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  They passed a solitary tree that had witnessed a hundred years of prairie history. Brendan stared back at it. Once they had hanged a man there, a bounty hunter who tried to poison their coffee after posing as a miner down on his luck. The Donovans hated lawmen, solid citizens, rich people and anybody who didn’t speak with an Irish accent, but most of all they hated bounty hunters ... especially the tough ones.

  If nothing else, Clint Savage had shown he was tough enough.

  SAVAGE 7: THE DARK BROTHERHOOD

  By E. Jefferson Clay

  First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  © 2019 by Piccadilly Publishing

  First Electronic Edition: February 2021

  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

  Table of Contents

  One – Die If You Want!

  Two – Close Quarters

  Three – Badmen of Angelville

  Four – Killer’s Day in Court

  Five – Big Money

  Six – A Killer Is Loose

  Seven – On the Run

  Eight – Luck of the Irish

  Nine – The Dark Brotherhood

  Ten – The High Cost of Glory

  About the Author

  One – Die If You Want!

  Bathed in the blood-red rays of a border sundown, Savage lunged low through the doorway under the path of a howling bullet. The saloon rocked to the bellow of his six-gun as he came clear with a lightning, faultless action, aiming for the dark corner. Between the head-splitting roar of his gunshots, he heard a cry of pain and the crash of a falling body behind him.

  He did not dare turn and see who had been hit. It could have been a curious patron or a painted percentage girl. It might have been the red-faced Irish detective who had brought him to Gearytown, or even the sawed-off runt named Yaqui Joe who called himself Clint Savage’s trail pard. Somebody else might get hurt soon, unless Savage could silence that wild-firing gunman pronto — and that somebody could be Savage himself ...

  The big man’s Colt hammer rose and fell, and the voice of his six-shooter shook dust from the ceiling.

  Down on one knee behind an overturned table, he kept the lead flying into the darkened corner.

  In that doubtful refuge sixty feet away, Ike Nash returned fire and tried to fight his panic.

  Nash was a crook, although nobody in Gearytown knew it. He was a thief and a friend to outlaws. He had killed in his day, but although he was handy enough with a Colt .45, he was no gunfighter. It was knowing that the man he had tried to kill really was a gunman that brought out the cold sweat. He expected to feel the bullets slamming into his unprotected body at any time, and waiting for it to happen was almost worse than actually feeling the lead. The fear tied knots in Nash’s guts and accelerated his heart until it roared in his ears. He would’ve given anything he owned to be out of the Brass Boot Saloon and away from the bounty-hunting gun slick.

  Pausing to reload, Savage shot a quick glance over his shoulder. His jaws locked. Lying a short distance from him in an open space on the sawdust-strewn floor was a dirty sombrero. Protruding from under a table were a pair of ridiculously high-heeled Mexican boots, ornamented with huge rowel spurs.

  The son of a bitch had shot Yaqui Joe.

  With a loaded gun in his fist again, Savage was fired with cold rage as he searched for his target. Through the gun smoke hanging in the stagnant air, his sharp eyes picked out a dim figure on the floor, dragging itself on its belly and making for the half-open back door.

  “Stop right where you are, scum!” Savage roared.

  Ike Nash sprang to his feet and threw himself at the doorway as Savage’s six-gun thundered twice. Nash turned and crashed sideways against the doorframe.

  “Well die then, if you’re so damn set on it,” Savage snarled, and he blew Ike Nash into the yard with a bullet in the skull.

  Moths whirled above Savage’s head as he walked the quiet streets of Gearytown an hour later. A lighted cigar was clamped between his teeth and his scowl was as black as the luxurious mustache that ornamented his top lip.

  Savage was a tolerably direct and uncomplicated man when it came to showing his feelings, and his feelings now were a combination of regret, anger and frustration. He had come to Gearytown with a pot-bellied Irish detective and a snaggle-toothed Mexican looking for a lead on a clan of Irish badmen known as the Donovans. They were worth nothing much to the world in general, but there was a bounty of five-hundred dollars on their unruly heads.

  Savage was bone tired before he got into town, and neither he nor his companions expected to find the wild Irishmen in Gearytown. Even so, he had been watchful as he went around asking the locals about them. That natural caution paid off at the Brass Boot.

  Ike Nash ... Savage brooded over the name as he halted outside the funeral parlor. The sound of industrious sawing and hammering came from the interior. Nash’s name didn’t mean a thing to Savage yet, or to the slow-moving sheriff who had identified the dead man from Redstone from the papers he was carrying. The sheriff was firing off wires right now in an attempt to discover more about the dead man who had been calling himself Smith during his short stay in the border town.

  Maybe Nash didn’t know Savage at all. A girl at the Brass Boot said everyone at the bar had been discussing Savage, the bounty hunter, and right after that, Nash went for iron.

  Savage shrugged big shoulders and moved on. As a veteran of four years of war and a wanderer of the West’s wilder places ever since, he was no stranger to violence or sudden death. He might not be squeamish, but he took no pleasure from gunplay, especially when it seemed pointless and unnecessary.

  Savage found Yaqui Joe sitting up on the vet’s scrubbed examination table puffing on a skimpily-rolled cigarette.

  Gearytown was too small to support a doctor, but the long-jawed vet had been splinting broken bones, digging out bullets and delivering babies for so long that he was known universally and respectfully as ‘Doc’.

  Doc’s report on Yaqui Joe was encouraging. The little half-breed had collected a slug in the thigh. He would be laid up for at least a month and would probably walk with a limp, but he would survive.

  “It is as I always say, Savage,” the patient grinned, showing his horsey teeth right up to the gums. “The bullet that can kill Yaqui Joe has not yet come from the mold.” He thumped his chest valiantly, and coughed. “It is the constitution of my noble forebears, you understand? Ah, those brave conquistadores! They also were brave men ...”

  “Noble, my eye,” Savage murmured as he leaned against the wall. Then he looked at the vet and asked, “Can you recommend a good roomin’ house, Doc? For him, I mean.”

  Yaqui Joe looked alarmed. “You will not leave me here, amigo? Will you?”

  Savage sure as hell would. After traveling a hundred miles and tangling with a trigger-happy nobody at the end of the ride, he was more determined than ever to catch up with the Donovans. Otherwise, all the effort would have been wasted. Out of pure kindness, he neglected to tell his bad-smelling sidekick that a month without him had a certain appeal. Stuffing a handful of money in the breed’s grimy fist, he turned to leave.

  “Savage,” Yaqui Joe wheedled, “we could hire the buckboard and I could travel—”

  “Negative,” Savage said flatly. “These potato eaters have been stayin’ one jump ahead as it is, and that’s without us slowin’ ourselves down with a cripple. Look, you’ve nothin’ better to do than smoke, drink and eat three square meals a day. A man would be a fool not to like that better than huntin’ outlaws in high summer.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Savage cut in, going to the door. “If I don’t see you beforehand, I’ll be back in a month. Vaya con Dios,” Savage grunted, and then he was gone, leaving one very miserable Mexican and a thoughtful veterinarian looking at each other with nothing much to say.

  “A big man, that pard of yours,” Doc remarked.

  “A big cucaracha!” Yaqui Joe said bitterly, surveying his heavily bandaged leg.

  “Think a lot of him don’t you?” the vet grinned.

  “May his horse turn into a grizzly bear and devour him ... slowly,” Yaqui Joe muttered.

  Although he had temporarily shed one burden that had cramped his style for longer than he cared to remember, Savage was not altogether free. Patrick ‘Blarney’ O’Brien reminded him of that as soon as he returned to the hotel which had been their first stop in Gearytown.

  The excited little detective insisted on taking part in the manhunt. Otherwise, he would withdraw his promise of an extra two-hundred dollars for the capture of the gang.

  Savage stared at the man bleakly. He’d met up with O’Brien by chance a week before. The man was cocky, gabby, shifty, self-assured and, as Savage told him to his face, just plain full of it. Savage wasn’t even interested enough to find out why the detectiv e seemed to have such a personal interest in the Donovans’ fate; it was enough to know that the man was an even more trying trail partner than Yaqui Joe.

  Maybe he was doomed to always have some human millstone hanging around his neck, Savage brooded as O’Brien gave one reason after another for sticking around.

  “You’re a fine, straightforward American, Clinton, whereas these Irishmen are as sly and tricky as fleas, and—”

  “And how about you, O’Brien? I don’t reckon that handle you go by is exactly Chinese,” Savage broke in. “If the Donovans are no-account, then maybe you’re just the same.”

  O’Brien drew himself up to his full height, looking Savage straight in the breast pocket. He sucked in his round little paunch and turned an even deeper shade of pink.

  “The Irish,” he declared, “are a richly varied and contrastin’ race, Clinton, somethin’ a colonial such as yourself would not be understandin’. But—”

  “No,” Savage cut in.

  His ears were already ringing, and he wasn’t in the mood for more of the same.

  “I’ll do better on my own, if I understand the Irish or not.” He fixed O’Brien with a cold look. “I’d have done better right here only for you. You were the mouthy bastard that spread it all over town about us huntin’ for bounty. That’s what made Nash go for his gun the minute he laid eyes on me. I sure don’t go around announcin’ myself that way when I’m on my own. I’m goin’ it alone from here on in.”

  “And where will you be goin’, boy-o? That’s the question,” O’Brien said slyly.

  “South.”

  “And what might there be to the south, pray?”

  “Badlands. Nine times out of ten men on the dodge will head for the badlands if they’re pushed hard enough. I reckon I’ll get a lead on ’em there ...” He paused. “Why are you shakin’ your head?”

  “Just wonderin’ at how wrong a man can be, Clinton.”

  “Who’s wrong?”

  “Bucko, you just don’t understand the Irish mind. Now, you tell me why three fellers with money in their pockets and a taste for good livin’ would be wantin’ to go runnin’ off into those badlands of yours, beset on every side by snakes, gophers and wolves? Not their kind, not when they could settle into some nice, quiet little village with maybe a saloon next door and a preacher livin’ just up the street?”

  “Because they’re bein’ hunted, that’s why, damnit.”

  “Three of them worryin’ about one of you?” O’Brien shook his head again. “It’s sure you don’t have much appreciation of Irish pride and courage, do you?”

  “You mean I wouldn’t scare them enough to drive them underground?”

  “Well now, I’ll admit you’re a fine, big fellow, Clinton, what with the height of you, and the width of your shoulders and that big gun that you handle so well. But you’re still one man, and the Donovan brothers are three in all, so they would rather be sentenced to fifty years back in the bogs of Mother Ireland than flee from you like mongrel dogs, so they would.”

  Savage took out the battered cigar case which he had carried right through the Civil War and all the years since. As he selected a stogie, he wondered fleetingly if he might not have been better off with Yaqui Joe. The breed merely stole horses and smelled like a cesspit. This rotund and red-faced O’Brien could talk the ears off a corn field. Then he reminded himself that he didn’t need either of them on this manhunt.

  “I’m goin’,” he announced, “and I’m goin’ alone.”

  “I see ... then you don’t want to know nothin’ at all about Angelville ...?”

  Savage lifted an eyebrow. “What about Angelville?”

  “For one thing, it’s nowhere near the badlands.”

  “So why mention it?”

  “It’s relevant.”

  “In what way?”

  “Should I be tellin’ you? Would that mean you’d be allowin’ me to travel with you? To be in at the death, as I told you all along I wanted to be?”

  “Why do you want to be in at the death? What have you got against the Donovans anyway?”

  O’Brien ignored the question. “Do we stay together, if you think my information is worthwhile, that is? Yes or no?”

  Savage hated to be pushed ... especially by fast-talking Irishmen. But maybe O’Brien was right in saying that Irishmen don’t think like normal folks, and he certainly seemed to know a lot about Rory, Brendan and Tim Donovan.

  “All right,” he grunted. “Let’s hear it.”

  O’Brien smiled, ruddy cheeks dimpling. “They have friends around Angelville.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Believe me, that’s enough. Back in the old country, havin’ a cousin somewhere handy is better than havin’ gold in the bank. He’s a source of comfort when you’re in trouble, his house is your house if you need a restin’ place, and there’s always a piece of meat or a bottle of whiskey to—”

  “All right, all right,” Savage rapped. “Just pipe down for a while and let me think on it, will you?”

  Going to the window, he gazed out over the rooftops at the moon washed countryside beyond. The Donovans’ trail had petered out before Savage and his odd companions reached Gearytown, and now it would be cold. He would be the first to admit that heading for the badlands in the hope of picking up their trail was a long shot. If the outlaws did have kin over in Angelville, it seemed a far better bet, all things considered.

  “So?” O’Brien said confidently.

  Before Savage could reply, there was a knock on the door and the sheriff walked in with his hat in his hands. He looked almost awake now, which was quite a change. It had taken a gunfight and several hours’ work at the telegraph office to jolt him out of his midsummer lethargy.

  The lawman brought news that Ike Nash had been employed as a telegraph operator up at Redstone, and the town was recently the scene of a particularly bloodthirsty attack on an Army pay train. Several lives had been lost, and a huge payroll was missing. Records showed that Nash had done time in both Kansas and Texas before coming to Redstone.

  Nash vanished mysteriously at the time of the robbery and the law in Redstone was working on the possibility that he was involved in the crime. It was rumored that Marshal Conway Grill, one of the territory’s toughest manhunters, had been searching for the man.

  “So ...” Savage said thoughtfully, stroking his mustache. “A feller who might have been tied in with a train job gets jumpy when he spots a bounty hunter ...” He looked from the lawman to O’Brien and back again. “What does that add up to, gents?”

  “That Nash was guilty, Mr. Savage?” the sheriff guessed.

  “Smells like it to me,” Savage replied.

  He was feeling better about Nash’s death now. It made it easier, knowing the man could have been an owlhoot with blood on his hands.

  “Is there a reward out on Nash?” Savage asked the sheriff.

  “Sorry, no. He wasn’t a real suspect yet, you see. The one with money on his head is Wade Nathan. There’s two-thousand on him. Everybody knows he wrecked that train and killed those men.”

  Wade Nathan. It was a notorious name in the territory that summer. Killer, gunslinger, bandit and escapee, Nathan was high up on the territory’s most-wanted list. Savage knew all about it. He had taken the trouble to read up on who was wanted for what when a severe attack of empty pockets made him consider the distasteful idea of bounty-hunting.

  “Two-thousand,” he said appreciatively. “That would buy a lot of cigars.”

  “We’ll be stickin’ to the Donovans, Clinton,” O’Brien said sharply.

  “We will?” Savage challenged, looking down on the man and dwarfing him with his bulk. “Since when have you been givin’ me orders, Irishman?”

  O’Brien smiled nervously. “Now Clinton, it’s sure you’re a free agent and at liberty to do what you want. It just seems to me that we’d be foolish to throw away all the good work we put in on the Donovans to go chasin’ off after a man we know nothin’ about and who has most likely got half the peace officers and bounty hunters in the territory huntin’ him by now. Ye see what I mean?”

  Savage saw the point, and after a final visit with Yaqui Joe, he was headed for Angelville with O’Brien on a fat gray mare beside him.

 

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