Day of Independence Read Free Page B

didn’t know.
    â€œThe people of Last Chance worked together to irrigate the fertile bottomland with canals that carry water from the river. Despite droughts and floods and all the other things that plague farmers, they grew wheat, corn, oats, and now there’s talk of planting cotton.”
    â€œThey built their prosperity on farming?” Cannan said.
    â€œNot entirely. They act as middlemen for Mexican trappers who supply them with fox, beaver, wolf, and bobcat fur. Last Chance also trades hogs, turkeys, and bees with Mexico for hard cash, and a few raise cattle on the floodplain farther along the river.” Dupoix smiled. “You could say the hardy folks out there have turned this part of the desert into a Garden of Eden.”
    â€œThen why are you and the other gun hands here, Dupoix?” Cannan said.
    â€œBecause, Ranger Cannan, we’re going to take it all away from them,” Dupoix said.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Abraham Hacker heaved his great, naked bulk out of bed and used his foot to slide out the chamber pot.
    â€œWhat are you doing, honey?” The blond woman who’d been lying beside him sat up on her pillows and regarded Hacker with blue, startled eyes.
    â€œTaking a piss. Go back to sleep, Nora.”
    â€œWhat time is it?”
    â€œHow the hell should I know?”
    Years of using and abusing her body, flaunting it, selling it, had chiseled the woman’s face into hard, tough planes, and her complexion was pale, seldom exposed to the light of day. Last night’s makeup smeared her face and gave her a bruised look, yet she retained some of her youthful beauty, like a faded portrait in oils.
    â€œToo early,” Nora Anderson said. She flopped onto her left side and was asleep within moments.
    Hacker held the chamber pot at crotch level and his piss rattled as he waddled to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked outside.
    A red and jade sky heralded the dawn and tinted the panes of the windows of the stores along the street dull scarlet.
    There was no one about this early, and the hotel opposite showed only a single light.
    It was the wounded Texas Ranger’s room, Hacker knew, a fact he’d earlier filed away for future reference.
    The lawman’s presence was an unexpected inconvenience, but nothing Mickey Pauleen couldn’t handle. The gunman specialized in getting rid of such bothersome details.
    Hacker laid the foaming chamber pot on the floor, then stowed it under the bed again. When he bent over, the fretwork of bullwhip scars on his back, thirty of the best, stood out in stark relief in the cruel morning light.
    On March 5th, 1863, at the Battle of Thompson’s Station, Major Abe Hacker deserted his infantry brigade and fled the field. He should have been shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy, but powerful friends in Washington intervened and the court-martial ordered that he be stripped of rank, whipped, then drummed out of the Army of the Cumberland.
    Hacker felt no remorse, no dishonor, and no sense of shame whatsoever.
    Better a live coward with urgent, exciting things to do than a dead hero.
    Now, twenty-five years later, he was a rich man who wanted to be richer, and he had plans, big plans.
    And one of them involved the town of Last Chance.
    Â 
    Â 
    Hacker sat by the window in a wicker chair that creaked under his weight, and his massive belly hung between his legs like a sack of grain.
    His great size made breathing difficult, and the man wheezed through his thick-lipped mouth, but his small, blue eyes were never still, calculating, incisive as scalpels, as though making up for the weakness of his heart and lungs.
    Abe Hacker was not a well man, but his ambitions kept him alive.
    He reckoned he was big and powerful enough to do whatever he wanted, no matter how many people he trampled into the dirt to reach his goals.
    Force, ruthlessness, and a readiness to kill were things he understood, never applied in anger, but with