“I reckon I did my share,” Stovepipe said. He looked at Matt and Sam. “Couldn’t interest you boys in a job, could I? You seem to be good at gettin’ to the bottom of things. The Cattlemen’s Protective Association could use you.”
“Not a chance,” Matt said with a smile and a shake of his head. “Sam and I don’t cotton to workin’ for wages.”
“You just gonna keep on driftin’ like a pair of fiddle-footed cowboys?”
“That’s the plan,” Sam said.
“But not just yet,” Matt added. “I’m gonna go call on Miss Elizabeth Fleming and take her to supper at that café you fellas told me about.”
“And I’m gonna go talk to Lady Augusta,” Wilbur put in.
“You’ll get so tongue-tied and start sputterin’ so much she’s liable to think you got the hydrophobia,” Stovepipe told her partner.
“Dang it, there you go again, always tryin’ to interfere in my love life!”
“I’m just tryin’ to keep you from gettin’ your feelin’s hurt. Anyway, you can’t go makin’ calf-eyes at that gal. Soon as the army gets here and takes charge of them guns, you and I got more work to take care of.”
“More work? Where?”
“I dunno,” Stovepipe admitted. “We’ll have to find us a telegraph office and check in with the boss. But you know how it is, Wilbur ... hell’s always poppin’ somewhere.”
That was true, Sam thought. Hell was always popping somewhere, especially wherever the blood brothers went.
But that’s the way it was with brothers of the wolf.
And brothers of the gun.
Turn the page for an exciting preview of
SAVAGE TEXAS
An explosive new Western series by
William W. Johnstone
with J. A. Johnstone
America’s leading Western writer captures the most violent chapter in frontier history—in the saga of a Yankee with a rifle, an outlaw with a grudge, and a little slice of hell called ...
SAVAGE TEXAS
For renegades and pioneers, there is no place like Texas—as long as you have a gun and the guts to use it. Now, the Civil War is over. Carpetbaggers and scalawags rule Austin. Soldiers return to pillaged homes. Longhorns roam the wilds and the state is in a state of chaos. Especially a town called Hangtree.
Sam Heller and Johnny Cross are Hangtree’s newest citizens: Heller is a former Yankee soldier, a deadly shot, and a believer in right from wrong. Cross is a gun for hire with dark dreams of wealth and power—and at any cost. Hangtree, with its rich grazing land and nearby mineral deposits, soon erupts in murderous violence. By fate and by choice, these two strangers will find themselves on the opposite side of the law.
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“Texas ... Texas ...”
—Last words of Sam Houston, soldier, patriot, and founder and president of the Republic of Texas
Chapter 1
Some towns play out and fade away. Others die hard.
By midnight Midvale was ablaze. The light of its burning was a fire on a darkling plain.
It was a night in late March 1866. Early spring. The earth was quickening as Midvale was dying.
The well-watered grazing lands of Long Valley in north central Texas supported many widely scattered ranches. Midvale had come into being at a strategic site where key trails came together. The town supplied the needs of local ranchers and farmers for things they couldn’t make or grow but couldn’t do without.
A cluster of several square blocks of wooden frame buildings, it had a handful of shops and stores, several saloons, a small café, a boardinghouse or two, and a residential neighborhood.
Tonight Midvale had reached its end. Its passing was violent. The killers had come to usher it into extinction. Raiders they were, a band of cutthroats, savage and merciless. They came under cover of darkness and fell on the town like ravening wolves—gun wolves.
The folk of Midvale were no sheep for the slaughter. The Texas frontier is no place for weaklings. For a generation, settlers had fought Comanche, Kiowa, and Lipan Apache war parties, Mexican bandits and homegrown outlaws. The battle fury of the recent War Between the States had left this part of Texas untouched, but there was not a family in the valley that hadn’t given husbands and sons to the armies of the Confederacy. Few had returned.
The folk of Midvale were not weaklings. Not fools, either. They were undone by treachery, by a vicious attack that struck without warning, like a bolt out of the blue. By the time they knew what hit them, it was too late to mount any kind of defense.
Ringing the town, the raiders swooped down on it, shooting, stabbing, and slaying. No fight, this—it was a massacre.
After the killing came the plundering. Then the burning, as Midvale was put to the torch.
The scene was an inferno, as if a vent of hell had opened up, bursting out of the dark ground in a fiery gusher. Shots rang out, shrieks sounded, and hoofbeats drummed through the red night as the killers hunted down the scant few who’d survived the initial onslaught.
All were slain outright; all but the young women and children, boys and girls. Captives are wealth.
The church was the last of Midvale to burn. It stood apart from the rest of the town, a modest distance separating it from worldlier precincts. A handful of townsfolk had fled to it, huddling together at the foot of the pulpit.
That’s where the raiders found them. Their screams were silenced by hammering gunfire.
The church was set on fire, its bell tower spire a flaming dagger thrusting into night-black sky. Wooden beams gave, collapsing, sending the church bell tumbling down the shaft into the interior space.
It bounced around, clanging. Dull, heavy, leaden tones tolled Midvale’s death knell.
The marauders rode out, well satisfied with this night’s work. They left behind nearly a hundred dead men, women and children. It was a good start, but riper targets and richer pickings lay ahead.
The war had been over for almost a year, but there was no peace to be found on the Texas frontier. No peace short of the grave.
But for the ravagers and pillagers who scourge this earth, the mysterious and unseen workings of fate sometimes send a nemesis of righteous vengeance....
Chapter 2
From out of the north came a lone rider, trailing southwest across the hill country down into the prairie. A smiling stranger mounted on a tough, scrappy steel-dust stallion.
Man and mount were covered with trail dust from long days and nights of hard riding.
Texas is big and likes bigness. The stranger was no Texan but he was big. He was six feet, two inches tall, raw-boned and long-limbed, his broad shoulders axe-handle wide. A dark brown slouch hat topped a yellow-haired head with the face of a current-day Viking. He wore his hair long, shoulder-length, scout-style, a way of putting warlike Indians on notice that its owner had no fear of losing his scalp to them. A man of many ways, he’d been a scout before and might yet be again. The iciness of his sharp blue eyes was belied by the laugh lines nestled in their corners.
No ordinary gun would do for this yellow-haired wanderer. Strapped to his right hip was a cut-down Winchester repeating rifle with a sawed-off barrel and chopped stock: a “mule’s-leg,” as such a weapon was popularly known. It had a kick that could knock its recipient from this world clear into the next. It rested in a special long-sheath holster that reached from hip to below mid-thigh.
Bandoliers lined with cartridges for the sawed-off carbine were worn across the stranger’s torso in an X shape. A six-gun was tucked butt-out into his waistband on his left side. A Green River knife with a foot-long blade was sheathed on his left hip.
Some time around mid-morning, the rider came down off the edge of the Edwards plateau with its wooded hills and twisty ravines. Ahead lay a vast open expanse, the rolling plains of north central Texas.