The Brannocks by Matt Braun

Author:Matt Braun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 1986-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The moon heeled over in the sky. All along Blake Street the dives were closing for the night. Drunks and stragglers crowded the boardwalks, slowly winding their way home. Lights began flickering out in some of the small saloons.

Clint stood beneath a lamppost. Every night, as closing time approached, he positioned himself midway along the street. Stubborn drunks often refused to be turned out of an establishment, and the disputes sometimes became violent. He moved quickly and decisively when that occurred. Any man who resisted spent the night in the town cooler.

Closing time always struck Clint as strangely unnatural. As the saloons and dance halls emptied, an eerie silence settled over the sporting district. The laughter and music, all the sounds of festive revelers, abruptly stopped. When the lights were extinguished, any sense of glamour went by the boards as well. Blake Street, darkened and quiet, was transformed into a bloozy, careworn hag.

Watching things shut down was a time of waiting and boredom for Clint. Tonight, as the street slowly cleared, his thoughts turned to Virgil. Earlier, he’d stopped by the Bella Union and talked with Earl. What he heard had left him all the more troubled, and somewhat at a loss. Virgil apparently wouldn’t listen to anyone, including Earl. His involvement with Hughes and his commitment to the railroad had clearly become a touchy subject. No amount of argument would faze him or change his mind.

What worried Clint most was Virgil’s obsessive ambition. He knew it wasn’t prompted by greed, the desire merely to accumulate wealth. By nature, Virgil was a generous man, charitable to a fault. Instead, the ambition sprang from a lifetime of hardscrabble farming, a bleak hand-to-mouth existence. Virgil was determined to better himself, gain acceptance and influence among the uptown crowd. Money was merely a means to an end, for he had his eye on a far greater goal. He wanted membership in Denver’s most exclusive club.

Clint fathomed all that easily enough. He understood that marrying a banker’s daughter was, for Virgil, a major step in the quest for status and prominence. Yet he failed to understand why Virgil would rashly form an alliance with Denver’s political kingpin. The decision seemed foolhardy and ill-conceived, born of ambition rather than common sense. He suspected that Virgil would be used and then discarded, perhaps made to serve as a scapegoat should the railroad fail to materialize. It bothered him even more that Virgil was the key figure in the drive to raise two million dollars. So much money was bound to cause sticky fingers.

Whether or not he’d misjudged the situation remained to be seen. Still, he had already considered and rejected the notion that David Hughes was a civic benefactor. Any politician worth his salt was, at the very least, a student of corruption and graft. And two million dollars was an inducement for all sorts of underhanded schemes. Should any of the money disappear, he felt certain that Virgil wouldn’t walk away clean. The greater likelihood was that Hughes and his cronies would somehow cover their tracks.

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