Dark Promises by Tommy Webb

Author:Tommy Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tommy Webb
Published: 2020-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

ANDREA’S STORY

The Duncan Ranch sat in a grassy valley about thirty-five miles north of Clayton. High, rocky canyons surrounded the ranch making it a fortress. The only way in was one trail guarded by the Duncan Ranch hands. Leland Duncan sat at the dinner table. He was happy with himself; he enjoyed being in charge of the thirteen thousand acre ranch he had inherited from his father. Leland was the oldest of the Duncan brothers and that made him the boss. He thought of himself as a handsome man, but in all honesty, he was a short, fat man. The cheeks of his face were constantly red with little blood veins fingering out like lightning bolts in all directions. He had been losing his hair for some time, even though he was only forty. In his eyes, the two younger brothers were a threat and if he didn’t have a need for them to help run things, he would have done away with them a long time ago. Cody and Ward were afraid of Leland. They stayed away as much as possible.

Cody was the middle brother. At six feet, five inches tall, he wore a thin, black mustache. With a head full of thick, black hair, he was quite popular with most women folk. Ward, the youngest of the boys, was a very thin man with fine features like a woman.

All the boys had come from different mothers. Old man Duncan had changed wives often and it was thought that was what started all the problems with the boys. No one in town ever knew just what happened to his wives, but stories were told that when he tired of one of them, he just killed them. Then shortly afterward, another lady would appear from back East at the stage line wanting to be taken to the Duncan Ranch. The pattern continued with the boys after old man Duncan died. Often young girls would randomly appear and also ask to go to the Duncan Ranch. That’s how Andrea came to Clayton; one day she just showed up.

Everyone around was afraid of Leland’s hired man, Dirk Prugert, so no one warned Andrea that she was in danger or that five other young women had come and mysteriously disappeared. Dirk was a despicable man used by Leland to oversee the dirty work that sometimes had to be done. Things like shooting someone in the back, slitting a throat, or borrowing horses that didn’t belong to him. Prugert had run away from south Texas for killing a cheating woman with a twelve-inch bowie knife, and then emptying his gun into the man he had caught her with. The Texas Rangers sure wanted to catch up to him, but the bad lands of New Mexico was an unforgiving place to a lawman and a haven to a man like Prugert. Leland knew all about the things he had done down in Texas and he held it over his head. That’s part of the

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