Double Revenge

By: Jared McVay

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Double Revenge
Many years have past and Clay Brentwood has retired as a Texas Ranger. He has a wife and three children. His ranch has prospered and life is good, or so he thinks. Randal Shoemaker and Juan Cruz, after almost two decades of being in the Kansas State Penitentiary, are released, with only thing on their minds --- Revenge against Clay Brentwood, the man who helped put them there. Excerpt
December 2, 1914 It was a cold, blistery day when Randal Shoemaker, thirty-five, and Juan Cruz, thirty-eight, were taken from their cells in the Kansas State Penitentiary. One was from Dormitory R and the other was housed in Dormitory W. They were both shackled in leg irons, with their arms secured to their waists. No words were spoken by the guards as they were marched along the dark hallways that eventually led to the Warden’s Office. Shoemaker knew the Warden didn’t like him and figured the man wanted to punish him for some trumped-up charge, which the Warden seemed to enjoy doing. Each of the two men had been turned down several times for parole, so neither of them had any idea why they were being taken to the Warden’s Office.
Juan Cruz had been a prisoner in the Kansas State Penitentiary for eighteen years and had been brought to justice by Texas Ranger, Clay Brentwood, for the crimes of cattle rustling, armed robbery, kidnapping and possibly rape. The rape charge had never been proven because the woman in question was dead when she was found and Cruz claimed to be miles away at the time. Besides, he didn’t need to rape women, there were plenty who went willingly to his bed. Juan Cruz started his outlaw career by stealing cattle in Texas and running them down to Mexico. If they could alter the brand, his cousin would sell them back to people in the United States, while the others were shipped to Mexico City where they were sold to people who didn’t care what brand they carried or that they were stolen cattle. He soon expanded his rustling business to Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas. It was in Kansas where Cruz began preying on small farmers; robbing them of their money and burning down their houses and barns. Two men who resisted, died. Once the Texas Ranger, Clay Brentwood, picked up his trail, Cruz could do nothing but try and hide from the infamous ranger.
The hunt started in southwestern Texas after a robbery of an elderly couple and the death of her husband. The ranger, it seemed, was always just a few days behind Cruz. Clay continued his pursuit up to Arkansas City, Kansas, where Cruz tried to blend in with the Wichita Indians, who were camped along the Walnut River, just outside Arkansas City. A young Indian girl who was afraid of Cruz and his drunken tirades, heard that a Texas Ranger was in town looking for Cruz and under the cover of darkness, she knocked on Clay’s hotel door. It was around two in the morning when Clay apprehended Cruz while he was asleep in a drunken stupor, and in no position to resist. Cruz was taken north to Wichita, and was tried and convicted of cattle rustling and four accounts of robbery. But sorry to say, not for murder, since all the witnesses were afraid to come forward. After only an hour of deliberation in his chambers, the judge sentenced Cruz to eighteen years of hard labor in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. Randal Shoemaker had also been sent to the Kansas State Penitentiary because of Clay Brentwood, who had relentlessly dogged his trail all the way from Dallas, Texas, through Oklahoma, into Arkansas and back into Kansas where the outlaw’s reign of terror originally began. No matter what Shoemaker did, the ranger always seemed to show up but he decided that one da,y when the ranger was least expecting it, it would be he who would should up and settle their differences once and for all.