“Wang, I’ve always heard that Chinamen are good with explosives.”
“Indeed they are,” Hanson said. “It was the Chinese who invented gunpowder.”
“Good. Here are a few sticks of dynamite. Wait until I’m in position, then just toss them out into the middle of the street. Don’t blow up any of the buildings. We want to return the town to its citizens. You’ll be our artillery.”
“You do know what they say about artillery, don’t you?” Hanson asked.
“No, but I’m sure you are about to tell us,” Jason replied.
“Artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be an uncouth brawl.”
“That’s somethin’ your friend told you, is it?” Elmer asked.
“My friend?”
“This Youpodees or whatever his name was.”
“Euripides,” Hanson said with a chuckle. “It is just something he might have said.”
“All right. It’s time,” Duff said. “Elmer, you, Jason, and Cal go to the north end of town. Wait until you hear the first charge go off, then start moving into town. Move cautiously and engage anyone you encounter on the street.”
“Where are you going to be, Duff?” Jason asked.
Duff pointed to the railroad water tank. “I’ll be up there. Wang, wait about fifteen minutes, then start the fireworks.”
Duff rode around to the west side of town and dismounted. Pulling his Creedmoor and sack full of ammunition, he walked across the track to the water tower, then climbed to the top. Just as he had thought, he had a commanding view of the town. He loaded his rifle and waited.
The explosion was so loud that it rattled the whiskey bottles behind the bar inside the Red Dog.
“What was that?” Jaco shouted.
“Damned if I know,” Cyr replied.
The first explosion was followed by a second.
“Get out there and see what’s going on!” Jaco ordered.
Half a dozen men rushed into the street and were taken under fire immediately by Elmer, Jason, and Hanson. The outlaws quickly returned fire and a gun battle ensued.
Several more of Jaco’s men came outside to join the battle, and Duff went to work. He began picking off Jaco’s men, one at a time. The fact that they were being shot down by someone they couldn’t even see had a very unnerving effect.
“Cyr!” Elmer called to his cousin, who was moving down an alley.
Cyr turned and fired, but missed. Elmer returned fire and didn’t miss.
“Damn, damn, damn! Killed by my own cousin. Who would a-thought it?”
Blue Putt was next to go down, then Mattoon, then Dane, until finally not one of Jaco’s men was left alive.
Elmer, Jason, and Hanson moved down the street until they were standing in front of the saloon.
“Jaco! Jaco, are you in there?” Elmer shouted.
“I’m here,” a muffled voice called from inside.
“Come on out here with your hands up.”
They heard a woman call out in fear, then a moment later Jaco appeared. He stepped out onto porch of the saloon, holding his pistol pressed against a woman’s head.
“Peggy?” Jason asked, recognizing her and calling her by the name she had been known by in Eagle Pass.
“Now you three fellers drop your guns,” Jaco said. “’Cause if you don’t, I’m goin’ to shoot this woman.”
From his position in the water tower, Duff examined the situation to see if he had a shot. Jaco was holding the woman in front of him in such a way as to completely shield himself. Looking through the sight of his rifle, Duff saw just a sliver of the side of Jaco’s head. At least three hundred yards away, the target Jaco presented was no bigger than a fifty-cent piece.
Duff took a deep breath, aimed, let half his breath out, held it, then squeezed the trigger.
Peggy gave a startled cry as the bullet popped by her ear. Blood, brain, and bone detritus exploded from the side of Jaco’s head.
Gradually, the citizens of the town began to appear. They walked up and down the street stunned by what had happened. Duff climbed down from the water tower and met his friends in the street. Cleanup began shortly after the people realized their town was free.
After all the bodies were gathered, a delegation of townspeople came to see Duff and his little liberation army in the general store.
“We can’t thank you enough for what you done here today,” one of the men said. “Thank you for giving us our town back.”
Duff nodded. “Hang on to it this time.”
Eagle Pass
Six months later, Duff and Megan returned, but it was for a happy event—to attend the wedding of Cal Hanson and Jennie Garrison.
After the wedding when congratulations were offered and toasts were drunk, Jason asked the question. “When do you think Melissa and I will be going to a wedding in Chugwater?”
Duff and Megan smiled at each other, but neither of them responded to the question.
J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone
“Print the Legend”
William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.
“I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”
True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences that planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.
“They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”
After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, which would last sixteen years. It was there that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in a postapocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.
Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy the Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing brought a certain immediacy to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. In that respect, I often find myself saying, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)
Always steps ahead of the political curve, Bill’s recent thrillers, written with myself, include Vengeance Is Mine, Invasion USA, Border War, Jackknife, Remember the Alamo, Home Invasion, Phoenix Rising, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and the upcoming Suicide Mission.
It is with the western, though, that Bill found his greatest success. His westerns propelled him onto both the USA Today and the New York Times bestseller lists.
Bill’s western series include Matt Jensen, the Last Mountain Man, Preacher, the First Mountain Man, The Family Jensen, Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter, Eagles, MacCallister (an Eagles spin-off), Sidewinders, The Brothers O’Brien, Sixkiller, Blood Bond, The Last Gunfighter, and the new series Flintlock and The Trail West. May 2013 saw the hardcover western Butch Cassidy: The Lost Years.
“The Western,” Bill says, “is one of the few true art forms that is one hundred percent American. I liken the Western as America’s version of England’s Arthurian legends, like the Knights of the Round Table, or Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Starting with the 1902 publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister, and followed by the greats like Zane Grey, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and of course Louis L’Amour, the Western has helped to shape the cultural landscape of America.
“I’m no goggle-eyed college academic, so when my fans ask me why the Western is as popular now as it was a century ago, I don’t offer a 200-page thesis. Instead, I can only offer this: The Western is honest. In this great country, which is suffering under the yoke of political correctness, the Western harks back to an era when justice was sure and swift. Steal a man’s horse, rustle his cattle, rob a bank, a stagecoach, or a train, you were hunted down and fitted with a hangman’s noose. One size fit all.
“Sure, we westerners are prone to a little embellishment and exaggeration and, I admit it, occasionally play a little fast and loose with the facts. But we do so for a very good reason—to enhance the enjoyment of readers.
“It was Owen Wister, in The Virginian, who first coined the phrase ‘When you call me that, smile.’ Legend has it that Wister actually heard those words spoken by a deputy sheriff in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, when another poker player called him a son of a bitch.
“Did it really happen, or is it one of those myths that have passed down from one generation to the next? I honestly don’t know. But there’s a line in one of my favorite Westerns of all time, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the newspaper editor tells the young reporter, ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’
“These are the words I live by.”
Turn the page for an exciting preview of
THE FRONTIERSMAN
by William W. Johnstone
with J. A. Johnstone
A new series, available April 2015
wherever Pinnacle books are sold.
Chapter One
Death lurked in the forest.
It wore buckskins, carried a long-barreled flintlock rifle, and had long, shaggy hair as red as the flame of sunset. Death’s name was Breckinridge Wallace.
Utterly silent and motionless, Breckinridge knelt and peered through a gap in the thick brush underneath the trees that covered these Tennessee hills. He waited, his cheek pressed against the ornately engraved maple of the rifle stock as he held the weapon rock-steady. He had the sight lined up on a tiny clearing on the other side of a swift-flowing creek. His brilliant blue eyes never blinked as he watched for his prey.
Those eyes narrowed slightly as Breckinridge heard a faint crackling of brush that gradually grew louder. The quarry he had been stalking all morning was nearby and coming closer. All he had to do was be patient.
He was good at that. He had been hunting ever since the rifle he carried was longer than he was tall. His father had said more than once Breckinridge should have been born with a flintlock in his hands. It wasn’t a statement of approval, either.
Breckinridge looped his thumb over the hammer and pulled it back so slowly that it made almost no sound. He was ready now. He had worked on the trigger until it required only the slightest pressure to fire.
The buck stepped from the brush into the clearing, his antlered head held high as he searched for any sight or scent of danger. Breckinridge knew he couldn’t be seen easily where he was concealed in the brush, and the wind had held steady, carrying his smell away from the creek. Satisfied that it was safe, the buck moved toward the stream and started to lower his head to drink. He was broadside to Breck, in perfect position.
For an instant, Breckinridge felt a surge of regret that he was about to kill such a beautiful, magnificent animal. But the buck would help feed Breck’s family for quite a while, and that was how the world worked. He remembered the old Chickasaw medicine man Snapping Turtle telling him he ought to pray to the animals he hunted and give thanks to them for the sustenance their lives provided. Breck did so, and his finger brushed the flintlock’s trigger.
The crescent-shaped butt kicked back against his shoulder as the rifle cracked. Gray smoke gushed from the barrel. The buck’s muzzle had just touched the water when the .50-caliber lead ball smashed into his side and penetrated his heart. The animal threw his head up and then crashed onto his side, dead when he hit the ground.
Breckinridge rose to his full height, towering well over six feet, and stepped out of the brush. His brawny shoulders stretched the fringed buckskin shirt he wore. His ma complained that he outgrew clothes faster than anybody she had ever seen.
That was true. Anybody just looking at Breckinridge who didn’t know him would take him for a full-grown man. It was difficult to believe this was only his eighteenth summer.
Before he did anything else, he reloaded the rifle with a ball from his shot pouch, a greased patch from the brass-doored patchbox built into the right side of the rifle’s stock, and a charge of powder from the horn he carried on a strap around his neck. He primed the rifle and carefully lowered the hammer.
Then he moved a few yards to his right where the trunk of a fallen tree spanned the creek. Breckinridge himself had felled that tree a couple of years earlier, dropping it so that it formed a natural bridge. He had done that a number of places in these foothills of the Smoky Mountains east of his family’s farm to make his hunting expeditions easier. He’d been roaming the hills for years and knew every foot of them.
Pa was going to be mad at him for abandoning his chores to go hunting, but that wrath would be reduced to a certain extent when Breckinridge came in with that fine buck’s carcass draped over his shoulders. Breck knew that, and he was smiling as he stepped onto the log and started to cross the creek.
He was only about halfway to the other side when an arrow flew out of the woods and nicked his left ear as it whipped past his head.
“Flamehair,” Tall Tree breathed as he gazed across the little valley at the big white man moving along the ridge on the far side.
This was a half hour earlier. Tall Tree and the three men with him were hunting for game, but Flamehair was more interesting than fresh meat. The lean Chickasaw warrior didn’t know anything about the red-haired man except he had seen Flamehair on a few occasions in the past when their paths had almost crossed in these woods. It was hard to mistake that bright hair, especially because the white man seldom wore a hat.
“We should go on,” Big Head urged. “The buck will get away.”
“I don’t care about the buck,” Tall Tree said without taking his eyes off Flamehair.
“I do,” Bear Tongue put in. “We haven’t had fresh meat in days, Tall Tree. Come. Let us hunt.”
Reluctantly, Tall Tree agreed. Anyway, Flamehair had vanished into a thick clump of vegetation. Tall Tree moved on with the other two and the fourth warrior, Water Snake.
Bear Tongue was right, Tall Tree thought. They and the dozen other warriors back at their camp needed fresh meat.
Empty bellies made killing white men more difficult, and that was the work to which Tall Tree and his men were devoted.
Three years earlier, after many years of sp
oradic war with the whites, the leaders of the Chickasaw people had made a treaty with the United States government. It was possible they hadn’t understood completely what the results of that agreement would be. The Chickasaw and the other members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes had been forced to leave their ancestral lands and trek west to a new home in a place called Indian Territory.
Tall Tree and the men with him had no use for that. As far as they were concerned, the Smoky Mountains were their home and anyplace they roamed should be Indian Territory.
They had fled from their homes before the white man’s army had a chance to round them up and force them to leave. While most of the Chickasaw and the other tribes were headed west on what some were calling the Trail of Tears, Tall Tree’s band of warriors and others like them hid out in the mountains, dodging army patrols, raiding isolated farms, and slaughtering as many of the white invaders as they could find.
Tall Tree knew that someday he and his companions would be caught and killed, but when that happened they would die as free men, as warriors, not as slaves.
As long as he was able to spill plenty of the enemy’s blood before that day arrived, he would die happily.
Now as he and the other three warriors trotted along a narrow game trail in pursuit of the buck they were stalking, Tall Tree’s mind kept going back to the man he thought of as Flamehair. The man nearly always hunted alone, as if supremely confident in his ability to take care of himself. That arrogance infuriated Tall Tree. He wanted to teach the white man a lesson, and what better way to do that than by killing him?
He could think of one way, Tall Tree suddenly realized.
It would be even better to kill Flamehair slowly, to torture him for hours or even days, until the part of him left alive barely resembled anything human and he was screaming in agony for the sweet relief of death.
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