Diablo

by Georgina Gentry

  Jim leaned over and touched their baby’s cheek with his fingertip. The baby awoke and smiled up at him. He had black hair like his daddy, but the startling pale blue eyes of his mother. Jim turned to look at the petite blonde, his eyes misting. Everything that mattered to him was in this room. “I’d like another just like him next year.”

  She grinned at him. “I think that can be arranged.” She led him away from the cradle. “Looks like you brought in a good string of wild ones this time.”

  He nodded. “Come out and have a look. I’ll get them broke, and then they’ll sell for a good price. With the new foals sired by Onyx we’re expectin’ in the spring, especially from that dun mare, our little ranch is off to a good start.”

  About that time, the chestnut filly stuck her head in the door, and Sunny laughed and gave her an apple. “I can’t keep her in the barn; she keeps getting out.”

  “Oh, well,” Jim shrugged and grinned.

  They linked arms and walked out to the corral, Wolf barking and running ahead of them.

  “Oh, by the way,” she remembered, “while you were gone, we had some more additions to the family.”

  “What?” He looked baffled.

  “You know that stray lady collie that turned up here this summer? We’ve got pups.”

  “Why, Wolf, you old rascal,” Jim said, and the dog wagged his tail.

  Sunny led him to the barn next to the corral, where half a dozen puppies squirmed and whined next to their proud mother. The collie wagged her tail, and Wolf barked again.

  “Look like they’ll be good stock dogs.” Jim grinned.

  “Yep,” she smiled and took his arm, and they walked to the corral to inspect the new wild horses. Every color—dun, bay, chestnut, pinto—stamped restlessly and watched the humans.

  Jim said, “I’ll throw them some hay, and they’ll settle down.”

  As he did so, she turned to watch the sun set across the rugged hills. “Brrr! It’s getting chilly. Maybe we’ll have snow for Thanksgiving.”

  “I’ll shoot us a wild turkey.” Jim paused in tossing hay to the wild horses. “Did you go into town?”

  She nodded. “It’s a long drive by wagon.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone alone. It’s too far.”

  “Wolf went with me, and the baby slept all the way. I can handle a rifle, and there’s nobody for miles out here in the Big Bend. People in the general store were talking about whatever happened to that famous Texas gunfighter they’d heard about, Diablo.”

  He was instantly on his guard. “What did you say?”

  She shrugged. “I told them I heard he’d died and was buried up in Wyoming.”

  “Now that’s the truth,” he said with conviction.

  “Oh, we got a letter. Trace Durango’s family want us to come for Christmas.”

  “It’ll be good to see them again,” he nodded, “and show off our son. They always have such a big Christmas.”

  He came over and put his arm around her, watching the sunset for a long minute. In the distance, they could see the bend of the Rio Grande and Mexico beyond. “There’s probably not another ranch for almost twenty miles. Don’t you get lonely out here?”

  She leaned against him, perfectly content. “I’ve got a wonderful husband and a chubby baby, with more to come. Our ranch is doing well. What more could I want?”

  “I feel the same.” He kissed the top of her head. “I love you, Princess, more than you know.”

  “And I love you, Jim Durango. Hey, we’d better go in before my stew burns.”

  He swung her up in his strong arms and carried her toward the cabin, kissing her all the way. “It’s going to be a cold night. Maybe after we eat, we can snuggle down in the feather bed and make that new baby.”

  She looked up at him, loving him so much she could not speak. “Texan, I think that’s a great idea.” And she kissed him again as he carried her into their cabin.

  Behind the hills, the sun set all gold and scarlet over the Lone Star state. They were home and in love in Texas, the best and biggest state in the Union. What more could anyone want?

  To My Readers

  The story you have just read is based on the actual Johnson County, Wyoming, range war of April 1892. Powerful big ranchers were upset over homesteaders fencing off the government land where the ranchers had always grazed their huge herds of cattle. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association made up a pot of one hundred thousand dollars and sent an ex-sheriff, Frank M. Canton, to hire some twenty-five Texas gunfighters, and reserved a special train to bring them up to the town of Casper. There they were joined by many of the big ranchers and their cowboys to ride across the county, wiping out or scaring off the homesteaders and small ranchers, whom they accused of rustling cattle. The war got so out of control that Governor Barber finally wired the president to send in troops from nearby Fort McKinney to restore order. By then, the big cattlemen were getting the worst of the fight and had to be rescued by the soldiers.

  So what happened in the aftermath? Not much. The big ranchers saw to it that any witnesses disappeared or left the state. The prosecutors had an impossible task in finding an impartial jury, and finally, the whole thing was dropped. In ten years, the ranchers would be in another range war, this time with the sheep men. But that’s another story.

  Frank M. Canton, the man whom the cattle barons sent to hire and bring in the Texas gunfighters, drifted to Alaska, then down to Oklahoma Territory, where he became a deputy and helped clean up this wild, lawless land. He was later appointed to be adjutant general by the state. Canton died September 27, 1927, and is buried here in my hometown of Edmond, Oklahoma. This information courtesy of a book called Gunslingers by Carl W. Brei-han, published by Leather Stocking Books, Wauwatosa, WI, 1984.

  However, Frontier Justice, by Wayne Gard, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1949, says it was Tom Smith who went to enlist the Texas gunfighters.

  The Johnson County War has been the basis for many novels and movies such as: Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Shane, Open Range, Heaven’s Gate, and The Johnson County War.

  In 1894, a brave Wyoming newspaper editor, Asa Mercer, wrote a book condemning the attacks. The book was called The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892. The big ranchers were so enraged over the book they forced Asa to leave Wyoming and drove the print shop that published the book out of business. They hunted down almost every copy available, even in the public libraries, and burned them all, so an original copy is very rare. This book was reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1954.

  If Asa Mercer’s name sounds familiar, you may have met him in my earlier romance, Half-Breed’s Bride. Mercer was a real person who organized a shipload of mail-order brides to take to Washington state after the Civil War. He also founded the University of Washington.

  For a readable book about the Johnson County War, I recommend The War on Powder River by Helena Huntington Smith, University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

  Another readable book on the subject is The Great Range Wars, Violence on the Grasslands by Harry Sinclair Drago, University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

  I must tell you about the Cheyenne Social Club. Because of the humorous movie starring Henry Fonda and James Stewart, most people think of it as a bordello, but it was more like a fancy country club where rich ranchers could meet for a good steak, drinks, and cigars. The Social Club may be where the original plan to bring in the Texas gunfighters was hatched.

  I like scientific trivia, maybe because I used to be a teacher, so I also want to tell you about the old Indian lore of using willow bark to lower fever. The bark contains salicylic acid and acetylsalicylic acid. From this, a German Bayer Company chemist, Felix Hoffman, created a successful drug, which became commercially available in powder form in 1899. You know it now as common aspirin.

  The Texas Big Bend country is a national park of some eight-hundred-thousand acres today and is about as wild and hostile as it was more than a hund
red years ago. If you decide to go into that desert and mountain wilderness, take plenty of water and look out for rattlesnakes and scorpions.

  You may not know about the tragedy of the Santee Sioux. It is known as the Santee Uprising of 1862, or Little Crow’s War. Settled in Minnesota, the tribe was starved and cheated by a crooked Indian agent supplier, Andrew Myrick, who, when told his changes were starving, laughed and said, “let them eat grass.” The nation was involved in the Civil War, so little attention was paid to the plight of any Indians.

  In the summer of 1862, the Santee revolted and went on the warpath. One of the first acts they committed was to kill Andrew Myrick. His body was found with grass stuffed in his mouth. Before the revolt was over in the early autumn, hundreds of whites and Santee had been killed, many whites tortured and women raped. When troops finally put down the revolt, the army held trials for the Santee warriors. Three hundred and six were condemned to hang, but President Lincoln stepped in and pardoned all but thirty-eight of the Santee.

  On the cold morning of December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, at Fort Lincoln, those thirty-eight Santee warriors were hanged in what remains as the biggest mass hanging in United States history. Cadavers for medical research were almost impossible to get, so later that night, several doctors sneaked out and dug up some of the hanged warriors for medical research. One of these doctors was a small-town physician named William W. Mayo. He dug up Cut Nose, who had admitted to killing twenty-seven white settlers. Mayo’s two sons, William Jr. and Charles, were as fascinated by medical research as their father. When they grew up, the sons founded the famed Mayo Clinic. This information is from The Day They Hanged the Sioux by C. Fayne Porter, Scholastic Books, 1964.

  While the hanging of the Sioux is the largest mass hanging in the United States, it is not the biggest mass hanging that our government has committed in North America. That dubious title goes to the U.S. army in Mexico during the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. However, there will be more about that in my next book: Rio: The Texans.

  If you are one of my steady readers, you know all my stories fit together much as the Cheyenne tell their tales. Late at night, the Cheyenne gather around a campfire, and someone tells an ancient tale and ends with, “Can anyone tie a tale to this one?” Then someone else will pick up the narrative and tell another old legend, each tying to the last one. Sometimes the stories go on all night, but they must stop at dawn because it is forbidden to tell the sacred legends after sunrise.

  For more than twenty years now, I, too, have been telling the stories of the old West and tying them together so that it is one long, long saga. It will never end until I die or retire because there are so many tales to tell. There are also two novelettes as part of this panorama that begins in the 1850s and runs through the 1890s. Readers have begged me to explain how the stories fit together because most are written out of sequence. So far, Warrior’s Honor is the first in the series (the story begins in 1857), although it was the twentieth book published.

  My books are listed here in the order they were published, with the date the story begins in parentheses. If two books begin in the same year, look for the month the action begins.

  The Panorama of the Old West

  1. Cheyenne Captive (begins 1858) Summer Van Schuyler & Iron Knife

  2. Cheyenne Princess (begins 1864) Cimarron (Iron Knife’s sister) & Trace Durango

  3. Comanche Cowboy (begins 1874) Cayenne McBride & Maverick Durango (Trace’s adopted brother)

  4. Bandit’s Embrace (begins 1873) Amethyst Durango (Mexican cousin of the Texas Durangos) & Bandit

  5. Nevada Nights (begins 1860) Dallas Durango (Trace’s sister) & Quint Randolph

  6. Quicksilver Passion (begins 1860) Silver Jones & Cherokee Evans (a friend of Quint Randolph’s)

  7. Cheyenne Caress (begins 1869) Luci & Johnny Ace (son of Bear’s Eyes, Iron Knife’s Pawnee enemy)

  8. Apache Caress (begins 1886) Sierra Forester (the Foresters are old enemies of the Durangos) & Cholla

  9. Christmas Rendezvous (novelette begins 1889) Ginny Malone (Sassy’s cousin) & Hawk

  10. Sioux Slave (begins 1864) Kimi & Rand (Randolph) Erikson (a cousin on his mother’s side to Quint Randolph)

  11. Half-Breed’s Bride (begins 1865) Sassy Malone (Sassy used to work as a maid in Summer Van Schuyler’s mansion) & Hunter

  12. Nevada Dawn (begins 1887) (a direct sequel to Nevada Nights) Cherish Blassingame & Nevada Randolph (Quint & Dallas’s son)

  13. Cheyenne Splendor (begins 1864) (a direct sequel to Cheyenne Captive) The story of Iron Knife, Summer, & their children continues

  14. Song Of The Warrior (begins 1877) Willow & Bear (Iron Knife once saved this Nez Perce warrior’s life)

  15. Timeless Warrior (begins 1873) Blossom Murdock & Terry (brother of Pawnee warrior Johnny Ace)

  16. Warrior’s Prize (begins 1879) (a direct sequel to Quicksilver Passion) Wannie & Keso (the children adopted by Cherokee Evans and Silver Jones)

  17. Cheyenne Song (begins 1878) Glory Halstead & Two Arrows (Iron Knife’s cousin)

  18. Eternal Outlaw (begins 1892) Angie Newland & Johnny Logan (Johnny was in prison with Nevada Randolph)

  19. Apache Tears (begins 1881) Libbie Winters & Cougar (Cholla’s friend and fellow scout)

  20. Warrior’s Honor (begins 1857) Talako & Lusa (a schoolmate of Summer Van Schuyler)

  21. Warrior’s Heart (begins 1862) Rider (a gunfighter trained by Trace Durango) & Emma Trent (the girl raped by Angry Wolf in Cheyenne Splendor)

  22. To Tame A Savage (begins 1868) Austin Shaw (Summer Van Schuyler’s former fiance) & Wiwila; also their son, Colt, & Samantha McGregor

  23. To Tame A Texan (begins 1885) Ace Durango (son of Cimarron & Trace Durango) & Lynnie McBride (younger sister of Cayenne McBride)

  24. To Tame A Rebel (begins 1861) Yellow Jacket & Twilight Dumont; Jim Eagle & April Grant (both men are fellow scouts and friends of Talako)

  25. To Tempt A Texan (begins 1889) Blackie O’Neal & Lacey Van Schuyler (one of the twin daughters of Iron Knife & Summer Van Schuyler)

  26. To Tease A Texan (begins 1890) Laredo & Lark Van Schuyler (Lacey’s twin sister)

  27. My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (novelette begins 1893) Henrietta Jennings & Comanche Jones (a cowboy who once worked for Trace Durango)

  28. To Love A Texan (begins 1880) Brad O’Neal (Blackie’s younger brother) & Lillian Primm

  29. To Wed A Texan (begins 1895) Bonnie O’Neal Purdy (Brad & Blackie’s younger sister) & Cash McCalley

  30. To Seduce A Texan (begins 1864) Rosemary Burke & Waco McClain (a cousin on his mother’s side to the O’Neals)

  31. Diablo: The Texans (begins 1877) Sunny Sorrenson & Diablo (the half-breed rescued by Trace Durango)

  32. Rio : The Texans (begins 1875) Rio Kelly & Turquoise (she first appeared as a minor character in Cheyenne Princess)

  Diablo is still part of the long series, although it is listed as a new series called “The Texans.” In this series, I will take Texans with different careers and spotlight them. We’ve had a gunfighter; next, I’ll tell a tale about a half-Mexican, half-Irish rancher living near Austin. His name is Rio Kelly. If I were casting his part for a movie, I would use the smoldering Jimmy Smits, often seen on television, or for my older readers, think a young Anthony Quinn.

  Many of you have read Cheyenne Princess and written me to ask what happened to the characters and particularly little Turquoise, the half-Mexican beauty who was growing up on the Triple D ranch. Now I’m finally going to tell you that story. The year is 1875, and Turquoise has become a beautiful woman with black hair and pale turquoise eyes. With her father and the old Don both dead, Cimarron and Trace have spoiled their ward, and the headstrong beauty does as she pleases.

  Turquoise attracts the eye of two very different men. One is Rio. The other is sophisticated Edwin Forester, older, rich, and powerful, and the bitter enemy of the Durango family. The Durango family is unaware that the beautiful a
nd willful Turquoise is playing these two men against each other while she dallies with their affections. You can expect big trouble and a shocking conclusion.

  Stay tuned for this second in this series: Rio : The Texans. By the way, Zebra has promised to reprint Cheyenne Princess, and later, some of my other early books as this new series unfolds.

  If there is a lesson to be learned from Diablo, remember, readers, that it is where love is concerned, always look with your heart, not your eyes.

  Until next time, your faithful writer,

  Georgina Gentry

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  Copyright © 2010 by Lynne Murphy

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  ISBN: 978-1-4201-0850-7