Ride the Panther Read Free Page A

cheer rose up from the merchants and McQueen’s fellow officers that filled the shipboard saloon. Enos Clem glowered and a twitch developed around his left eye. Had he been bluffed? Pride demanded he learn the truth. He slid his chair back, stood, and, leaning across the table, attempted to flip over the five cards Jesse had placed facedown. Jesse caught the gambler’s wrist.
    “I’ll see those cards,” Clem said.
    “You didn’t pay for the privilege,” the officer reminded him. Tension suddenly filled the room and men, despite their curiosity, began to give ground and find excuses to put themselves out of harm’s way.
    Enos Clem, wearing a black frock coat, string tie, and baleful expression, could have passed for an undertaker appraising a prospective client. Jesse knew little of the gambler’s history, other than the fact he was an Easterner headed for the gold fields of California and traveling on the winnings he acquired along the way. But Jesse McQueen was no stranger to violence and he could see trouble coming like a thunderhead on the horizon of the gambler’s eyes.
    Clem dropped a hand toward the gun butt protruding from the waistband of his trousers. It was a Starr revolver, caliber .44, with a sawed-off barrel to enable the weapon to ride comfortably against the gambler’s belly. He’d kept the Starr concealed beneath his vest, until now.
    Enos Clem was no slouch. He moved fast, fueled by his pride and his anger. But Jesse McQueen was faster. Survival spurred him. He overturned the table and stepped forward. His right hand was a blur as he caught Clem’s gun hand in middraw and shoved the Starr .44 back in the gambler’s waistband. Clem grunted and winced in pain as the muzzle of the revolver dug into his groin.
    Jesse held the gambler’s hand in an iron grip, thumbing the hammer back on the Starr and forcing his finger through the trigger guard. An ounce more of pressure and Clem would shoot himself in the testicles.
    “You’ve finished one game. Better not start another,” Jesse said in a quietly ominous tone of voice. He glanced down at the revolver bulging the front of the man’s pants. “You’re not in Boston now, pilgrim. And this is one game I don’t think you’ll have the balls to finish.”
    A silver dollar rolled off a nearby table, landed on the wood, rolled a few feet, then spun and settled flat against the floor. A dropped pin would have been heard just as clearly. Jesse never took his eyes from the gambler. The fire cooled in Enos Clem’s veins. It was time to cut his losses before they became—he glanced down at his crotch—unacceptable. Jesse read the surrender in the man’s lowered gaze.
    The steam whistle sounded again and the boat shuddered and slowed as it approached the river town. Jesse removed his hand from the gambler’s belly gun. Clem took care to pat the wrinkles from his coat, then sniffed indignantly and, mustering the last of his pride, walked stiffly from the saloon.
    The crowd of Union officers and merchants collectively sighed, relieved there hadn’t been gunplay. The quarters were too close and no one in his right mind wanted to risk a stray bullet. Jesse knelt to pick up his winnings off the floor. He was more than six hundred dollars to the good.
    “Welcome to Kansas City,” someone said dryly, breaking the tension.
    It would do.

Chapter Three
“Captain Jesse McQueen. Your presence in Kansas City is urgently required. Come with all due haste. I will be staying at the home of Doctor Milburn Curtis.
    Major Peter Abbot”
    JESSE ABSENTLY REREAD THE dispatch that had found him in Vicksburg, then folded the missive and tucked it away in his pocket. He glanced around the dock. The waterfront was crowded with townspeople and soldiers, buckskinners, rivermen, and freed slaves who had escaped bondage in the South and found work as common laborers in this Union-controlled town. Glistening black muscles unloaded goods from the Westward Belle and carried