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  Clay Nash hadn’t made many mistakes in his long career as Wells Fargo’s top detective. But when he busted Shell Shannon from jail because he needed the man’s help in solving a case, he should have expected a double-cross. When Shannon lit out on him, Clay always knew he would have to hunt the man down again, even though he’d saved Clay’s life before hitting the trail.

  Now the time had come.

  Shannon was cutting a bloody trail through the Brazos country with his lethal Remington-Hepworth rifle, cutting down innocent men from up to half a mile away to get his hands on a fortune in gold. So Clay cleaned and reloaded his guns and set out to bring Shannon to justice once and for all.

  CLAY NASH 24: THE BRAZOS CHORE

  By Brett Waring

  First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd

  Copyright © Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  First Kindle Edition: October 2020

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.

  One – On the Dodge

  He was squatting by the lonely Colorado river, shaving with the honed edge of his hunting knife, when he had the first inkling that the posse was closing in.

  At that stage, his hair was still shoulder-length, wild and greasy. But he had partly-trimmed his beard, for he had figured he had out-foxed the posse that had dogged him all the way down from Cheyenne. He felt he could take time to work on a change of appearance. It seemed he was wrong.

  While the unnamed river swirled and gurgled away in midstream, the water was quiet and still, where he had made his camp—out of reach of the eddies. Its surface formed a good mirror because of the black sand mineral deposits on the bottom.

  His mind registered, vaguely, that it was an almost certain sign of alluvial gold. But gold wasn’t what he wanted. What he was chasing was freedom ...

  And he thought he had been well on the way to finding it, but someone had shown good tracking skills and found his trail across the Rockies and down into Colorado.

  More than likely it was Clay Nash himself, pushed into the chore by Wells Fargo, in the person of Jim Hume, the Chief of Detectives. A man like Hume wouldn’t like the way Nash had acted on that chore where the young Farrell girl had been kidnapped by that madman Largo Brewster. He would want Nash to run down ...

  There was no more time for thought. The mirror-like surface of the water showed the edge of the cliff behind his camp. He’d seen a movement up there—and it hadn’t been caused by any bird or stalking animal. He’d lived on the owlhoot trails long enough to trust his feelings as much as his sight and hearing.

  He acted instinctively. And it saved his life.

  He simply threw himself backwards, wrenching his body around in mid-air—and reached for his gun.

  A strange-looking affair, it was long, half-stocked, brass-bound, and had long, knobbed, brass prongs protruding from the butt, forming a tight and snug fit for a man’s shoulder. The hammer was oversized, curled to take a man’s thumb easily ...

  The rifle up on the rim opened up and raked the camp site with a hail of lead.

  The strange gun leapt to the fugitive’s shoulder. With elbows braced, the rifle was as solid as if it had been mounted on a swivel. The man flipped up a peep sight from the stock and centered the foresight in the small hole as the man on the rim lifted for another volley. The huge gun thundered, a single shot that slapped and echoed down the river canyon.

  The man on the rim reared and thrashed then tumbled over the edge to plummet onto the rocks. The fugitive knew the gunfire would bring the man’s companions. There wasn’t much chance that the man had been alone.

  The single cartridge case ejected from the strange gun as the fugitive worked the lever, and he slid a fresh load into the smoking chamber. It was only a single-shot weapon, but it was probably the most accurate rifle on the frontier at that time—a specially-built Remington-Hepworth Creedmoor Number Three. In the hands of a man who knew his guns, it could be more devastating than a Winchester repeater.

  The fugitive leapt to his feet and rammed his hunting knife into its sheath. Only one side of his beard had been scraped off—giving him a mad, lopsided look as he hurriedly threw a blanket and then his saddle rig over the back of the nervous bay horse. By the time he had his bedroll tied, the rest of the posse had arrived.

  Leastways, he could hear their horses up on the rim as they rode in, attracted by the sounds of the gunfire.

  “Here’s Milt’s bronc,” someone called. “Where the hell’s he got to?”

  “Looks like a canyon over there,” another voice replied. “Can hear a river, too. Guess he’s found a camp ...”

  The fugitive was astride his bay. He rammed home the spurs, making no attempt at subtlety, knowing he would be seen the moment the men rode to the rim. Before he cleared the canyon, they were shooting down on him. Judging by the amount of lead that zipped around him, kicked dust from the trail and tore lines of powder from the rock walls, he knew others had joined the first two riders. Looked like the posse figured they had him nailed.

  Suddenly, a hail of lead poured into the canyon as he zigzagged and weaved his way towards the narrow entrance. He veered away almost immediately as three riders came pounding through, guns blazing as they reared up in their saddles ...

  He threw the Remington to his shoulder and squeezed off his single shot. The leading rider was punched out of the saddle as if jerked by a wire and the man directly behind him looked startled as he, too, felt the slam of a bullet into his body an instant before he pitched sideways.

  The fugitive smiled crookedly as he wheeled away, ramming the Remington into the saddle scabbard. The gun fired special, high-powered slugs and they tended to go clear through a man’s body. Just as that one had gone, taking down the first rider, then, still packing plenty of punch, slamming into the man behind. The third man had faltered.

  The fugitive’s six-gun palmed up and he snapped two fast shots that felled the bewildered man before he had time to think.

  But more riders loomed in the narrow entrance. He knew he couldn’t clear the canyon that way.

  The rim was lined with men with blazing rifles.

  That left only one other way out—the river. Without hesitation, the man hauled the bay’s head around, slammed home his spurs and drove the animal full-tilt off the bank to plummet ten feet into the river—a swirling, earth-devouring current.

  The fugitive had no sooner been engulfed in spray than he felt the river snatch at the bay and send it hurtling down-stream.

  The animal thrashed and whickered, pawing desperately at the water, sending up more screening spray that threw off the aim of the cursing posse.

  He shook his head to clear his vision of blinding water, and saw that the posse had lined up along the rim and had started pouring lead into the river. The riders who had come through the entrance, skidded to a halt on the bank and began shooting.

  He slid off the saddle, clinging to the horn, and kept the swimming bay between him and the riverbank. Bullets zipped into the frothing water. One thunked into the thick leather seat of the saddle rig, and another bur
ned leather off the horn.

  The horse shook its head and whinnied in fear as the man clung tightly to the animal swimming madly with the speeding current that was whipping them both down-stream—to safety.

  He laughed as he heard a frustrated yell from one of the posse, the man’s voice just audible above the passage of the river. “Goddamn you, Shannon! We’ll nail you next time.”

  The words “next time” echoed several times across the wild river as the fugitive and his mount were swept around a bend, and out of sight of the posse. Shannon laughed again, and got a better grip on the horn.

  “Sure,” he thought. “Next time. Maybe. But not if I can help it, amigo. No, sir. I’m headed for freedom and I don’t aim to let anythin’, or anyone, stop me—and that includes the whole of Wells Fargo, from Jim Hume and Clay Nash on down.”

  The posse was already riding out of the canyon, aiming to try to cut the fugitive further down river. But they knew they would never make it in time.

  Once again, the man had slipped through their fingers. And that wouldn’t make anyone happy. Except Shannon, of course.

  “Like I said before, Jim, I kind of hope Shell Shannon makes it to wherever he’s headed.”

  Clay Nash, top gun of the Wells Fargo detectives, leaned back in the hard train seat as the locomotive panted its way up the grade towards the tunnel through the mountain range before the long downhaul to Denver, Colorado. He was a tall man, pushing thirty, with weathered, wolfish features and deep-etched lines around his gray eyes. His mouth was wide, but a trifle on the thin side—capable of smiling warmly or thinning out into a dangerous razor slash with equal ease ...

  Nash seemed weary as he stretched out and planted his scuffed riding boots on the empty seat beside the blocky, wide shouldered man in the Derby hat opposite him.

  He hitched his six-gun rig around to a more comfortable position and pushed his hat up from his forehead, wiping sweat from his brow and revealing matted brown hair. Then he dug in his shirt pocket for the makings as Jim Hume stared at him.

  “Clay, you got this all wrong. Shannon was in the Wyoming State Pen for attempted murder,” he said grimly. “Not just anyone, mind. He tried to kill the Governor of the Territory.”

  Nash shrugged, building his cigarette and licking the edge of the paper. “He didn’t bear any grudges, Jim. Shannon’s a gun for hire. Someone paid him to try to nail the Governor and he did. It backfired and he was headed for the hangman ...”

  “Till you busted him loose,” Hume cut in, his mouth tight. i Nash paused a moment as he struck the vesta, then applied the flame to his cigarette. He blew smoke out the window, then snapped the vesta in two to make sure it was dead before flicking it away.

  “Jim, he was the one man who could help me get Mary Lee Farrell back from that maniac Largo Brewster. You told me yourself there was no chance of getting Shannon a reprieve because he’d taken a pot-shot at the Governor. There was no time to wait or try to find someone else, so the way I saw it, I had no choice but to get into the prison—and break him out. We were lucky we made it.”

  “And you put that special Remington into Shannon’s hands. A known assassin. If I’d guessed what you had in mind, I would never have arranged for that gun to be made available ... And to top it off, Shannon slugged you and ran. He didn’t even carry out his part of the bargain.”

  Nash smiled slowly. “That ain’t surprisin’ if you knew Shannon, Jim. Fact was, there was no bargain. I couldn’t promise him freedom if he helped. I had to tell him that all I could do was to put in a word on his behalf. I also told him that after the chore was done, he’d have to go back to prison. I had to trust him on some of the deal. I ain’t surprised I couldn’t.”

  Nash suddenly leaned forward, dropping his boots to the swaying floor of the carriage, and leaning his forearms across his knees. “But, Jim, this is what I’m remembering: I’d been bushwhacked by Coe. Shannon doctored my wound before he lit out. And that Indian squaw who had the knife at the Farrell gal’s throat, would’ve killed her—except for that long-range shot by Shannon with the Remington.”

  Hume sighed. “Clay, you’re surmising he did that.”

  Nash sat back, smiling crookedly. “No, Jim. You’re surmisin’ he didn’t. I saw that squaw. A neat hole between the eyes, and the back of her head blowed clean off. Same way as you found Mary Lee’s father, in Cheyenne.”

  The Detective Chief nodded, but his eyes narrowed. “That was cold-blooded murder, Clay. Luke Farrell was standing in his hotel suite window when he just dropped. Drilled clean between the eyes with the back of his head lifted off.”

  “Jim, you claim that was Shannon. Why hold back on the squaw? She died the same way. Seems to me, you hang Farrell’s murder on Shannon, you gotta at least give him credit for nailing the squaw.”

  Hume took out a cigar and went through the elaborate preparation of piercing and rolling it before lighting up. Finally, he stared levelly at Nash through the smoke.

  “S’pose I do concede it was likely Shannon? Okay, it means he did show up to help you at Tomahawk Canyon and saved the gal’s life. There’s no getting away from the fact that he shot down her father in Cheyenne in cold blood. The killing of Luke Farrell was nothing less than cold-blooded murder.”

  Nash pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “I was on my way to kill Farrell myself, you know that, Jim. With all his pussyfootin’ around, he let his daughter get so badly treated by Largo’s varmints that she’s not likely to be anywheres near a normal human being for a long, long time. If ever. The medics are just guessin’. Any man who’d willingly let that sort of thing happen to his own flesh and blood so as to save himself some money, don’t deserve to live. Leastways not in my book.”

  “Clay, we’re not here to judge. The morals of the thing had nothin’ to do with us. You got too involved, was all.”

  Nash looked as if he were about to explode but he controlled himself with an effort and looked out the window.

  “All this don’t change anythin’, Clay,” Hume said slowly. “We can talk and discuss this till hell freezes over. It don’t alter a damn thing: you busted Shannon out of prison, it’s your job to get him back. Now, so far, I’ve managed to keep it quiet that you’re involved. Wells Fargo sure don’t know and my head’s already in the noose, just by keepin’ quiet about it. So you owe me somethin’, whether you like it or not, and the only way you can square it is to go after Shell Shannon and bring him back. I mean it, Clay. This is unofficial, between you and me, has to be that way. But—if you like—I’m giving you a chance to square things. No-one need ever know you were the one broke him out. Feller who helped you—what was his name ...?”

  “Coe,” Nash said curtly.

  “Yeah, Coe. He’s dead. Only Shannon himself to talk and there’s nothin’ in it for him, so I reckon he’ll keep quiet. And, Clay—I gotta say this. We been friends a long time. But I got my duty to the Company. I’m puttin’ my butt in a sling by even goin’ this far, you know that: I don’t want to lose you. Nor do Wells Fargo. But, you don’t play along with this—like you know you should—I’m gonna have to find some reason to explain to the Company why I fired you.”

  Nash stiffened.

  “Did I hear right?”

  “You know you did, Clay. You think about it. You know I got no choice.”

  Nash’s eyes narrowed. He studied Hume’s rocky face for a long moment and then turned and stared out the window into the night. A shower of sparks erupted from the loco’s smokestack as they took a bend and then swayed onto the straight that led into the dark maw of the mountain tunnel.

  The thunder of the train’s passage through the tunnel filled Nash’s head. Black, choking smoke boiled through the open window but he didn’t close it.

  The pall of smoke didn’t clear until they were well past the other end of the tunnel, on the long steady sweep down to Denver, the lights of the town showing far ahead like a handful of weak, scattered stars.

  Nash thumbed out his cigar
ette butt on the window sill and looked back to Hume who was patiently waiting for some reply or reaction from his top operative

  “You’d do it, too,” Nash said flatly.

  Hume merely nodded.

  “Look, Jim, I know Shannon’s a killer. Okay, I did wrong busting him out, but I’d do it all over again if I had to. I believed it was the only way to save that little gal’s life. I owe Shannon something. If he hadn’t doctored me in that cave, if he’d just ridden out and left me, I’d be dead. And so would Mary Lee Farrell. He stuck around long enough to back me up at Tomahawk Canyon: from a distance, sure, but he stayed. Then he did what he knew I would have to do: he went after the gal’s father and nailed him. I can’t just bring myself to take off after a man like Shannon.”

  “I said I owed the Company a lot of loyalty, Clay,” Hume said quietly. “Never figured I’d have to remind you that you do, too.”

  Nash clamped his jaws, and muscles knotted along the edges.

  “You don’t need to remind me,” he gritted.

  “Seems to me, I do.”

  Nash sighed. “Look, we don’t even know where Shannon is. He hasn’t been sighted since Cheyenne. Sure, we know he headed for the Rockies, but there hasn’t been a positive sighting of him since. From what I know of Shannon, we’ll never see nor hear of him again. Not as Shell Shannon, leastways.”

  Hume drew deeply on his cigar and exhaled, peering at Nash through the blue haze of smoke. “We will, Clay. When you bring him in ...”

  When the train rolled into Denver just before midnight, the clerk from the Wells Fargo depot was waiting with a telegraph message for Hume. He read it quickly then smiled thinly as he handed the yellow, dog-eared form to Nash without comment.

  Nash stiffened as he read the message and looked up.

  “All right. He’s definitely been sighted now. In some canyon where a whole posse of more than twenty men couldn’t even pin him down. How am I gonna bring in a man like that, Jim?”