Red River Revenge (Remington Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

is. And maybe it’ll snow in hell.” The three men laughed and the tension seemed to drain away from them.
    “If nothing else,” Beck said, “I know of a little place down on the river front where we can get some good smoked fish. I ate there when I came through here before.”
    “What are we waiting for, then?” Shaw said. “I’m starved.”
    “Maybe food will improve our moods,” Ned said. He touched his boot heel to his horse’s side and snapped the reins. As the three deputies rode through the quiet pasture land, Ned knew that they were being observed by the Cherokees. He saw the Indians in the fields stop their work and watch them pass by. The people near the adobe huts paused from their chores long enough to openly stare at the riders. And the shepherds among the flocks of white sheep looked their way.
    “Tom, I thought this was the Chickasaw Nations,” he said.
    “It is, just north of here,” Beck said. “Some of the Cherokees from Tahlequah immigrated down here to raise their sheep so they’d be closer to the shipping waters of the Red. I hear that some of them have drifted as far south as the Brazos.”
    “Look at that odd rock formation,” Ned said, in- tempting Beck. He gestured off to his right. “It looks like a big devil’s den, if you look at it just right.”
    “It’d make a good hiding place,” Frank Shaw said. “You want to check it out?”
    “No, it’s too far away,” Remington said. “If Lina and her uncle were hiding there, they’d be gone before we could ride over there. Let’s just keep going.”
    The dusty road, rutted with the tracks of wagon wheels, led straight to the small riverfront town. When they got there, Remington realized that there were more buildings nestled among the cottonwoods than he’d first thought. The small homes he saw were scattered out and well away from the main part of the town. Some were made from adobe, but most of them were crude shacks put together with rough, uneven slabs of wood.
    As they turned onto the busy, dirt road of the small town, Ned reined his horse up in the shade of a clump of trees and looked down at the wide river.
    “This place is bigger than I thought,” he said as the other two men stopped beside him.
    “It’s a busy port,” Beck said.
    There were three boats docked in the small harbor. One of them was nothing more than an empty hulk of a raft with wooden plank sides. Another looked like a fishing boat. The third boat was the one with all the action around it. Bare-chested dock workers, wearing bands around their heads to keep the sweat from running down into their eyes, loaded heavy bundles of the white shearings from the sheep into the boat. Loose balls of the white fleece littered the dock and the area around it where some men sat on kegs in the shade and watched the proceedings.
    “That’s the ferry we’ll take to cross the river,” Beck said, indicating the empty hulk of the wooden raft. “Then we’ll have a lot of land to cover before we reach the other part of the river where another, ferry will take us across to the Red River Station.”
    “And hopefully, Van Hook’s ranch,” Ned sighed. “This smells like a river town, doesn’t it?” He could smell the aroma of cooking fish, but he also smelled the dankness of the town, the stench of rotting waste and animal droppings.
    “I’ve smelled worse,” Frank Shaw said.
    “Where’s this smoked fish place, Tom?” Ned asked as he looked down the busy dirt road that was about a block long and lined with the weather-beaten buildings of the town.
    “At the other end of the street,” Beck said.
    As the trio rode along the crowded street, Remington made a mental note of everything he saw. The mercantile store, a meat market, a blacksmith’s stall, a dilapidated building called Traders Center, several nondescript, wooden structures that butted up to each other. There was even a small hotel with a wooden sign above the door that bore the name: River Front