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  ROBBERS ROOST

  James Reasoner

  Original edition copyright ® February 1988 by Terence Duncan

  Ebook edition copyright © April 2012 by James Reasoner

  First printing: February 1988 POWELLS ARMY #4:

  ROBBERS ROOST

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Introduction

  The 1986 Western Writers of America convention in Fort Worth was the first one I attended. I'd been a member of WWA for less than a year, and that convention was an opportunity for me to meet a lot of people whose work I'd read and admired. Many of them became friends, and I'm still honored to call them my friends.

  Two of the people I met that week were literary agent Ray Puechner and his wife Barbara, a fine writer who was working on a Western series called POWELL'S ARMY. We became friends right away, and although Ray was never my agent, I remained in occasional contact with him and Barbara.

  A year went by, and Livia and I were excited about the impending birth of our second child. The phone rang one day, and on the other end was Barbara Puechner, who had some unwelcome news. Ray was sick, and because of the need to help take care of him, Barbara wasn't going to be able to continue writing the Powell's Army books for which she had contracts. She needed someone to take over for her, and she asked Livia if she'd be interested.

  Livia explained that she was going to be having a baby in the next day or two, so she didn't think she could take on anything else. But then she said, "You might get James to write them," and handed the phone to me.

  The motto of the freelance writer, of course, is "Sure, I can do that." So that's what I told Barbara. I agreed to write a Western novel in a series I hadn't read, in two weeks, with a newborn baby in the house. Piece of cake, right?

  I spent the next few days reading the first three books in the Powell's Army series (between the birth of our daughter Joanna, bringing her and Livia home from the hospital, etc.), then sat down and wrote ROBBERS ROOST in twelve days. I was pretty pleased with the way it turned out, too, and so was Barbara. I wrote the next two books in the series, ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHOWDOWN and RED RIVER DESPERADOES, before moving on to other things.

  In the meantime, Ray passed away, and after writing one more novel, a stand-alone Western entitled CRUSH that was published by M. Evans under the pseudonym Dell Beman, Barbara took over the literary agency and proved to be an exceptional agent. Livia and I became her clients, and she represented our work for many years. We saw her at a number of conventions and became friends not only with her but also with her sister-in-law Millie, who helped her run the agency, and her daughter Glenna.

  Unfortunately, illness forced Barbara to retire and then took her life at much too early an age. She was a fine writer, an excellent agent, and an even better friend, and Livia and I still miss her.

  I always remembered with fondness the three Powell's Army novels I wrote, at times under trying circumstances, and with the permission of Glenna and Millie, we're glad to make them available again as e-books. All three of them are dedicated to the memory of our good friend, Barbara Puechner.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "I'll bet you don't know nothing about Bozeman," the boy named Joshua taunted the man in his early twenties riding alongside him on the front boot of the stage.

  Preston Kirkwood Fox, former second lieutenant with the US Army, fingered his spindly mustache without deigning to answer.

  "I bet you're a greenhorn from back east," the boy continued. "Bet you've never been to Montana Territory before."

  Preston stopped fiddling with his facial hair and gritted his teeth together so hard they creaked. He wished he could tell this young whippersnapper that he was armed and dangerous, working undercover as a full member of a crack investigative unit even though he no longer had any official military sanction.

  That would shock some respect into the ornery boy.

  "And I got a turn to sit up front, whether you like it or not." Joshua stuck out his tongue. Fox would have enjoyed throttling him.

  Fox had insisted on his own turn sitting on the most comfortable seat on the stagecoach, riding beside the driver in the open air.

  The other passengers pruned their lips when Fox informed them that he wasn't about to give up his turn for the boy.

  Inside the canvas covered buckboard coach, the six seats facing each other jolted far more with each bump than the coveted seats on the front boot. The rear boot was packed with trunks, valises, and mail bags.

  Joshua had been crowded up front as well, even though it wasn't his turn, so that Fox was jammed toward the right of the careening stage.

  Joshua was ten years old, freckle-faced, traveling with his mother. The driver and the other passengers liked Joshua. They thought he was a wonderful boy. Fox had warned them all about sparing the rod and spoiling the child numerous times, but so far no one had been listening to him.

  Preston Kirkwood Fox did not like children in general, and he did not like Joshua in particular. Four hundred miles of the boy was more than Fox could stand. Four hundred miles was the distance from Corinne, Utah, where Fox had boarded the stage, to Bozeman, Montana Territory.

  It was the quickest — and most uncomfortable — way for Preston to make the last stretch of the journey to meet up with the other members of Powell's Army.

  Powell's Army, an army of three, four, now that Fox was one of them. Some army, he had thought more than once. It consisted of a woman, Celia Louise Burnett, a Dartmouth educated Omaha Indian, Gerald Glidinghawk, and a renegade former Confederate named Landrum Davis. And now Fox, who was, he supposed, a defrocked West Point career man.

  Together, Powell's Army worked undercover without glory on problems that the US Army had been unable to solve through regular channels. Problems? That was a mild term for the deadly missions on which Lt. Col. Amos Powell sent them.

  This one, Fox knew, would be no exception.

  Also, Landrum, Celia, and Glidinghawk were not expecting Fox to be the one delivering then-new orders-and they certainly wouldn't expect him to be acting undercover, to be a full member of their team. Always before, he had been their military liaison officer, in uniform.

  But expecting him or not, they had damned well better be happy to see him, Preston Kirkwood Fox thought.

  "Since we'll be traveling separately for security reasons," Landrum had told Celia and Glidinghawk, "we'll have to meet up at Bozeman."

  But that was back in Kansas, thousands of miles and a world away from Montana Territory. Landrum hadn't counted Fox in as a member of the team, hadn't told Fox anything except thanks and good luck.

  Landrum had left Fox with a handshake — left him in the clutches of an embarrassed US Army that had not at that time decided just what to do about Fox. And that handshake was given grudgingly after Landrum had given Celia and Glidinghawk the warmest of farewell embraces.

  Like always, Fox thought bitterly, the three of them, Landrum, Glidinghawk, and Celia, went on their merry way to points far west, leaving him holding the bag for the fiasco of Powell's Army's third mission.

  Three words from the tall Texan — thanks, good luck — were small thanks indeed when Fox had risked his life, limb, and most importantly his military career to break Landrum out of the Dodge City jail where he was awaiting the noose on trumped-up charges.

  The break-out had worked, too, Fox recalled with grim satisfaction. It had, he told himself, been nothing less than brilliant. Heavy hog-iron chains pulled by the twin stack Baldwin engine Fox had commandeered in the name of the US Army had pulled the thick adobe wall right off the strongest hoosegow in the west.

  Convenient
ly, Fox spent a lot of time reliving that triumph. He preferred to forget the way he had almost gotten all of them killed back in Fort Griffin on their first mission for Amos Powell and then again in Arizona Territory. Most of all, he wished he could forget the dressing down he had received from Powell for involving the good name of the US Army in the undercover operation in Dodge City.

  "Your action was excellent," Amos had admitted, "but your stupidity in letting everyone know who you were is unforgivable. If you hadn't boasted about being an army man, I could have covered it up. And bringing West Point into it, that was crass idiocy. You're just lucky I managed to talk them out of a court-martial."

  The stagecoach hit a bump, jarring Fox from his unhappy reverie. He looked everywhere but at the wide-open spaces on either side of the rough stagecoach trail.

  The mountains and prairie stretching out majestically before him made Fox vaguely uncomfortable, made him long for the measured, finite granite walls of West Point, from which he had graduated in '73. He longed for the small, protected spaces of the army posts he had known all his life.

  So instead of taking in the vast emptiness, Fox concentrated on watching the driver and team of six sturdy horses, the animals sleek with sweat as they struggled up an incline. Montana was all uphill so far, except for the stomach-lurching small valleys always followed by yet another mountain.

  The driver was a distinguished individual — until he opened his mouth and his loquaciousness was peppered with words Fox would never use in mixed company. He called himself Gus Slaten, but out here, who knew what his real name was, Fox thought judgmentally.

  Gus was somewhat of a dandy, what with his fine felt hat with a two-inch brim, his high-topped calfskin boots, and his doeskin gloves. His woolen shirt was topped by a thick leather coat, lined with sheepskin, that hugged the trunk of his body from armpits to middle, leaving his arms free.

  Gus was finely dressed, all right, Fox thought as he shivered in the November chill. With every rise in altitude, the air seemed colder and crisper. Damnable situation, Fox thought. His army greatcoat would have been warm-but his greatcoat, along with his keenly pressed military uniforms, had been taken from him.

  "I don't want you to keep anything that would connect you with the army," Amos Powell had told Fox. "Maybe later, after people forget what happened back at Dodge City, I can get you reinstated."

  It still irked Fox no end, especially now that he was shivering with chill. True, Amos had offered him the use of a thick buffalo robe, but the garment had been infested with bugs.

  Fox had purchased a decidedly non-military and impractical wardrobe consisting of woolen breeches, ruffled broadcloth shirts, a vest and a swallow-tailed coat he rather fancied.

  The way Fox figured, if he had to work undercover as an operative, out of uniform, he was going to be a high-living undercover operative, a gambler-type. He could have some fun with that role.

  After all, he had studied some thespianism. He could pull it off. It would be small enough compensation for his separation — a temporary one, he fervently hoped-from the army.

  The only problem had been that the tailored coat and brocade vest had overextended Fox's budget, and for a warm coat he ended up with a thin woolen broadcloth that the wind blew right through, more suited to the city than the wilds.

  However, Fox thought, he hoped to spend most of his time beside cast-iron stoves in smoky saloons, or perhaps at mining town hotels which, while they could not match up to the establishments in Dodge City, would offer some of the amenities.

  Fox smiled slightly at the mental image of himself at a poker table, cool, fearless, and dangerous. Somehow, in his mind's eye, the scraggly, sandy-colored mustache he sported had blossomed into a silky, impressive growth of mahogany hue.

  "Shove over, mister," Gus, the driver, said abruptly. "You're squeezing the boy out."

  Fox glared, but he resentfully inched over. Joshua was still crowded in between him and the driver. As Fox resettled his travel-sore rump-he had given an inch and wasn't about to give a mile — he felt a quick, painful jab to his gluteus maximus. He yelped and shot up out of the seat.

  Gus sneered, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. "Mister, you want to jump out here, it's your business."

  "Jump out my . . . foot. That wretched little devil stabbed me!"

  Joshua turned an angelic face to Gus and said, "It was an accident, Mr. Slaten. I thought he was going to give me enough room, so I moved. But if he'd given me enough space, he never would have ended up shoving himself into my mother's hatpin. So I reckon it's his fault."

  Gus spat a wad of tobacco juice out. Drops of it blew back in the wind, above Joshua's head. Fox closed his mouth abruptly, but not before a gobbet flew down his throat.

  "I reckon the kid's right," Slaten said. "Anybody who'd try to push around a youngster ain't fit company. You want I should let you out here?"

  "My way is paid to Bozeman," Fox said stiffly, trying to hold down his anger. God, why was he always getting himself into these ridiculous situations? It had happened with his classmates at West Point, it had happened with his fellow officers at the forts, and now it was happening with Powell's Army.

  "Horse manure," Gus said, spewing another stream of brownish liquid. This time, Fox had to wipe at his cheek. "It ain't long now 'till I get rid of the likes of you. Until then, behave yourself."

  Fox settled back to sulk.

  He tried to think again of his brief moment of glory, his time in the sun when Celia, Glidinghawk, and even Landrum patted him on the back and told him he was a hero.

  However, it was growing colder by the mile and it was hard to hold onto his thoughts. He could still taste, second-hand, the bitterness of the stage driver's chaw.

  He remembered a sergeant he had overheard telling a new enlisted man, "The one to stay away from is that pantywaist, by-the-rulebook Fox. He's the worst of the officer breed. Watch out for him. He's got a way about him not even a mother could love."

  That had stung.

  Fox could feel tears of self-pity welling up in his eyes. Although he never discussed it with anyone — not with his classmates, not with Amos Powell or his fellow officers, and certainly not with Powell's Army-he did not have a mother.

  Well, everyone had a mother once, Fox amended to himself. He had been born, but his mother, he had learned, had deserted his father when little Preston Kirkwood Fox was only a toddler.

  His father was a military man, distant and cold as if the desertion was the boy's fault. Preston was reared by a succession of strikers, enlisted men who became in essence servants to the officer class. None of the strikers seemed to like the boy any better than they liked his stern father.

  The elder Fox had died of apoplexy about the time Preston informed him he was graduating in the middle of his West Point class, rather than at the top.

  In Fox's mind, the events were always connected. He had never been able to measure up to his father's perfect spit-and-polish or his exalted military record. To Fox, his father had occupied a position subordinate only to Ulysses S. Grant and God.

  If he ever allowed himself to think about it, it would have struck Fox as odd that deep inside he wanted to win the approval of Landrum Davis, a former Confederate and Texas Ranger and a current renegade. Not to mention the fallen woman and the stinking heathen who worked with Landrum.

  The senior Fox had despised women, Indians, and Confederates, in about that order. He would turn over in the Arlington Cemetery grave where he had been buried with honors if he knew that his only son was working with a team that consisted of all three.

  But then again, Fox Senior had never thought much of his only son — something Preston was spared further thought on, as a gunshot suddenly rang out, echoing from the hills.

  The stage leaped forward, speeding up alarmingly as the horses responded to the sound. Gus Slaten cracked his whip and drove the team into a greater frenzy. They were careening along at more than thirty miles an hour and gaining speed.
/>   In a minute, they would fly through the rocky pass like a cork exploding from a poorly capped bottle of sarsaparilla. The gunshots were coming faster now from overhead.

  Nobody can travel this fast and not get killed, Fox thought wildly as his stomach contracted in fear. He jerked his head around and saw that they were almost clear of the dangerous pass.

  There was no doubt about what was happening, but Gus Slaten and Preston Kirkwood Fox shouted the dreaded word at the same time as the passengers from within the coach shrieked in terror.

  "Ambush!"

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Them damned road agents're at it again," Gus moaned. "I never would've taken this job if I knew they were still out here."

  The stagecoach had cleared the pass now and was barreling down the steep ravine that led to the Snake River. The river was the last obstacle before the town of Bozeman.

  Distances appeared shorter in the vastness, and down at the bottom of the steep trail, Fox saw ferrymen like small ants poling across the river.

  There were workers manning the wooden barge that was moving at a calm and stately pace. But from this distance, the ferrymen were unaware of the danger to the stage which was racing, screeching and tilting toward them.

  Why don't they look up and see us, Preston wondered? Why don't they help? Were gunshots so common in these hills that no one paid any attention to them?

  A fresh shot rang out behind Fox. He ducked his head. Instinctively, he put his arm around Joshua, who huddled into him, past differences forgotten.

  "You have a rifle," Fox yelled at Gus. "Use it!"

  Fox was armed only with a Colt .44, no good at all in this situation. The robbers were at least a hundred yards away, but they were gaining at an alarming rate. Horses' hooves clanged flintily against rock.

  Gus Slaten didn't answer Fox at first. When he did, his voice was a terrified wail. "I ain't never been held up before!"