Welton Novels

 

         �Nights of Terror�

           Published at lulu.com         

    A woman of Hugoton, a one horse town, on the Kansas plains tried to help two small Indian children. They died of lung fever in her home. Several months went by and a prominent citizen was found dead on the plains near town. Then the nights of terror started. After dark the town was afraid to go out at night for when someone did, they died. The sheriff was the only man to stop the killing and burning of his town.

Riding along he got to thinking about maybe going back east after this term as Sheriff, before the war his brother had moved his family over in Arkansas near the town of Locksburg. It was nice country down in that part of Arkansas. After the war, Jed had stayed two weeks with his brother before deciding to come out west and find him a place. Working a wide assortment of jobs, guard on the stage coach, driving freight wagons and cutting fence post and breaking horses, he still didn�t have a place. He had even tried cowboy work but after riding from daylight till dark and getting twenty dollars a month and found, he had decided that being a cowhand wasn�t his cup of tea. He had hired on as deputy for thirty a month and had stayed for a while. It had turn out to be a long while for he was still here two years later. This was nice country in the spring but here in mid-summer, it was hot, dry, and dusty with everything looking as if it had dried up. In the winter, it was cold, snow, and the wind blew all the time from the north.

Jed Adair was about an hour out of the town of Hugoton when it first caught his eye. He was half-asleep, having ridden all night, and for a moment, it didn�t register. Then he sat up straight and turned his horse toward it. He knew what it was even from half a mile away. It was the body of a man and it didn�t move. He circled a little and came on it from upwind so his horse wouldn�t spook. He swung to the ground, stiff from being in the saddle so long. He recognized the body before he got to it. George Pickins it was, and he was dead.

George wasn�t a pretty sight. Jed hadn�t seen anything like what someone did to Pickins since the war. They had opened him up from crotch to breastbone with a knife. He�d been crawling toward town. God only knew how long, trying to hold his insides in and not succeeding very well. He had died here, his face down in the dirt, one of his hands as a claw dug into the ground ahead of him. Jed looked back along the trail Pickins had made as he dragged himself along. It was the kind of trail somebody would make dragging a sack of grain. Jed couldn�t do anything for George Pickins, except to find out who did this to him, and why, so Jed went to his horse, mounted, and rode back along the trail Pickins had made.
     Jed scowled as he rode. This particularly bothered him because as far as he knew, everybody liked Pickins. He ran the General Store in town and the saloon next to it. To Jed�s knowledge, he didn�t have an enemy, and a killing like this one had to be because of a mighty powerful hate. Jed Adair was Sheriff of Stevens County, Kansas and had been since Sheriff Barber died from a fall from a horse two years before. When Barber died, he�d been the Sheriff�s Deputy before and he had taken over the Sheriff�s job. When be ran for Sheriff on Election Day, he was unopposed.

Being forty years old now and he was lean, dark skinned, and there was gray in his hair and mustache. He didn�t consider himself handsome, but he carried, never the less, a certain male attractiveness that came, perhaps, from his own self-assurance and competence. Stevens County was probably as thinly populated a county as there was in the State, and Hugoton, the County Seat, had only thirty-seven permanent residents.

      However, the county wasn�t small in area. It ran east and west for sixty miles and north and south for thirty at one end, twenty at the other. It took a lot of riding for Jed to get the business of the Sheriff�s office done. Pickins trail was longer than he had thought it would be.