Hard Texas Trail by Matt Chisholm

Author:Matt Chisholm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: wild west, old west, western fiction, texas cowboys, piccadilly publishing, matt chisholm
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Twelve

Lincoln Hurley was counting his chickens. Without his being aware of it, fate started to deal a few cards from the bottom of the pack.

They reached San Antonio and booked a room between them at a hotel and found lodgings of a sort for Witney and Oaks. They reckoned that they had enough money to last them a week. Blessed didn’t seem disturbed. They enjoyed the comfort of the hotel for a couple of days and then during the evening he advised Hurley to enjoy an hour or two drinking in the bar. Hurley looked at him sharply.

‘What do you intend to do?’ he demanded.

‘The less you know, the better,’ Blessed told him with a confident smile. ‘I’m going to replenish our dwindled fortune.’

Anxiously, Hurley said: ‘Take care, Lewis.’ He knew that he couldn’t survive without his partner. True it was he who always gave the final orders, but it was Blessed who had the daring and the driving power.

Blessed merely laughed and walked out of the room.

Hurley repaired to the bar, got into conversation with some Texans and was, within the hour, enjoyably drunk. Getting drunk was a relief for he found that the tension in him was rising. This affair over the girl was dragging on endlessly. It should have ended last summer in her death. Now she was still alive and appeared to have the unopposable protection of a bunch of gun-toting Texas cattlemen. He was laughing and talking easily with his new-found friends when Blessed walked into the bar and slapped him on the back. He suggested that he was tired and that it was time he turned in. Hurley was enjoying himself and resisted, but Blessed was insistent. Finally, the message got through to Hurley’s befuddled brains and he followed the bearded man to their room.

Hurley stood swaying and watching him. Blessed reached into his pocket and drew out something which he tossed with a grin on the bed. Hurley picked it up and saw that it was a thick roll of money.

He turned to Blessed and asked simply: ‘How?’

Blessed laughed.

‘One good tap with the barrel of my Colt’s gun.’

This information sobered Hurley somewhat.

‘You took a hell of a risk,’ he said.

‘There’s nearly three hundred dollars there,’ Blessed said. ‘Wasn’t that worth some risk?’

They retired to bed. They rose the following morning and went down to breakfast. Hurley suffered from a hangover and ate little. Blessed stuffed himself heartily and suggested a stroll to clear Hurley’s head. Hurley agreed. In that moment, fate played her first card. They walked out into the sunshine and stood for a moment surveying San Antonio’s traffic. Blessed suggested they turn right. Hurley, for some reason unknown to him, insisted on going left. They turned left and fate played her second card.

They hadn’t covered a dozen yards when a man walking toward them stopped in his tracks, pointed a quivering finger at Blessed and shouted; ‘That’s him.’

Fate had played her final card.

Blessed recognized the man. It was the man from whom he had taken the money the night before.

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