Learn more about Rio Pecos Compound: Book Six of The Clint Mason Series
Copyright William F. Martin. All Rights Reserved.
A month had passed since the shootout with the Johnson gang. The Rio Pecos wounded were healing very rapidly. The whole village was putting the final touches on the last of the new houses and preparing for the winter months. Clint was headed back to Santa Fe with two of the Mexican guards. The guards would go with Sr. Bond to Albuquerque to bring back the mares that had been bred with the Spanish stallions.
Clint was following up on the activities of Claude Johnson, plus having a little fun gambling. The first café stop for a good beef steak uncovered the story that Mr. Johnson had taken the stage back east to meet with the railroad executives in St. Louis. He had just left the day before with an overnight layover in Las Vegas. If Clint left immediately with one extra horse, he should be able to reach Abilene about the time Claude would be arriving by stage. The word was that Claude was traveling with two professional gun hands as bodyguards. The waitress at the café was very descriptive of the guards and their dress. They had intimidated several of her best customers. She described them as strutting around like peacocks in their fancy clothes and expensive double-holster Colt revolvers. Both guards were identically dressed and armed. They could be brothers or maybe close kin. One of them went by the name of Jake Tilson. She had never heard the other name. They had openly bragged about getting even with the Rio Pecos people for bushwhacking the Johnson Ranch workers. The story these two Johnson guards were spreading had the Rio Pecos people squatting on Mr. Johnson’s land, and saying that the Rio Pecos people bushwhacked the Johnson riders when they tried to serve notice on the compound. Mr. Johnson was going to have the U.S. Army evict the Rio Pecos people off the railroad right-of-way and his property. The rumor had it that Claude Johnson and his family had a lot of financial power back east in both New York City and the national capital.
Clint traded one of his horses with one of the Mexican guards so he had the two best horses to make the run to Abilene. A quick pack job at his old town house and he started. If his calculations were good, he should be able to pass Johnson’s stagecoach almost a full day before he got to Abilene to catch the train. Train schedules were uncertain, but Clint’s goal was to beat Johnson to St. Louis.
Clint was more than a day’s ride out of Abilene when he overtook the stage at a rest stop for a team change. He rode clear of the stage’s horse changing station and continued on to Abilene.
Clint’s first stop in Abilene was the train ticket office. A train was leaving late that evening for St. Louis. This gave Clint enough time to check in with the U.S. Army survey office and railroad office to verify that they had received his offer to sell his right-of-way through Rio Pecos Ranch. Neither office had seen the papers, but both were very interested. The Colonel remembered Clint and his excellent showing on the survey exams. He was glad that Clint had agreed to work on the railroad right-of-way issue between Raton Pass and Santa Fe.
The death of Atkinson had left a lot of the land surveys incomplete. The Santa Fe land title clerk had sent a message last month that the Atkinson/Johnson land deals may be improper. The Colonel had sent word to the St. Louis office to withhold all further payments until the legal issues could be checked out.
The Colonel was aware that Claude Johnson was headed to St. Louis or even further east to free up his money and persuade the railroad company to complete the land purchases from him. Johnson was claiming to be the sole owner of the jointly held lands upon the death of Atkinson last summer in St. Louis.
Timing could not have been worse. The stage with Johnson and his two guards arrived before the train left Abilene headed to St. Louis. Clint’s horses were being moved around in the stockyard next to the rail station when Johnson and his men walked by. Clint had boarded the train a little earlier and could see Johnson’s reaction when he spotted Clint’s horses. Clint watched Johnson go back to the ticket office. Clint was beginning to feel trapped. He did not think of Johnson as a gunman, but those two guards with Johnson’s help would be more than Clint could handle by himself. Clint’s idea had been to select his time and place in the big city of St. Louis. Abilene was much too small and he was well recognized in this town. But being trapped inside a railcar was almost certain death, so he snuck out the rear side of the train and headed to a public place. He selected the biggest saloon and eased himself into a card game. He chose a rear table back against the wall. If he was to have any chance, he had to keep Johnson’s guards in front of him. It did not take long before one of Johnson’s men walked through the saloon. When he spotted Clint, he left immediately. The return of all three was predictable.
Johnson sent one of his gun hands over to join Clint’s card game. It only took a few hands for the quality card skills of the Johnson gunman to appear. Clint was an expert gambler himself and this guy was very close in his handling of that deck of cards. Clint was watching the cards so closely that he almost missed the movement of the other gunman, toward the wall near Clint, just off to his side about four or five feet.
When another player left the table, Johnson joined the game. Clint was face-to-face across the table with two men that wanted him dead and a third just off to his left that would gladly help them accomplish that deed. Johnson’s gun hand was making obvious cheating moves with the cards. Clint knew it was to sucker him into challenging, and then being killed by all three guns. The whole shootout would be called a gambling dispute and dismissed.
Clint had taken the precaution of having two guns in his lap so he did not have to draw a gun while seated. One of the other players finally got fed up with the cheating and stood up to protest. This was the moment that the Johnson team was waiting for and Clint knew it. Clint fired two shots at once from under the table. Johnson and his card playing partner were thrown back as their guns exploded into the floor. The standing card player had partially blocked the line of sight for the last gunman. The gunman had put a bullet into the challenging card player. Clint had tipped his chair over backward and put two shots into the last standing gunman just as he was pulling off another shot. Clint felt the burn of a bullet in his leg. The standing gambler fell onto Clint in obvious pain. His gun fell right beside Clint. With a quick motion, Clint used the other man’s gun and put another shot into each of Johnson’s men and Johnson himself. Clint was looking directly into the helpless eyes of Johnson when that fatal bullet struck him.
Once the shooting had stopped and the smoke had cleared, the local law officer and doctor were sent for. Clint’s leg wound was not serious, but the other card player had taken a rather bad shot into the upper chest and shoulder. He had lost a lot of blood, but the doctor was sure he could pull the man through
The story was very clear to the law officer. Johnson’s guard was cheating at cards. When he was challenged, the shooting started. The challenger had killed Johnson and the cheating gunman. The second guard had then shot the challenging card player and Clint in the leg. Clint had then shot the guard in self-defense. This story was confirmed when the law officer inspected everyone’s guns for empty shells. Clint had reloaded with the exception of two empty shells. There had been so much confusion following the shootout that no one noticed Clint reloading both guns. The wounded card player did not remember all the shooting, but accepted the conclusion that he had killed the cheating card player and the cheater’s boss. In fact, he accepted the role of hero quite willingly and with pride. The two other players confirmed the dead gunman’s card cheating and put the praise on their fellow card player for challenging the cheater. Clint was seen as an innocent bystander that had defended himself. The demise of Claude Johnson could not have been planned better than this accidental encounter. The word got around that one of the dead gunmen was known as Jake Tilson, a well-known professional guard for the Atkinson/Johnson enterprises. He was credited with almost a dozen killings from Chicago, St. Louis and as far south as New Orleans. Everyone was telling Clint and the wounded card player how lucky they were to have survived the gun battle. By now, the saloon shootout had grown to a new level of heroism, having Trent Jones, the wounded card player, standing up against three gunmen and killing them all even though he had suffered a serious gunshot wound to his upper chest and right shoulder, his shooting arm. It was a miracle that he was able to continue shooting after he had fallen. Trent Jones was an overnight celebrity.
Clint could only smile to himself and reinforce the myth every chance he got. His wound was mending without infection and his job was done. He hung around Abilene for a week to see that Trent Jones was recovering okay and that no new details were uncovered to challenge the myth of the saloon gun battle.
Clint had another mission now that the threat of land claims against Rio Pecos Ranch had died with Atkinson and Claude Johnson. Joe Black had given Clint the name of his sister and her two young sons that Joe had heard were living in Chicago. She had escaped slavery in the Deep South while the Civil War was raging. Joe did not know what had happened to her husband. The only clue was that Joe had placed his sister at one of the meatpacking plants on the south side of Chicago. Joe had asked Clint to get a message to her if he got back to Chicago. Joe had found a safe place to live and JoAnn Jackson was welcome to join him. Her two boys went by the names of Fred and Andy. They were about 10 and 12 years old.
Clint set off on the train ride to Chicago with hope for the future and a sense of pride that even Joe Black felt safe at Rio Pecos Compound.