Francis shook his head. “They didn’t claim it after the gold strike. They already owned it. They’d been farming here for several years before anybody found any gold.”
“Farmin’?” Scratch repeated. “This ain’t good territory at all for farmin’, I’d say. Of course, I wouldn’t really know, not havin’ done much of it in my life.”
“Oh, it’s not,” Francis said. “Not at all. From what I’ve heard, the family just barely eked out a living, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a little rustling and the like to help them get by. Jackson Devery and his sons came here from Kansas, and I’ve got a hunch they pulled up stakes and moved west because the law made it too hot for them back where they came from.”
Bo had only seen Luke Devery and his cousin Thad, but he didn’t doubt that Francis was right. Luke and Thad appeared to be brutal, vicious men, the sort who wouldn’t be above committing a crime. For that matter, Bo was fairly certain that Luke and Thad had been among the men who’d attacked them at the livery stable and robbed them, and the others had probably been members of the Devery family, too.
He indulged his curiosity by asking, “The fella who owns Edgar’s Livery Stable in town…would Devery happen to be his last name?”
Francis nodded. “He’s Jackson Devery’s younger brother. He came out here right after the town got started. That was before the gold strike, too. Jackson and his boys built that big house at the top of Main Street. You’ve seen it?”
“Yeah,” Scratch said.
“That may have been the last real work they did. After a while, Jackson sent word back to his kinfolks in Kansas, and some of them came out to join him. They started the town. Even now, you can tell an original Devery building.”
“They look like they’re about to fall down,” Bo guessed.
Francis laughed. “I see you paid attention when you rode in.” He sobered. “Then a cowboy who was just passing through here found a gold nugget where there’d been a rockslide not long before, and he told people about it, and, well, you know what happened next. There was a big rush, and not just miners, either. All the sort of folks who flock into every boomtown showed up, from the gamblers and whores and saloon owners to the honest businessmen. Didn’t matter what they had in mind. When they got here, they found that if they wanted to go into business, they had to promise the Deverys a healthy share of the profits. Same was true for the prospectors, like me.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Scratch commented.
Francis shrugged. “I was a newspaperman at one time, and the habit of asking questions never got out of my blood. I talk to people, and they seem to want to talk to me. Most of them, anyway. Hard to get a word out of Jackson. He doesn’t come out of that old house much. But Edgar likes to talk.”
Bo sipped his coffee, relishing the warmth of it. The chill was mostly gone from his bones now. He said, “I don’t imagine folks like it very much when the Deverys carve off half the pie for themselves without doing any work for it.”
“No, of course they don’t. But the Deverys own the ground, so what can they do?”
“You made it sound a while ago like the Deverys have committed crimes. You implied that they had killed people and thrown the bodies in that hog pen, the way they did with me and Scratch.”
Francis frowned. “I don’t know that for a fact. But I
Scratch said, “Down in Texas, folks’d call in the Rangers if things like that started happenin’.”
“This isn’t Texas. If the Deverys have broken any laws, they’ve covered it up.” A bitter laugh came from Francis. “Anyway, if you’d met our local lawman, Biscuits O’Brien, you’d know it’s not very likely he’d ever stand up to the likes of Jackson Devery and his sons and relatives. Biscuits is such a pathetic excuse for a human being that I hate to claim him as a fellow son of Ireland.”
“We have met him. Why do they call him Biscuits?” Bo asked.
“I don’t have any earthly idea. But it suits him, don’t you think?”
Bo had to admit that Francis was right about that.
“So, how did you boys get on the wrong side of the Deverys? You must’ve done something to offend them to wind up in the hog pen like that.”
Bo felt instinctively that they could trust the burly O’Hanrahan, so he explained about the encounter at the bridge, with Scratch adding some of the details. By the time Bo got to the part about taking their horses into Edgar Devery’s stable, Francis was shaking his head.
“You fellas really are lucky to be alive,” he said. “I’m sure when they dumped you in the hog pen, they figured you’d be out cold until it was too late to stop the hogs from eating you. You must be tougher than they thought.”
“They took our guns and our money,” Scratch said. “Probably our horses and the rest of our gear, too.”
Francis nodded. “Oh, yes, I think you can be pretty certain of that. I’d say that you boys don’t own anything at the moment except those filthy clothes you left outside.”
“That’s not true,” Bo said. “Those other things still belong to us, whether the Deverys have them or not.”
Francis looked at them and frowned. “How do you figure that? You can’t get them back.”
“Sure we can,” Scratch said. “All we have to do is kill all them damned Deverys first.”
CHAPTER 10
Francis O’Hanrahan looked at them like he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. After a long moment, he shook his head.
