Free Rough Justice by Lyle Brandt Page B

down.
    He wasn’t sure that anything he’d done so far, in Corpus Christi, fell within the law. He could have said the same for Galveston, of course, and that turned out all right, as far as his director was concerned. He’d lost Tom Hubbard to the KRS, along with several freedmen, but that would have happened anyway, he guessed, whether he’d been in town or not.
    The thing to work on now was moving forward. Ryder wasn’t finished with the Knights, by any means. He’d only started, and his next move would be taking him into the hard heart of their territory, to disturb a hornets’ nest.
    He needed to be ready, or his bones—like those of Yankee soldiers in the Rebel song—would soon lie still in southern dust.

6
    T he train left Corpus Christi for Houston at nine o’clock on Friday morning. Ryder had passed a restless night, sitting up in his room at the boardinghouse, half expecting the police or sheriff’s deputies to turn up anytime. He was relieved when they did not appear, managed to eat a double helping of the landlady’s biscuits and gravy, then packed his gear and headed for the station two hours ahead of schedule, taking back streets all the way.
    The railroad station had a fresh coat of paint, but the tracks were rusty and the train that pulled into the depot at half-past eight consisted of three passenger cars trailing a boxy prewar locomotive, its giant funnel smokestack out of all proportion to the boiler and the engineer’s cab. In motion, he knew from experience, it would spew gray smoke and cinders, proven by the staining on the cars it towed.
    They killed time while the locomotive took on fuel and water, but Ryder had his ticket ready and sat out that timein the last of the three aging passenger cars. His half dozen fellow passengers sat in the first car, treating themselves to the worst of the smoke and jolts from the journey, and he left them to it. Assuming they stayed on the rails, all three cars should arrive in Jefferson at the same time.
    He had plotted the trip beforehand. The stretch from Corpus Christi to Houston covered 184 miles, at an optimistic top speed of twenty miles per hour. With at least one other fueling stop along the way, call it ten hours on the rails. At Houston, he’d be switching trains for the 218-mile journey to Jefferson, eleven hours minimum, not counting any stops along the way. A full day of rattletrap travel, but once he got used to the noise and vibration, Ryder supposed he could catch up on sleep from last night.
    And what would his adversaries be doing, in the meantime?
    He was leaving Corpus Christi’s Knights of the Rising Sun in disarray, momentarily leaderless, but Ryder guessed they wouldn’t stay that way for long. They didn’t have his name, and Truscott—dead now—was the only one to whom he had identified himself as a federal agent. Beyond that, he assumed that general alarms would go out to other KRS chapters statewide, and the organization’s headquarters in Jefferson should logically be first to get the news.
    That meant he’d be walking on eggshells tomorrow, when his train arrived. The KRS might have a welcoming committee at the depot, watching out for strangers, maybe even with a general description of their target from survivors of the shootout at the Southern Cross. If so, he would be ready for them—or, at least, as ready as he could be in the circumstances. One man in a hostile city, where his badge was nothing but a bull’s-eye, and he couldn’t count on any help from local lawmen.
    Perfect.
    As he sat and watched the arid countryside roll past beyond his smudged window, waiting for sleep to overtake him, Ryder went back over what he’d learned about the Knights. Their “grand commander” was a former Rebel captain, Royson Coker, known to friends and enemies alike as Roy. He’d been attached to the First Texas Partisan Rangers, a cavalry unit