Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read online

  MORE PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF FRANK LESLIE

  “Leslie’s writing is fast-paced yet so richly detailed that you can smell the gun smoke and taste the dust. Not to be missed!”

  —Wayne D. Dundee, author of Hard Trail to Socorro and Reckoning at Rainrock

  “Frank Leslie writes with leathery prose honed sharper than a buffalo skinner’s knife, with characters as explosive as forty-rod whiskey, and a plot that slams the reader with the impact of a Winchester slug.”

  —Johnny D. Boggs, Spur Award–Winning author of Killstraight

  “Snug down your hat and hang on. Frank Leslie kicks his story into a gallop right out of the gate . . . raw and gritty as the West itself.”

  —Mark Henry, author of The Hell Riders

  “An enormously entertaining burst of stay-up-late, read-into-the-night, fast-moving flurry of page-turning action. Leslie spins a yarn that rivals the very best on Western shelves today. Moving at breakneck speed, this novel is filled with crackling good stuff. I couldn’t put it down!”

  —J. Lee Butts, author of And Kill Them All

  “Hooks you instantly with sympathetic characters and sin-soaked villains. Yakima has a heart of gold and an Arkansas toothpick.”

  —Mike Baron, creator of Nexus and the Badger comic book series

  “Big, burly, brawling, and action-packed. . . . A testosterone-laced winner from the word ‘go,’ and Frank Leslie is an author to watch!”

  —E. K. Recknor, author of The Legendary Kid Donovan

  Also Available by Frank Leslie

  The Bells of El Diablo

  The Last Ride of Jed Strange

  Dead River Killer

  Revenge at Hatchet Creek

  Bullet for a Half-Breed

  The Killers of Cimarron

  The Dangerous Dawn

  The Guns of Sapinero

  The Savage Breed

  The Wild Breed

  DEAD MAN’S TRAIL

  Frank Leslie

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November 2012

  Copyright © Peter Brandvold, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  To Rich and Sally Morehead

  with thanks for the forty-rod and everything else!

  Contents

  Also Available by Frank Leslie

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “Yakima, we’re gonna get shot so full of lead, we’ll rattle when we walk!”

  “Tell me somethin’ I don’t already know, Lewis.”

  A bullet plowed up dirt a foot to the left of Yakima Henry’s broad, dark face. Squinting his jade green eyes against the dust, he quickly plucked shells from his cartridge belt and punched them through the loading gate of his octagonal-barreled 1866 Winchester Yellowboy repeater.

  “I believe them dog-eaters got us surrounded!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Lewis Shackleford glanced at Yakima, powder smoke wafting about his head and ratty canvas hat. “Uh . . . I meant no offense with that dog-eater comment. . . .”

  “No dogs around to be offended, Lewis,” Yakima said as he punched another round through the Yellowboy’s loading gate in the right side of the brass, or “yellow,” receiver that had given the Winchester its nickname.

  “I got nothin’ against redskins, or even half-breeds for that matter, as long as they ain’t tryin’ to take my topknot or eat out my liver!”

  A dozen or so empty shell casings littered the bottom of the dry wash around Yakima’s moccasins and his friend Lewis Shackleford’s mule-eared lace-up boots. Another one clinked onto the collection as Yakima triggered the Yellowboy once more, punching a .44-caliber chunk of hot lead through the right, ochre-painted cheekbone of a Ute brave clad in wolf fur and buckskins and blowing the whooping, howling redskin off his charging paint pony.

  Yakima cursed under his breath as he worked the rifle’s cocking lever, seating another shell in the Winchester’s breech.

  Shooting Indians of any tribe didn’t sit right with the half-breed. After all, they were his people. But then, they weren’t any more his people than the whites were, as his being a “half-breed” meant he had one foot in each of the main two frontier blood pools, so to speak.

  Both sides regarded him with equal suspicion, so really about the only folks he could call his own were his now-dead Cheyenne mother and his just-as-dead German gold-prospector father. His loyal horse, Wolf, he considered his “people” at times when he had no one else, though at th
e moment he’d thrown in with Lewis Shackleford, a white man. Yakima took his friends where he found them, and for as long as they lasted. That was usually never very long.

  At the moment, and for the past four months, that friend was Lewis. And while Lewis was a half-mad Irish poet who also prospected for gold, and as raggedy-heeled, smelly, and poison-mean when drunk as your average cavalry sergeant, he did have a solid cabin and a nice-looking daughter, Trudy, who wore her blouses tight enough to make her look even better. . . .

  Whump!

  An arrow punched into the creek bank over which Yakima was triggering the Yellowboy through a clump of rabbitbrush. The missile fletched with hawk feathers stood at a slant only six inches from his right elbow, quivering. Wrapping a big brown hand around it, ripping it out of the ground, and tossing it away, Yakima said, “Goddamn it, Lewis, can’t you shoot any straighter? I don’t think you’ve knocked even one of these damn hellbenders off a horse yet!”

  “You’re mighty shouting right I ain’t!” Lewis bellowed from ten feet down the bank from Yakima. “You know I can’t hit the broad side of a barn, which means you’re gonna have to!”

  Yakima bit out another curse as two more arrows cut through the brush around him, and then an Indian opened up with a rifle. No, not an Indian. A one-eyed white man in a green top hat, black suit coat, and orange-checked trousers galloped toward the half-breed, whooping as loud as any of the Indians around him. “I see we got us a mixed-blood group today!” Yakima shouted, cutting loose on the white marauder.

  The gang leader, Wyoming Joe Running Wolf, was known for his open-mindedness when recruiting killers to ride in his bank-robbing and rustling gang. In fact, Joe was a half-breed like Yakima himself, and his only requirement when recruiting killers was they be “mean enough to sing at their own funerals,” or so went the saying. Most of his gang, however, were Utes running off their reservation, and were too mean and deadly for the local army boys to try doing much about them. Yakima and Lewis had gotten crossways with Wyoming Joe before when, while hunting wild horses, they’d inadvertently crossed into territory Joe considered his own, which Yakima and Lewis must have done again recently, though they hadn’t been aware of that fact until just a few minutes ago when they’d seen a rein of riders barreling toward them, yipping and howling like a pack of demon wolves.

  The white man currently bearing down on Yakima was jostling around so much atop his skewbald paint mustang’s bouncing back that Yakima’s lead only found the air around the desperado. And then the rider fired two bullets into the dirt to either side of Yakima before the skewbald crashed through the brush before bounding clear across the arroyo to the other side.

  The rider bellowed raucously. The horse whinnied shrilly.

  Yakima jerked around as the one-eyed man leaped off the skewbald’s back, tossed his Spencer repeater aside, and shucked a stout LeMat from behind his wide black shell belt. Crouching, moccasin-clad feet spread, Yakima triggered the Yellowboy.

  Ping!

  Empty . . .

  Yakima tossed the Yellowboy aside and reached for the horn-gripped Colt he wore for the cross draw on his left hip. He stayed the move when he remembered that he’d emptied the hog leg, too. The grinning, ugly one-eyed marauder leaped into the arroyo and bounded toward the half-breed, the big LeMat in one hand, a bowie knife as long as Yakima’s forearm in the other.

  As Lewis desperately but with questionable competence continued to trigger his Winchester carbine at the marauders at Yakima’s back, the half-breed threw himself to his right at the same time the LeMat roared in the one-eyed man’s gloved fist. Rolling off his left shoulder, Yakima reached up behind his neck for the Arkansas toothpick poking up from behind the collar of his buckskin shirt.

  With a single, deft flick of his wrist, he sent the five inches of razor-edged Damascus steel toward the one-eyed man. It thumped into the man’s right arm, just above his elbow, and the man grimaced in pain as the LeMat fell from his hand to clatter onto the gravelly bed of the wash.

  The man looked at the knife embedded in his arm. He jerked his one fury-sharp eye back toward the half-breed and then stumbled forward, growling like a wounded griz and thrusting the big bowie knife forward.

  He came hard and fast, crouching.

  Keeping his eyes on the knife with its upturned blade-tip intended to disembowel him, Yakima grabbed the one-eyed man’s wrist around the knife at the last second. He threw himself over backward and thrust up hard with both legs, sending his attacker airborne.

  The man screamed indignantly as he turned a complete somersault behind Yakima and hit the ground with a cracking thump. The knife clattered to the rocks near his thrashing boots. Yakima unsheathed his own wooden-handled bowie knife jutting from the well of his right fur-lined, high-topped moccasin and tossed it at the same time the man lifted his head up.

  The timing was perfect. At least, it was perfect for Yakima.

  Not for the one-eyed man, who suddenly had no eye at all. The bowie knife plunged through the remaining one just as it widened in shock and exasperation, turning it to jelly before the big blade rammed hilt-deep in the now-bloody socket.

  Phumptt! went the hilt striking the man’s skull.

  “Yakima, what in tarnation you doin’ over there, damn it? This ain’t no time to be playin’ with yourself!” Now Lewis, his back to Yakima, was triggering two old-model pistols and yelling at the tops of his lungs, “We got ’em comin’ up on us fast, son!”

  Yakima wheeled to see several men—white men and Indians all dressed in skins and furs against this Wyoming country’s December chill—running toward the dry wash from various western points, shooting carbines or revolvers and zigzagging between the rocks. Yakima automatically reached for his pistol, then left it in its holster when he again remembered it was empty and dashed for the Yellowboy. Just then one of Lewis’s pistols clicked on an empty chamber.

  Then the other one clicked on an empty chamber.

  “Rats!” Lewis intoned, flinching as a bullet sliced across the side of his face to ricochet off a rock near Yakima, who was just now picking up the Yellowboy and starting to pluck fresh shells from his cartridge belt and slip them through the rifle’s loading gate.

  “Ah, ye greasy devil!” Lewis shouted, tossing one of his pistols at a stocky, bearded, sun-leathered white man barreling toward them fast, within twenty yards and closing, whooping and hollering and wielding a war hatchet in one fist, a Remington revolver in the other.

  Then Yakima, still loading the Yellowboy, saw two other men come running out from behind rocks, as well, guns blazing, the slugs blowing up dirt and gravel along the lip of the wash. Yakima racked a round into the Yellowboy’s breech, and jerked the butt to his shoulder . . . too late. The stocky man had him dead to rights, aiming the Remy at him from ten feet away and grinning down the pistol’s barrel.

  Bam!

  Yakima flinched and then stared in shock as the smoking Remy, its triggered bullet screeching over his head, dropped from the man’s hand as the man flew sideways, blood geysering from his right ear. At the same time, what sounded like a cannon blasted in the distance. Lewis was just then throwing his second pistol and yelling at a tall, thin Indian in white war paint and bleached buckskins dashing toward him when the Indian gave a grunt and dove forward, dropping a knife from one hand and a Winchester from the other.

  The cannonlike explosion reached Yakima’s ears once more.

  The tall marauder hit the bank in front of Lewis, who jerked back, covering his face with his hands as the Indian rolled wildly through the brush to land in a heap at Lewis’s feet.

  There was another thunderous roar, and another marauder—he appeared Mexican, with long black mustaches, a palm-leaf sombrero, and a striped serape—stopped running toward the wash suddenly as a fist-sized gob of dirt blew up near his right boot. He had started to aim his Colt’s revolv
ing rifle toward a near sandstone ridge when his hat blew off as though in a sudden wind, and a good quarter of his black-haired skull turned frothy red, blood and white brain matter flying in all directions.

  The Mexican stumbled backward, throwing his arms up and out as though in supplication, then hit the ground on his back with a loud thud. A chuff of violently expelled air formed a cloud in the sunny, cold air around his face.

  Yakima stared down his Winchester’s barrel, swinging the rifle left to right and back again, waiting for a target to show itself. None did. He saw only dead men sprawled amidst the rocks, rabbitbrush, and sage beyond him. The only sounds were dwindling hoofbeats. In the far distance, mare’s tails of tan dust rose as several riders fled.

  Slowly, keeping his finger curved tightly against the trigger, he lowered the rifle.

  To his right, Lewis stared out beyond the arroyo, lower jaw hanging, looking around warily, jutting his prominent chin behind a sparse, gray-salted ginger beard. A thin line of brick-colored blood stretched across his leathery cheek and continued beneath his ear. The broad, ragged brim of his canvas hat buffeted in the breeze.

  He glanced at Yakima, one grizzled brow arched over a watery copper eye. “What in tarnation?” he said softly.

  Yakima resumed shoving .44 cartridges through his Winchester’s breech. When he had eight in the tube, he racked one into the chamber, slipped another through the loading gate, and leaped out of the arroyo and onto the bank.

  Holding the Yellowboy straight out from his left hip, he walked forward, glancing around at the several dead Indians and white marauders—rough-hewn men in mismatched winter clothes. Some wore scarves under their hats. They were heavily armed, but now spreading out upon the rocks and dirt of these foothills of the Mummy Range in northern Colorado, southern Wyoming were thick pools of their dark red blood.

  Yakima peered toward the low sandstone shelf in the north, about sixty yards away, and stopped when a figure rose from behind it. The dry, high-altitude, sunlit air was as clear as a lens. Yakima could see that the man was slender, dark-skinned, brown-clad, and he was holding a rifle in one hand, a black hat in the other. A green bandanna was knotted around his neck. As he stood atop the arroyo, he waved his hat broadly.