The Trail West

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

In the year 1850, when he was but twenty years old, young Dooley Monahan, last born and only living offspring of Janine and David Monahan, struggling Iowa farmers who had joined the first wave of pioneers, found himself fallen in with bad company.

It was a simple enough thing. Dooley had ridden south to a town near the Missouri border to pick up a new milk cow for his pa. She was a purebred Jersey—a rare breed at that time and place, and one which was renowned for producing rich milk. She was already paid for, and all he had to do to claim her was show proof of who he was. He was all set to do just that, with an introductory letter from his pa, enough chuck in his saddlebags to get him there and home again, and fifty cents emergency money in his pocket. “Just in case,” David Monahan had said as he pressed the worn coins into his son’s hand.

Dooley’s father was always chock-full of “justin-cases.”

But Dooley—tall, handsome, and always with a twinkle in his chestnut eyes—had nodded, taken the cash, mounted up, and set off. At twenty, he was already running half of the farm. He had forty acres in corn, twenty acres in oats, twenty acres in hay, twenty acres in cattle pasture, and responsibility for all the hogs. In another year or so, he imagined he’d take over the place.

He thought about all that while riding the two days south to Corydon and half of another to reach his goal: the small farm town of Accord. There, he bartered at length with the liveryman to trade a good morning mucking out the stalls in exchange for one night’s resting place for himself and his horse.

They sealed the deal with a handshake, and Dooley gave his old gelding a thorough rubdown before he grabbed his hunting rifle and the last bites of his ma’s good apple pie, and headed out into the dying rays of the sun to have a look around.

There wasn’t much to look at besides darkened windows and
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signs until he came to the mouth of an alley, from which muted laughter and man talk burbled out onto the street along with the soft glow of lantern light. Dooley was a curious lad, and, gulping down the last of his pie, he stuck his head around the corner and peered in.

A packing crate, topped with a horse blanket and centered by a small mound of coins, sat back about a dozen feet from the street. Seated on boxes or nail kegs surrounding the crate were four men, each staring at a handful of cards.

“Damned if you didn’t deal us out a mess, Usher,” Dooley heard, just before the man with his back to him punched the speaker in the arm. Well, more like gave him a little shove, Dooley guessed. Leastwise, it all looked real friendly.

At least, that was what he thought then.

If he had known who they were or what they would eventually do to him, and worse, the path they would set the gangly Iowa farm boy traveling down—a path filled with pain and questions and heartbreak beyond measure, and one that would change his life forever—he wouldn’t have been so eager to call out a friendly, “Hello there, fellers!” But Dooley was no fortune-teller, and so he grinned and called to them, and they waved him in.

They played poker until the morning light, though Dooley didn’t remember it in much detail. They’d had a jug of homemade hooch they’d passed around too often for him to keep track. When he came into himself again, it was late the next morning and they were outside town. Old Tony, the aged chestnut gelding his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday, was safely hitched to their picket line, and Dooley was as sick to his stomach as he’d ever been. He also began to realize he’d fallen in with dangerous men.

He looked around. Usher, the one who’d been punched the night before, was a tallish fellow with oily, red hair curling into his eyes and down his back. He looked quite a bit cruder than he had in the lamplight. Dexter, the one who’d punched him, was a little shorter with close-cropped, dark brown hair and a scar running high across his forehead, like somebody had started to scalp him but got interrupted. Dexter looked like he’d skin his own mama for sneezing during Sunday service. Well, that wasn’t right—Dexter looked to never have been to Sunday Service in his life—but Dooley couldn’t think of anything meaner right off the top of his head.

The third man, a short blond with a droopy mustache and a permanent scowl, was across the way, angrily and jerkily stropping a knife blade back and forth across a length of leather. His name was Grubb. A fitting name if ever Dooley had heard one.

The last of the four—and the roughest, young Dooley guessed, if you took any mind of the scar on the side of his face—was another tallish fellow, his once dark hair graying already, whose name was either George Vince or Vince George. He answered to either one singly, and Dooley hadn’t heard anyone call him by both names. At least, not in the correct order, whatever that was. But despite his obvious lack of hygiene (Dooley could smell him clear across camp), he seemed the happiest that Dooley was “one of them,” whoever they were. Dooley was running a little shy on the details. They seemed to be some kind of a group, and they seemed to have plans.

Later that afternoon, Dooley discovered just what their plan was: to rob the First Iowa Bank of Corydon. By the time he figured out what they were up to, he was in too deep to crawl back out.

That’s how Dooley Monahan came to be one of Monty’s Raiders (the original Monty having been lost in the mists of time), a gang of cheap rowdies who, before the Civil War, terrorized the central plains.

Against his will, he stayed with the raiders until late the next year, when his complaining and pleas to leave and go home finally rankled the nerves of the gang to their frazzling point. One night, Vince George (which had turned out to be his proper name), with the help of Red Usher, took it upon himself to beat Dooley senseless and leave him for dead in a ditch near a northern Missouri field.

They left him without a dime from the monies he helped them steal or his wallet, which still held the fifty cents that had been his father’s final gift to him. All they left with him was Old Tony who, at twenty-five, was too old to do anybody any good. And they took his saddle.

For three days Dooley lay in the ditch, not moving, passing in and out of fuzzy consciousness, until he was found by a passerby on her way to a neighbor’s. Battered and bruised and barely conscious, he was saved by a woman named Kathleen.

 

The pot wouldn’t have been considered a big one in town. In fact, it would have been laughable. But it was rich for a bunkhouse when the players were still a week and a half from payday and hurting bad for something to do. A dollar and fourteen cents, twenty-six matches, an old whorehouse token, and a train-flattened nickel sat in the center of the table. Dooley Monahan held exactly two pairs—tens and deuces.

Being unlucky at cards, it was the best hand he’d had in months. He dug deep into pockets linty with disuse and finally dug out a dime, his last. He looked across the table at Bob Smith, a summer name if he’d ever heard one, then flipped the dime onto the table. “Call, and raise you a five-cent nickel.”

The other players had folded already and looked on eagerly while Smith scowled. He was the only other player left in the game, and universally disliked by the other hands.

Smith, a dull, hulking fellow with a Southern accent and a hair-trigger temper, growled, “All’s I got is matches.”

Everybody knew the matches would be redeemed, come payday, for a penny apiece. Monahan nodded. “Fine by me, Smith.” He turned to the old codger sitting next to him. “You keepin’ track, Cookie?”

Holding a folded-up piece of paper and a crooked stick of raw lead, Cookie licked the makeshift pencil. “Yup. That’s five more matches for Smith. Right, Smith?”

Smith grunted and tossed five more sulphur tips on the pile. “Call,” he barked. “Let’s see ’em, Monahan.”

Carefully, Monahan lay down the battered pasteboards to the boys’ enthusiastic hum.

Smith set down his cards, but facedown. “You lose, Monahan,” he growled, and started to rake in the pot.

Cookie, who was seventy-something and old enough . . . or dumb enough . . . to be brave in the face of a tough hombre like Smith—braver than Monahan was, in any case—grabbed Smith’s arm. “Hold on, there. Let’s have a look-see.”

Monahan wasn’t exactly sure what occurred over the next couple of seconds, but he recalled something about Smith calling him a cheat who lost more at cards than most men lose trying to put a size eight boot on a size ten foot! He thought he pushed Cookie out of the way right about the time Smith drew his gun, and he was a bit fuzzy about pulling his own.

But Monahan remembered the way it ended up, all right.

Smith lay dead, shot through the heart by Monahan, a man who normally couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a handful of beans, and Monahan himself was shot in the left hip. It wasn’t bad, just a graze really, but it sure hurt like hell.

And he remembered everybody whooping and hollering and cheering.

As for Monahan? He hadn’t liked Smith much, but he felt awful bad about the whole mess. He’d seen far too many deaths in his life to feel marginally good about causing yet another.

 

 

A couple of weeks later the U.S. marshal came by, and from the men’s description—and the wrinkled poster he carried in his wallet—he identified Smith not as Smith, but as Jason Baylor, a man wanted in three states and two territories for everything from robbery to aggravated assault to cold blooded murder. Make that multiple murders.

“The last was when him and his brothers killed a couple fellers down in Colorado.” Marshal Tobin sat in the good chair on the boss’s porch with the boss and all the hands—including the still-limping Monahan—all huddled around. “Wounded three more, too. Bank job gone bad.” He shook his head. “If I was you, Dooley, I’d change my name and beat it out of here. Them Baylor boys is like rabid skunks. Reckon they’re split up now, waitin’ for the heat to die down from that Colorado job, but eventually they’ve got a plan to meet up. And when Jason don’t show . . .”

“That’s right, Dooley,” said Cookie, nodding sagely. “They’ll come lookin’ for you, sure as anything. And that Alf Baylor? I hear he’s plumb crazy!”

“Dev ain’t exactly normal, either,” muttered the marshal.

Monahan scrunched up his face. “Just how many brothers did the feller have, anyhow?”

Marshal Tobin frowned. “Just the two, Dooley, just the two. But you’ll feel like you’re in the hands of the legions of Satan if they catch you up. They’re bad business. Real bad.”

Monahan simply said, “Aw, crud.” He was nearly forty-one and well past his prime. He’d been thinking—hoping, more like—he’d outlived what little reputation he had, and could get on with the peaceful business of living out the rest of his life and dying in relative obscurity.

Didn’t seem the dice were going to roll his way, though.

Marshal Tobin scribbled on a piece of paper, and handed it to Monahan. “Reward voucher. There was plenty of paper out on Jason Baylor. Five hundred dollars’ worth.”

Collectively, the boys gasped and Monahan knew why. It was near two years’ wages for a top cowhand.

“You can cash that in any place that has a bank and a telegraph, but I’d do it a far piece from here, if I was you. Think you know why. Hey, Charlie”—the marshal turned to the boss—“don’t suppose you got anything stronger than coffee to drink around here, do you? Like to celebrate sayin’ adios to at least one o’ those damned Baylor boys.”

Monahan left the next day, with a pillow under his left hip and the voucher in his pocket.