south, he turned his attention to the trouble at hand. The gunfire was growing louder, angrier, and he could hear men shouting and yelling and a woman screaming. A man seemed to be screaming, as well, as though in horrible agony.

There was little street traffic. Most of the men and women normally heading for the saloons this time of the day were gathered in small clusters on the boardwalks, looking tense and wary and conversing in low tones, obviously unsettled by the sounds of the foofaraw coming from the direction of the Goliad, which sat on a side street one block east of the main avenue.

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