Read Online West Texas Kill by Johnny D. Boggs - Free Book Online

Galveston, hell, eight years ago, when there’s plenty of outlaws west of the Pecos, and Juan Lo Grande’s been raising hell?”
    â€œHe’s wanted, Captain.”
    Six Rangers under Savage’s command were too damned honest. Two of those were dead. Savage had concocted a plan to get rid of the other four, but Dave Chance had to light out after some fool Negro man-killer.
    â€œHe might be posted for another killing, Captain,” Ray Wickes was saying. “I heard this Albavera fellow shot Prince Benton dead a few days ago up in Shafter.”
    Savage studied Wickes for a full minute, letting the words soak in, then burst out laughing. As he filled his tumbler with more rye, he said, “Well, hell, that’ll do, I reckon. If that darky doesn’t kill Chance, Don Melitón surely will.”

CHAPTER SIX
    Moses Albavera suggested, “You might want to give me a gun.”
    Said Dave Chance, “I don’t think so.”
    â€œNot even to protect myself from two dozen armed men?”
    â€œThat’s my job.”
    Albavera swore, then spit.
    The good sign was that Don Melitón Benton raised his right hand as he neared Chance and his prisoner, and the twenty-five vaqueros riding behind him reined in their lathered mounts. The bad sign was that the old man held a side hammer Allen & Wheelock pistol. On the other hand, that weapon was a single-shot, and Chance had always figured it would take something more powerful than a .22 to kill him. Of course, each of Don Melitón’s vaqueros wore a brace of Navy Colts in their sashes, apparently all converted to centerfire, and carried Spencer carbines in their saddle scabbards. More than enough to finish off Chance and Albavera.
    Chance studied the Schofield revolver as if it were a toy gun, and holstered it, putting his left hand on the saddle’s cantle and hooking his left leg over the horn. He waited for the don to approach.
    Nobody truly knew where Don Melitón Benton hailed from. Despite his dress—open-sided, concho-studded britches favored by Spanish noblemen, calzoneras they were called, and a suede jacket trimmed in red velvet with elaborate embroidery—he wasn’t Mexican. An elegant mustache and neatly trimmed goatee, pure white, accented the bronzed face underneath a flat-crowned black hat secured underneath his chin by a horsehair braided stampede string.
    Throughout West Texas and northern Chihuahua, stories were told that as a much younger man, he had fled Missouri—Chance always liked to believe the one that had Don Melitón, or Milton, as he had been called in earlier days, killing a man in a duel over a lady from Independence—into Mexico, where he had worked as a muleskinner for a freighting outfit that ran from Meoqui to Ojinaga. By 1850, Milton Benton had married the daughter of a flour mill magnate in Meoqui, and taken over the freighting outfit. By 1855, he had expanded his runs to the Chihuahua and Santa Fe trails. Five years later, Benton left Meoqui with his wife, Francisca, and carved out a rancho in Texas’s Chinati Mountains, some twenty-five miles north of the Río Grande. He bought land. Many stories said he learned the location of abundant springs from the Apaches.
    His rancho along Cibolo Creek was more fortress than home, a hundred-square-foot adobe citadel with circular defense towers at the northern and southern corners in which visitors would always find armed guards. Other ranches he established in the Big Bend country were equally well protected.
    His wife gave birth to a son, and Milton carved a kingdom in that patch of desert, trading at his rancho , raising longhorn cattle and sheep. Fruits grown in his orchards tasted spectacular, and nobody ever passed the chance to sample his peach brandy. By the end of the Civil War, nobody knew him as Milton Benton anymore. He was Don Melitón.
    His accent hadn’t changed, though. It remained pure