Dueling Dukes Chapter 3: Midnight Flyer, a dukes of hazzard fanfic

Author's note: All right, so by now there's no doubt that this story takes place in 1894, but what I don't think comes up until this chapter is that it takes place in Dade County, Georgia, which unlike Hazzard, is a real place. I know, it's kind of sacrilege to put the Dukes anyplace other than Hazzard. But Dade has such an interesting history of its own and it's loosely where I tend to imagine Hazzard being anyway. The town of Trenton is also real. So, yeah, it might be a little disruptive that the story mentions Dade and Trenton, but maybe we can imagine that these places become the town and county of Hazzard some day.

3. Midnight Flyer

Don't think about me, never let me cross your mind
'Cept when you hear that midnight lonesome whistle whine
Oo, Midnight Flyer
Engineer, won't you let your whistle moan?*

Sometimes disasters were for the best. In those little moments between the bigger ones, where he could find his own peace in solitude. Luke wasn't supposed to be here, to be alone and quiet with only his own thoughts, but that was where disaster came in.

He was supposed to have a horse.

("It wasn't your fault," Cap had told him with an odd gentleness for the patriarch of a feuding family. "They crossed the line. It's good that you didn't let anyone get killed." The sun had angled in from the windows in the sitting room, cutting through the lace curtains to leave a dappled design on the wooden floor. The Porter house was a grand affair, with a wide porch doing laps around its outside and carved wooden furniture on the inside. Well kept, for the most part, and spacious. A castle, though it lacked for turrets and a moat.

Luke had stood alone in front of the older man, watching his hair turn gray and crow's feet dancing at the corners of his eyes.

"You did a good job, boy." Strange man, this Cap Porter, who could pat Luke on the shoulder and all but comfort him like he was a lost little boy with one breath—"Only way it could have been better is if you had killed you some Hickorys,"—then order him to commit murder with the next.)

But that was disaster for you. Sneaking right up and staking its claim on your life the minute you got lazy.

Or stupid. He'd lain there with Ruby's hand in his hair, stroking and soothing like she was his mother, until he'd been halfway asleep. Just drifting along on thoughts or memories, pictures behind his eyelids of a better life while Babe Sheridan had trotted right on up to the front of the brothel and unhitched his horse and the sundry others that'd been lashed there. Disappeared with them while the rest of the Hickory gang lit the old wood structure up into a crazy bonfire, then did their own disappearing act.

A disaster of his own making. He was the one who had led the ragtag group of a dozen-plus-one men into town, who'd given them the night to do as they pleased, who'd watched with a silly smirk on his face as they didn't hesitate or collaborate or even bother with pretenses of doing anything else, they'd just trooped in a line up onto Miss Mabel's porch. And since that was his destination too, he'd just lashed his own horse, then trudged right in after them. Left Yellow-eye to keep an eye on things, because the scout had nothing better to do in a whorehouse, and settled into a night off from the perils of the feud.

Town was what it always had been, crowded, dusty, a clump of buildings blocking the horizon and taking up space like so many lonely cowboys clustered around one campfire. No place Luke ever much favored being, but it was safe. Or it was supposed to be.

("They crossed the line, son. I've got all the faith in the world that you know you've got to do next," Cap said, those icy blue-gray eyes fixing on his.

Funny how the older man looked to Luke to sort out the situation. How he called him son, though Luke wasn't technically of Porter blood. Cap liked to tell tales of having been a captain in the Confederate Army, but he hadn't. He liked to say he was the richest man in three cities, but he wasn't that, either. And he liked to believe that he had three perfectly bright sons, but what he had was a trio of dolts. Sure, Ephraim, Andrew and Tobias were high-ranking in the fool's army they had going here. Probably, if it came down to some sort of inside skirmish for power, Cap would find on the side of one of his own flesh and blood over Luke. But as long as peace among ranks reigned, Luke got the choicest assignments that Porter doled out. Which meant those that carried the greatest risk, of course.

"I got Yellow-eye watching them now." Which probably wasn't too hard a task, what with Hickory gang members strutting up and down the streets of Trenton with clear pride of ownership.

"That boy's a strange one," Cap mused. "But there ain't no one half as good at spying on the enemy.")

The enemy. Cap had been in the War Between the States, that much was true. Just a stump of a boy, to hear old Pastor Jesse tell it, barely thirteen. Banged a steady beat on his snare, but he'd never wielded anything more deadly than a drumstick in those days. Captain of the drum corps, in charge of making sure the real soldiers had a rhythm to step to and reasonably good morale when they got to the battlefield where they were more than likely to get shot.

The Yankees had been the enemy, Luke was fully willing to agree with that notion. They'd marched right down here and burned what they couldn't kill, destroyed for no other reason than to show their dominance, then left a shambles in their wake. Georgia was still reeling under the violence done to her. And strutting toward a confrontation with those Yankees, whether a fellow was carrying a gun or a drum, counted as either crazy or brave. Could be that Cap was a little bit of both.

The Hickorys were not the same as Yankees. Not in all ways, anyway, though their love for fire made Luke want to hate them a little bit more. Mostly they were a disorganized bunch of men fighting for—

Well, Cap said it started over a horse. Or not a horse, but a mule advertised as a horse. Which Cap had bought from Ol' Nut Hickory. He'd paid horse prices, what he'd gotten was a mule and Hickory hadn't ever made things right. So it came to shooting, Cap's young wife had been caught in the crossfire, and had died with a baby in her belly. No restitution was made and… that was Cap's story. But there were others that went back further than that. Folks claimed that there never had been any livestock trading hands between Hickorys and Porters, because they'd been sworn enemies long before 1878, which was when the supposed bad deal had gone down.

The feud had started, some said, with the secession of Dade County from the union, back in '60. Jumped the gun and bailed out before the state of Georgia had gotten around to it. Which made for a good story, but no one could attest to it being true. All anyone knew for sure was that Cap's daddy had put a lot of pressure on the powers that be to make a bold statement to the state and the rest of the country about what Georgia would not tolerate, and that Josiah Hickory had advocated for caution. The two had set to bickering, but they weren't any different from the rest of the folks around here. Some thought Dade ought to secede from the whole thing and become its own country, and others said that they'd go broke if they did. The mine that supported most of the county was all well and good, but it would become useless if factories in Georgia wouldn't buy the coal that came out of it. And the cotton growers wouldn't be able to sell their crops, either.

Factions had set up, fights broke out, but then the war had come anyway and it got hard to know or care who had wanted to secede first. After the Yankees came and left, everything centered around trying to put the town and the state back together again, and no one could be sure whether it was horses and mules that started the feud or whether it was a resumption of old resentments from well before many of the current combatants were born.

Luke didn't know, any more than the rest of them did, where the feud emerged from, fully grown and vicious. He just knew he wasn't supposed to be fighting in it.

Just like he wasn't supposed to be alone now, strolling up overgrown remnants of Gray Voice Lane and plotting his next move in this feud he wasn't meant to be fighting. Gray Voice Lane – no one knew quite what it meant, only that Luke's baby brother Jud had come in the house one day, talking about "gray voices" calling to him from the rutted trail that ran off Main Street then meandered and split until it passed the Duke farm. It was a day of heavy fog, the train whistles echoing eerily off the mountains as they brought supplies in and shipped coal out. Meanwhile, the Daughtreys in the farm to the west had been planting their crops and their disembodied chatter might have made its way to the five-year-old's ears. Whatever the cause, the boy had been emphatic about those gray voices, and with only the Duke and Daughtrey farms fronting on it, there had been no real objections to registering the dusty trail as Gray Voice Lane when the postal service came surveying.

These days the lane wound through invading thickets and brambles, nothing more than a lonely dirt patch with no voices, gray or otherwise, anywhere along it. All that was left of two farms was half rotted fence posts and some cleared land. Tassled weeds bending in the wind and Luke picked one, stuck the stem in his mouth. Savored the sweet flavor of his boyhood.

("My boy," Cap Porter had said, but Luke wasn't his boy. He was the son of Matthew Harmon Duke. Then again, he might not mind Cap thinking of him like a son. Or more accurately, son-in-law. Because long ago, in an innocent time, there'd been a schoolhouse on Wildflower Hill that he'd walked to every day between fall's harvest and spring's planting season. In those sun-drenched days, Luke had played at courting sassy but pretty Miss Mary Kaye Porter. Time had passed but his feelings for the honey blonde, blue-eyed girl hadn't. Even if she was, at the moment, with child. Another man's child, a Hickory gang member's child. A fool's child, a coward's child. An overgrown boy's child, because the scoundrel wasn't even man enough to face her father and ask for her hand. Far as anyone could tell he didn't want her hand, didn't want anything more than what he'd already gotten from her. Luke would marry her and make her an honest woman. If Cap would hear of it, but he wouldn't. He just kept Mary Kaye closed into an upstairs bedroom and hushed anyone who dared speak of her.

"You know what you have to do," was how Cap finished his instructions on the nature of strategy in the feud.)

To the left were what had once been cornfields, to the right, the pastures. The train whistle still echoed off the mountains to the east. The Dukes hadn't had much, but the land, acres and acres of it, had been homesteaded for generations. The Daughtreys had come later and been good neighbors. Luke heard that after that one terrible night they'd packed up what they could and headed over the hills to Walker County, a more civilized region. He hoped the decision had yielded good things for them.

His own family hadn't been the kind to run. Or to get involved in feuds.

"Fighting," his father had told him, "is for them that ain't got the strength to make a living from using their back, and ain't got the smarts to make a living from their brains. Lucky for you, boy, us Dukes got both."

So the family of four had stood separate from the feud that raged all around them. Had watched the town divide itself over everything and nothing, had shaken their heads then bent over their hoes and ploughs and kept to themselves. Had sowed and reaped and then brewed their crop into something a little bit special. Had sold their resulting product to anyone that had a dollar to spare, no matter whether they called themselves a Porter, a Hickory, a squatter up in the hills or the owner of a right-and-proper saloon. Had congratulated themselves on their wise business sense and laughed at the poor feuders who really thought that fighting would get them anywhere at all. And then laughed some more, because feuding made men the sort of thirsty that only Duke whiskey could quench. And, as a side benefit, their fine brew made for a pretty decent sterilizer for battle-inflicted wounds.

Yep, his daddy had been smart, and they'd benefited off the feud plenty, even as they'd looked down their noses at it.

Until his mama took sick in the winter of eighteen eighty-nine, and didn't get better. His pa tended her until she died the next spring, then he took to the comforts of his own liquor. At fifteen, Luke had been mature and strong enough to tend to the farm while his father mourned. Had to give up school but that was mostly all right. He reckoned he had a better education than most moonshine whiskey makers by then, and the only loss was that he didn't get to see a lot of Mary Kaye Porter anymore. Little brother Jud wasn't quite yet thirteen and had the temperament of a mule, but Luke could wrangle him just like he wrangled the cows, and for a while, he made it work.

But by the summer of eighteen ninety, his pa still hadn't come around, and Jud had gotten clever enough to sneak off on his own whenever Luke turned his back. Sure, he came back every evening and helped around the farm some, but he was gone more than he was home.

It took another year, and then some more. By then, Luke had stood in front of his pa and told him that if he wanted more liquor, well, he'd have to get his wits about him and brew it himself, because Luke couldn't do it all anymore. Sure, he'd been holding it together, but that was only because he'd been lumping Duke wares in with that of the crazy mountain man, Jesse. Everyone knew of old Jesse, everyone always had. He'd been hanging around the outskirts of town, looking scraggly, mean and older than his years since Luke's daddy was a boy. He was also a fine whiskey maker and an old family friend – at least as much as his half-feral life would allow him to be friends with anybody. Luke felt safe enough working with him but with Jud halfway absent, it was too much. He'd turned to his pa and just about given the man an order to straighten up because what was left of his family needed him.

Luke figured it hadn't worked, but one day his pa joined him in the fields, tending to the corn. Not for long, but he was there. The next day he'd come out to help feed the livestock at dawn, and sometime after that he'd taken to tending the still again. When Luke had gone up into the hills to tell old Jesse that he wouldn't be asking him for help anymore, the grizzled man had smiled and nodded like he'd expected nothing less. Wished him well and sent him back down to take care of his family and their land.

One night soon after, Jud hadn't made it home. The next day they found him in the pasture, bloody and beaten. He had a head wound that looked like he'd been just about scalped, but when they got the boy inside and cleaned up, it turned out not to be so bad. He also had some buckshot in his backside that the Doc, when consulted, suggested they leave where it lay.

"He's young, he'll heal," was the summation.

Next, they'd summoned Marshal Coltrane, though Luke had known it was futile.

"I can't go arresting the whole town," the lawman had asserted. "When he's ready to say who did this to him, you come get me again. I can't be waiting here all day until the boy comes to his senses." Of course he couldn't. He had three cities to police and about two thousand people to keep from killing one another. Hard enough without two feuding families that insisted on warring regardless of the marshal's attempts to stop them.

And Jud had been stubborn. Wouldn't say who'd hurt him, only that Luke and his pa were fools if they really thought they could stay neutral in the feud. Their pa had promised Jud that the minute his backside got healed it'd be whipped raw if the boy didn't straighten out.

But it never came to that.

Two nights later there'd been the tinkling of broken glass, a hiss and a pop and the smell of smoke. Luke had run from the house thinking that the barn was burning. It was, but it took until he got out into the crisp air for him to realize that the house was engulfed as well. He'd hollered for his pa, for his brother, might even have called out for his ma, though she was buried in the family cemetery on the hill. Had run for the house, but gotten caught up in something. Fought against it, tried to get free, but he couldn't.

"Settle down, boy," got panted in his ear, and he realized he was being held back by a surprisingly strong crazy mountain man. Jesse. "There ain't no hope for them," which went to prove the old-timer was insane. Of course there was hope for his family, if only Luke could get to them. "They're already gone, and if you go back in there, you will be too."

"No!" he'd screamed, trying again to get free, but the heavy-set man had a strength born of a hard life. It was nothing a seventeen year old youngster could hope to match. By the time the marshal arrived with his ragtag posse, Luke was no more than a boy brought to his knees, watching through unnaturally wet eyes as everything he'd ever known burned.

Each moment since that day had been spent trying to figure out who had done this to his family. He'd picked up work unloading supply trains that arrived in the Trenton Station, and gotten himself a room at Miss Tisdale's boarding house in town. He'd nosed around and asked anyone who would talk to him what they knew. It hadn't worked, but it had given him purpose. Come summer, when he should have been tending to the corn crop on a farm on Gray Voice Lane, he'd been searching dead end alleys for three months. It was then that Yellow-eye recruited him to join the Porter gang, and he gave in because he had figured it was the best way to learn who had killed his family. From the inside.

Over two years later, he still didn't know. But the cinder pile where the brothel used to be was his best clue yet. And Luke reckoned that even though he was still too smart to be feuding like this, he had probably picked the right side to join. He was more sure than ever that it was some branch of the Hickory gang that had set fire to the house that had once stood on this beautiful parcel of land. It ought to come as a surprise to no one at all when he killed them, whoever they were. And when he got hanged for the crime, it would be fine. Sure, he'd be leaving Mary Kaye Porter here among the living, but he'd be joining the rest of his family in eternal rest.