A Running Man

By H. Berkeley Rourke

A heinous murder of a young girl breaks the peace of a community in Yuma, Arizona.

It's 1890. The town is growing and changing, with many emerging farms and ranches. But some of its people are not changing in concert with the times. After the brutal murder of a young girl, the killer escapes from prison with the help of his father.

Determined to bring Jenny's killer to justice, Ralph Forney and his best friend Ross Hendershot enter into a deadly chase to capture the killer. But even at the 19th century, the West is a dangerous, unforgiving place. Can the law keepers catch the criminals before it's too late?

A Running Man is the third novel in H. Berkeley Rourke's Hendershot Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 482411635X

Book preview

Prologue

This tale of the west of the 1870's through a period up to about 1890 is, in part, about a man named Ralph Forney. Other people impacted or were part of his life. They included family members, his wife, his daughter, and dear friends, and one of his companions, Ross Hendershot. Much of the rest of the tale is about a young man, a man named Jason Grant. Jason, the son of a rancher in the Yuma, Arizona vicinity, turned out to be a rapist and a murderer. After being in prison for approximately a year he escaped, and Ross Hendershot and Ralph Forney tried to track him down. The tale cannot be told without reference to Ralph's wife, Georgianna, his son Jonas, and his daughter Jenny. It is, in a way, a tale of endings, and new beginnings, of living and dying in a difficult time in history. The historical narrative telling his story was created by Ralph, and written by Flora Hendershot.

Ralph and his wife Georgianna came to Yuma, Arizona in about 1875. Yuma was not a large town when they arrived there. The reason they came was very important to them both. They came to Yuma where Ralph had been hired to do a job. They lived in Bisbee prior to the time they moved. They arrived in Yuma along with their infant son to be, and yes, she became pregnant during the month or so it took them to move from Bisbee to Yuma. They moved so Ralph could take the job of Sheriff in Yuma. It paid more money than he was making doing the same kind of work in Bisbee. They were married shortly before the move.

The Conestoga wagon in which Ralph and Georgi arrived in Yuma contained all their belongings, her hope chest, and all the things they had received as gifts because of their marriage. They struck out across the desert even though there was some danger from Apache, and they made it to Tombstone, then Tucson and finally to Yuma after what seemed to be an eternity of traveling through rough desert. There were a few small places along the way where it was possible to renew their supplies of water and feed for the horses. Every night they slept under the stars, under the wagon, next to a small camp fire, and made love. Along the way somewhere she became pregnant with their son who would be named Jonas. He was born a few months after they arrived in Yuma. Jonas went to work for the U.S. Army as a tracker and guide. He was born about four years before Jenny, and left home at age sixteen.

Ralph had been born in about 1844, and grew up in the Denton County, Texas area. Though the Commanche raids which came almost every month grew less frequent while Ralph was growing up they would increase after the War of Aggression (the Civil War some call it). Ralph served the Confederacy with the Texas Cavalry in 1863, and was captured and released. Being captured and released probably created more danger for him than he would have had if he had stayed in the confederate army. He made his way home to Texas as soon as he could. It meant hiding out part of the time while the war was still going on. Hiding out was necessary to escape those who rounded up and shot deserters. Any Confederate soldier who signed a letter of allegiance to the Union was considered a deserter, and shot when discovered. There were many who sought after so-called deserters, and those who found them showed little mercy.

Ralph left Denton County shortly after the Civil War. There was no work in Texas so he headed north and then west. He tried being a buffalo hunter, but the Buffalo were killed out in Kansas and Nebraska too quickly. He had no desire to go to Wyoming or Montana to hunt them. He took the first lawman's job he ever held in Eastern Texas before going north. There he learned a tremendous amount from a patient man about how to handle drunks and belligerent people who were being taken to jail. As he moved on, heading north and west into the Panhandle of Texas he went into a town called Claude. There he learned another lesson. As the story goes he went into a saloon and was finishing a drink when a man said to him, Where are you from boy?

Ralph said he was from northeast Texas and asked the man if he knew where Denton County was. The man immediately became angry, or appeared to be angry, and took a swing after yelling, Are you calling me stupid? Ralph managed to defend himself well even though the man who assaulted him was bigger. Then Ralph got hit in the head with what the Sheriff later called a bung starter. The sheriff told Ralph about the bung starter after he wandered out of the cell in which he had spent the night, waking up with a horrible headache. The man with whom Ralph had fought turned out to be a local who picked a fight with any new man he saw in the saloon. The lesson learned? Stay away from the bar, and the bartender, when you get into a fight so you don't get hit in the head with something. It turned out the sheriff was a great guy, and so was the guy with whom Ralph fought. He too had spent the night in the jail. Both laughed about the entire thing the next morning.

Ralph lived with a woman in New Mexico for a time but she left him one day for no apparent reason. After she left Ralph moseyed on down the road to Silver City, and took a deputy's job there. In a short time he had the wander lust again, and headed for Arizona. He didn't cotton much to the people in Silver City, New Mexico so he moved on to Globe, Arizona, deep in the heart of Apache land. Ralph was very lucky regarding riding from Silver City to Globe because he did not encounter any hostile Apaches. In those times, the 1870's, it would have been easy to run into a raiding group of Apache around Globe, Arizona. Little quarter would be given to any white man by any Apache if such a chance meeting occurred.

Ralph found a wonderful Sheriff in Globe named Huddleston who gave him a job as a deputy right away. Ralph worked there for a while until the Sheriff was killed by a jealous husband. The killing is, in and of itself, quite a tale. The jealous husband was having a drink in a local watering hole. He was talking about his wife and mentioned her name. A stranger had come into the bar and overheard the conversation. Like a lot of women of those times she had worked as a prostitute, married and left the New Mexico town in which she had been working to take up the life of a normal married woman. The stranger said something about her being a whore. The husband went and got a gun. The Sheriff tried to get his friend, the man who had done the killing, to give up his gun, and ended up getting killed himself. The husband shot the drummer, and shot the sheriff. He killed both because the drummer had called his wife a whore. Once, before they married, she had been a whore. She returned to her time-honored profession after her husband went to jail. It is wacky world sometimes. It always seemed to Ralph there ought to be a better way to solve problems than with a gun or your fists. Many seemed to disagree, and those sometimes tried to solve their problems with guns. In a way, the tendency of some men to have problems which end up in fights of one kind or another, are a boon to men like Ralph since they provide them with jobs.

After working in Globe for a time, Ralph went to Bisbee, and there he tried to get hired on as a miner. He wasn't really cut out for the kind of work miners do, and when he heard the Constable's job was open in Bisbee he applied for it, and was appointed to fill the position. It was a good place, Bisbee. It was quiet, without Apache attacks, and without a lot of criminal conduct. Mostly what Ralph ended up doing as a lawman there was putting drunks in a cell to sleep it off after a fight in a bar. Then he saw an ad for the Sheriff's position in Yuma. Georgi and Ralph were courting at the time, and she had accepted his proposal of marriage. He left Bisbee for long enough to go to Yuma, apply for and be hired for the job, set up a time when he would be there for sure, arranging for the current Sheriff to stay on until then, and went home to marry, and bring his bride to their new home. It was an adventure for both in loving as well as the travel across the breadth of the Territory of Arizona.

When Ralph and Georgi arrived in Yuma they rented a small place in town. By the time the two of them had been there for several years they had settled on, and created, a small ranch just northwest of town in the rich soil of the river bed. There was some danger of flooding from the Colorado River, but they planned well, built their home high enough off the ground so it would not be flooded, putting it on a small hill. It was a sweet existence for them, and their children. The two of them were able, Georgi (short for Georgianna) and Ralph, to buy the land and build on it in part because he left the job as Sheriff, and went to work with Ross Hendershot, and his wife Flora, in the Palace Hotel, Bar and Fancy House. Ralph became a third partner in the place by investing with Ross and Flora from the generous wages they paid him. It was the most money he had ever been paid for his work.

Ross came into Yuma about a year or so before Ralph went to work with he and Flora. A young man named George Martin tried to kill Ross one day. Ralph was a little better shot and got to Ross a little before Martin did, and shot and killed the Martin boy before he could kill Ross. From the very moment after Ralph shot Martin, Ross and Ralph became close friends. They discovered, while Ross was working for Ralph as an investigator as to the activities of a man named George Bonhomme, they had grown up in the same area of Denton County, Texas, only lived some ten to twenty miles apart and had many similar experiences as young men. George seemed to be fortunate as a gambler, or maybe he brought in gamblers to his place of business who were more than just lucky. People who owed him money because of gambling seemed to leave town or disappear. Ralph asked Ross, after they became acquainted, knowing Ross was going to be employed by Bonhomme, if he would keep an eye out as to what was going on with those who seemed to disappear. Ross said sure and Ralph put him on the county payroll. The kinship between Ross and Ralph had already begun for sure. It grew with their connection as Ross dealt with issues caused by George Bonhomme. Ross also had to deal with issues concerning his love for the woman who became his wife, Flora. As time passed Ross's son, Manny, and Ralph's son Jonas became good friends as boys even though Jonas was a few years older.

Georgi and Ralph made their home into a small farm and ranch. The ranch had chickens which the young children tended for eggs, and when one seemed to be unproductive, or in times of need, for food. They kept several cattle for milk and for beef. Jonas tended the several pigs which they also kept for meat. Their garden, which Georgi tended with the help of the children, and occasionally even Ralph, was very productive. At first the garden only held flowers, but the ground was good and eventually it grew vegetables and herbs. A small barn was built for their horses and to shelter the other animals in bad weather. The chickens sheltered and laid eggs in the same building. As the family of animals grew it was necessary to add space onto the barn.

Ralph and Georgi's daughter, Jenny, was born in their little home with a midwife attending. It was the same way Ralph was born in Texas, just as it had been for Georgi when she was born in Bisbee. Ralph's lovely wife Georgi also left the world in the same home. She contracted a fever of some kind which just wore her down, wore her out and finally took her life. The disease, whatever it was, moved slowly through her, consuming her a little at a time while all the family watched. It was sad and frightening. It was also lucky for the rest of the family not to have contracted the same feverish illness, because they all shared caring for her during the time in which she was ill.

After Georgi died Ralph was a lost soul for a while. In all his years of wandering, working as a cowhand now and again, working bars and working as a lawman, he had never been much of a drinker. When Georgi became sick, and then died, he sought refuge in the bottle. Ralph never thought it would happen to him but it did. His closest friends, Ross and Flora, spent a lot of time with the Forney kids and Ralph in those dark, lonely, drunken days. Flora helped Ralph's little girl to grow up, taught her many things about cooking, about housekeeping, women's secrets of which Ralph had no knowledge. Flora was a godsend for the Forney children. Ross, his dearest friend, helped him to begin to climb out of the doldrums of the pain over Georgi's death. He helped Ralph to escape the need for the bottle. They rode together, practiced shooting when Ralph could hold a gun without the feeling of the need to turn it on himself, and the two of them spent much time talking about Georgi. Ralph met her in Bisbee when she was only sixteen. When she was seventeen Ralph asked her parents to allow him to court her. Ralph and Georgi courted for nearly a year before they were married. She was everything he ever had thought a woman should be, and so much more. The daily steps of recovering from being a drunk were difficult, the loss was too much for Ralph to bear sometimes. He fell back into the bottle on several occasions. When Ralph got drunk again, Ross drug him out of the gutter, cleaned him up, fed him, sobered him up again and then he started anew. Finally, he began to see the error of his ways and picked himself up as well. He began to work again, fulfill my duties in the business venture, to live again in some respects though with tremendous grief over the loss of his lovely wife.

Ralph's daughter, Jenny, was strong, resilient and even though she too was grieving she helped him so very much during the months of his indulgence in alcohol. She fed him when she could persuade him to eat. She took care of the home, kept it clean, kept the animals in good shape. She had help. Ross and Flora spent much time with her, even kept her at the hotel from time to time when Ralph was on a bender. They were strong for Ralph, strong for her, loving friends without whom Ralph could not, and probably would not have lived. Jenny was his rock, his connection to her mother, his vision of the loveliness of her mother in the flesh.

Then, without warning, probably the worst moment in life he would ever experience, outside the death of his lovely wife, occurred. The events, which unfold in the rest of the story, brought Jason Grant to prison for the rest of his life, or so it was supposed to be. But Jason had been in the Yuma Territorial Prison for only about a year when he escaped. That brings us to the end