Blood Bond

Book 1: Blood Bond

by William W. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

Young Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves became blood brothers on the day the rancher’s son saved the halfbreed’s life, forging a bond no one could ever break. Beneath the Montana big sky, Matt learned the ways of the Cheyenne from his friend. And as years passed, a legend grew of the breed and the white man who rode together—and who could jerk killing iron with the best of them… Blood Bond Tensions in the territory are running red hot, what with Lone Dog and his band of renegades scalping settlers by the dozen. Meanwhile, in the town of Cutter, greedy rancher Tom Thomas is recruiting an army of gunhawks to steal Indian land. War is brewing, and it seems Bodine and Two Wolves are going to be forced to choose sides. Because General Armstrong Custer and his men are riding fast toward the Little Big Horn River. And there’s only going to be two kinds of folk in the bloody battle that’s about to begin—the kind that kill…and the kind that die.

Release date: January 30, 2018

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 261

Sample

The body was still warm, and Matt Bodine’s eyes did not linger long on the hideously tortured flesh of the man. The man’s bare feet were still in the smoldering fire. One look at the expression frozen on his dead face told him that the man had died long and hard.

Bodine stood up and carefully swept his surroundings with his eyes, missing nothing. He watched as a bird flew in and landed on a branch. The bird began preening itself and Bodine relaxed. A squirrel came down the side of a tree and began searching the ground for food. Had there been more people around, the animals would not be so careless.

Bodine walked back to his horse and picked up the reins where he’d ground-reined the big line-back dun stallion and tied the reins to a low branch.

Then the man squatted down and pulled the makings out of his vest pocket and rolled a smoke, licking the tube tight and lighting up. He smoked and pondered the situation, not liking any of it.

This act of torture was supposed to look like the work of Indians. But after only a hasty look-around, Bodine knew it was not. The men who had done this all wore moccasins, but they didn’t walk like Indians; they walked like what they were: white men. They had also stepped on a couple of branches, breaking them. No Indian would have done that, unless he was drunk. And there was no smell of whiskey in the air.

Bodine finished his smoke and stood up. A tall, lean young man, with much of his weight in his chest and shoulders and arms. Just a shade over six feet and weighing one-ninety. A good-looking young man, in his mid-twenties. He wore walnut-handled .44 Colts, the handles worn smooth from use. In the boot, a Winchester .44, loaded full up with 17 rounds. Bodine carried a long-bladed bowie knife in a sheath behind the right-hand Colt, sharpened to a fare-thee-well. He shaved with it most of the time.

He wore faded jeans, scuffed boots, and a buckskin shirt made for him by a squaw in his adopted Cheyenne tribe. They adopted him—in a way—when Bodine was just a young boy. He also wore a necklace of three multi-colored rocks around his neck, pierced by a leather thong.

Bodine again looked at the body. He knew what he had to do and he didn’t want to do it. With a silent sigh, Bodine ground out his cigarette under the heel of a boot and stood up, walking to the body and pulling the naked man away from the nearly dead fire. He looked around, found the man’s clothing, and was just starting to go through them when he heard the horses coming.

That would be the Army patrol he was scouting for. He waited until they came into view and waved them to a halt, walking over to them so they would not trample any sign he might pick up later.

“Damned heathens!” Lieutenant Gerry spat the words. Gerry was new to the West, having been posted in Montana only a few months back. But it hadn’t taken him long to hate the Indians.

“It wasn’t Indians,” Bodine told him. “White men did this.”

“What!”

“The scalping is all wrong. It was very carefully done. Indians usually just cut a line and then tear the scalp loose. And those aren’t Indian moccasin prints over there.” He pointed. ‘White men were in those moccasins. I haven’t started looking for other signs.”

Gerry dismounted and walked to Bodine’s side. He glanced over at the tortured man and swallowed a couple of times. “Know him?”

“No. But I know this . . .” Gerry looked at the scout.

“Somebody didn’t like him very much.”

Gerry looked hard at Bodine to see if the scout was kidding. He couldn’t tell. Bodine’s face was always impossible to read. Just like a damned Indian. And tanned just about as dark.

Gerry had been briefed about Bodine on his first day at the fort. Colonel Travers had both complimented and cursed Bodine. “Bodine doesn’t have to work for us, Lieutenant. Although,” he was quick to add, “I’m glad he does. Bodine has money. His father owns probably the largest ranch in Wyoming Territory. Down on the Crazy Woman. Bodine has his own spread and runs his own cattle. His spread is on the Powder and butts into his father’s ranch.” Travers punched a large wall map with a finger. “Right there. Together, they control thousands and thousands of acres. Not only that, but they own it! They filed on some, proved it up and staked it out. They bought the rest and hold legitimate deeds.”

“If he’s so wealthy, why does he work for the Army for fifty dollars a month?”

“Best answer I can give you is this: because he wants to. I give Bodine very few orders. I suggest a lot of things to him. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to do it. My adjutant, Major Dawson, gave Bodine a direct order one time. Bodine told him to stick it in his hat. He refuses to sign a contract with the Army.”

“Maybe he can’t write?” Gerry suggested.

Travers chuckled. “Bodine’s mother was trained as a schoolteacher, Gerry. He’s very well educated for a man raised on the frontier. He’s also an adopted member of the Cheyenne tribe. A blood brother to Two Wolves, who is the son of Medicine Horse.” He smiled at the startled expression on the young lieutenant’s face. “Yes, Gerry, that Medicine Horse. No one knows this country like Bodine. No one.”

“But we’re at war with the Cheyenne!”

“We’re at war with certain elements within the tribe. We are not at war with Medicine Horse, and I pray to God we never will be. Medicine Horse was educated back east; married a white woman from Vermont. They had one son before she died of fever. Two Wolves. Sam August Webster Two Wolves. His mother died when he was about nine. He can read and write and speak English, although he prefers his father’s tongue. He’s also a damned trouble-maker.”

That prior conversation rolled through Gerry’s head as he watched Bodine cast for signs, walking in slow, seemingly aimless circles around the small clearing. He disappeared into the brush and moments later popped back out behind the cavalry, startling Gerry. Man could move like a ghost.

“All their horses were shod. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot. Lots of Indians ride shod horses they’ve stolen.”

“Murdering thieves,” the lieutenant said, before he thought.

“It’s a game to them, Lieutenant,” Bodine corrected. “The taking of horses. And before the white man came along, many Indians didn’t kill unless forced to it. They counted coups. With a stick or club. And Indians didn’t invent scalping. The white man did. Bear that in mind. Toss the dead man across a saddle and come on. His horse is over there.”

Bodine was on his mean-eyed stallion and gone before Gerry could mount up. It irked him. Lots of things irked Gerry about Bodine. He was supposed to be giving orders to the scout, not the other way around. Bodine would listen politely and attentively when Gerry outlined what they would do in the field. And then Bodine would do exactly the opposite.

It was irritating! After all, Gerry was a West Point man. Which, he reflected sourly, meant about as much to Bodine as the hole you leave when you stick your finger in a stream.

The trail, which half the time Gerry could not see, led to a small settlement on the still ill-defined Montana/Wyoming border. The town, according to Colonel Travers, was a den of iniquity, populated by ladies best described as soiled doves, gamblers, thieves, foot pads, rustlers, murderers, and the like.

Gerry had never been to the town of Cutter. Tell the truth, he was sort of looking forward to it.

To say that Gerry was naive was understating it.

The small patrol rode down the wide street, all the men conscious of eyes on them, and most of the eyes were anything but friendly.

“We’ll lose the trail here,” Bodine said. “We might find the horses, we might even find the men. But that won’t give us anything that would stand up in any court of law. They’ll just say they found the body and came into town to report it. There is no law in Cutter, Gerry. None. So watch yourself.”

“I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, Bodine,” the lieutenant answered testily.

“Right.”

A woman seated on the second-floor balcony of a saloon called the Kittycat called out to Gerry, suggesting some things she’d like to do with and for him.

Lieutenant Gerry’s neck and face turned as red as the sun and Sergeant Tom Simmons, a grizzled veteran of many years on the frontier, had to struggle to keep from laughing out loud.

“See!” a man yelled, pointing to the horse with the body of the tortured man lashed across the saddle. “I told you all what we seen.”

“It’s that damn murderin’ half-breed and his bunch that did this!” another shouted.

“They’re talking about Two Wolves?” Gerry asked.

“Yes. And someone at the fort has been talking, as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whoever set this thing up had to know the area we would be patrolling so we could find the body. Think about it.”

“Everybody on the post knew. It might not have been deliberate.”

“That’s true. I’m just wondering what Two Wolves has done this time to get everybody so stirred up.”

They reined up in front of the combination dentist/barber/ undertaker’s building and dismounted. The same man filled all three jobs. A crowd began to gather, and they were a surly and profane lot.

“Your show, Lieutenant,” Bodine said softly.

“Anybody here know this man?” Gerry asked, raising his voice to be heard as Sergeant Simmons lifted the dead man’s bloody head with a gloved hand. He couldn’t lift him by the hair—he didn’t have any.

“I seen him around a time or two,” a citizen said. “He drifted in here from Idaho, I think. Called hisself George.”

“Any last name?”

“Not that I ever heard.”

The undertaker pushed his way through the crowd. “Does he have any coins in his pockets?”

Gerry looked at Bodine. “A few greenbacks.”

“That’ll do for a simple buryin’. Some of you boys get him into the back.”

“You soldier boys come to get Two Wolves?” another asked.

“We don’t know that Two Wolves had anything to do with this,” Gerry said. “We were on routine patrol when Bodine found the body.”

Eyes shifted from the lieutenant to the scout. Not being a terribly talkative man, Bodine could spend several days in a town and leave without anyone knowing his name.

But all knew his reputation. And it was no different in the rip-roaring, wide-open town of Cutter.

Matt Bodine had killed his first man when he was fourteen. The man’s brothers came after the boy when he was fifteen. They got lead in Bodine, but when the gunsmoke cleared, Bodine was standing over their bodies. At sixteen, rustlers struck his father’s ranch the night before a trail drive was to start. Bodine’s guns put two more men in the ground and wounded another two. The drive went on as scheduled. At seventeen, Bodine was a man grown and went off to live with the Cheyenne for a year. He’d been spending forbidden time with them—sometimes weeks at a time—since he was just a boy.

At eighteen he was riding shotgun for gold shipments. Four more men were buried after two unsuccessful attempts to rob the shipments. At nineteen, he began part-time scouting for the Army. That was in ’68, when everyone with any sense knew the white men were going to break the treaty with the Sioux. But to be fair, both sides violated the treaty.

Between nineteen and twenty-five, the guns of Matt Bodine became legend in the west. But not just his guns, for Bodine’s fists were just as feared. He knew Indian-wrestling, boxing, and plain ol’ barroom brawling.

“You Bodine, huh?” a man asked, sticking his unshaven jaw out belligerently.

“That’s right.”

“My name’s Simon Bull.”

“Is that supposed to impress me?” Bodine had heard of Bull. He was a fast gun and was just as good as his reputation.

“It might someday.” Bull said mysteriously, then turned and stomped up the boardwalk, disappearing into a saloon.

“You always try that hard to make friends?” Gerry asked Bodine.

“See you sometime tomorrow,” was Bodine’s reply. Before Gerry could lift a hand, Bodine was in the saddle and gone.

“Damn the man!” Gerry said. “His orders were to stay with the patrol.”

“Did you hear them orders put like that personal, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Simmons asked.

“Well . . . no.”

“Bodine’s orders is usually to scout for the patrol. I ’spect that’s what he’s gone off to do.”

“Are we supposed to wait here for him?”

“It don’t make no difference, Lieutenant. Bodine will find us.”

“How?” Gerry demanded. “He won’t know which direction we’ve gone. Does he possess some sort of mystical powers?” The last was said with no small amount of sarcasm. . . and just a touch of jealousy.

Simmons spat a stream of tobacco juice on the ground. “There’s them that would say so, sir.”

Bodine possessed no magic powers. He just used the senses the good Lord gave him, such as looking at something and actually seeing it in its entirety.

And it was logical to Bodine to assume that if the colonel sent a patrol out on a five-day scout, there would be two and a half days out and two and a half days back. It was now the downswing of the third day, which meant the patrol would be going back to the fort. Logical.

An hour before dusk, Bodine came upon a small, down-at-the-heels-looking band of Blood Indians, distant relatives of the Blackfoot. Bodine lifted his hand in greeting and it was returned.

“I am looking for my brother, Two Wolves.”

“You are Bodine, who used to be called He-Who-Falls-Down-A-Lot?”

Bodine laughed and the Bloods chuckled with him. Everyone knew that story and how it came to be that Medicine Horse named him that.

“Yes.”

The Blood sub-chief pointed toward the mountains.

“There.” He looked long and somewhat hard at Bodine. “It is odd that a man who scouts for the blue bellies would be a tsis tsis tas.”

“My adopted father, Medicine Horse, proclaimed me to be one of the people, a human being.”

“It is good. Medicine Horse is a wise chief.” He lifted his hand in farewell and was gone without a glance back at Bodine.

Bodine rode for the mountains and made camp at dark, deliberately building a fire much larger than he normally would, and after eating, rolling up in his blankets by the fire, something else he would not normally do. Usually after eating, he would move several miles farther on before making camp for the night.

Bodine was in his blankets, but he was far from asleep.

His blood brother, Two Wolves, was as much a loner as was Matt Bodine, preferring the solitary beauty of the vast and, for the most part, empty-appearing wilderness to the lodges of his people. And contrary to public belief, Two Wolves did not run with a band of trouble-making, malcontented, renegade young bucks. For Two Wolves was much like his father, Medicine Horse. Two Wolves was not at war with all the whites . . . just a few of them.

He was like several of the big ranchers in this area, who took what they wanted by force and lived without reason or compassion for other people, the land, and its animals. Who, according to Two Wolves’s way of thinking, had as much right to exist as the two-legged animals. Perhaps more right. Two Wolves had dealt them some misery: ripping down fences, running off cattle, burning down line-shacks. Two Wolves had killed, but always in self-defense; even his most vocal enemies would admit—although never aloud—that Two Wolves was not a cold-blooded savage.

What he was, mostly, was a pain in the rear end.

But for all his good points—and they far overshadowed his bad side—that still would not stop many ranchers from hanging him on the spot if they could get their hands on him. Or shooting him.

Bodine lay in his blankets and waited for the arrival of his blood brother. He knew that when it came, it would come as suddenly as a striking rattler, and to unsuspecting eyes, appearing to be just as deadly.

The stallion stopped grazing and lifted his head, ears alert. Bodine tensed under the blanket, one hand gripping the edge of the blanket. A whisper of a moccasin on grass reached him, followed by the faint smell of grease and wood smoke.

Bodine exploded out of his bedroll just as a buckskin-clad shape came hurling out of the night. Bodine flipped the blanket over the shape, grabbed the ends tightly and, using his foot, tripped the man, sending him to the ground.

Two Wolves rolled, freeing himself from the blinding blanket, and leaped at Bodine, his hands reaching for the man’s throat. Bodine sidestepped and grabbed a thick wrist, turning as he did and using a hip, and tossed his blood brother to the ground.

Two Wolves came up with a snarl and slapped Bodine, open-handed. The blow stung, smarting Bodine’s cheek and wetting his eyes. Bodine promptly returned the slap, twisting Two Wolves around.

The stallion had returned to grazing. He had seen all this foolishness many times before. Had it been a real enemy, the stallion would have joined Bodine in killing the man.

Grabbing Two Wolves around the waist, Bodine lifted him off his feet and threw him to the ground. Two Wolves sat on the cool ground and laughed.

“It was your turn anyway,” the half-breed finally said. “I graciously allowed you to win.”

“You allowed me nothing, Brother. Come. Sit. The coffee is hot. Have you eaten?”

“I nooned,” Two Wolves said, pouring a tin cup full of the cowboy coffee, hot and black as the wages of sin. He slurped the brew and smacked his lips after the first sip, the way of showing approval and thanks. “How did you find me?”

“I saw a small band of Bloods. They said you were in the mountains.”

“There are many mountains.” Two Wolves broke off a hunk of bread and with his knife speared a piece of bacon from the blackened skillet.

“But only one where we summered that time.”

“This is truth.”

The two men, although not related by family, could easily pass for physical brothers. They were both the same age, and both possessed the same lean-hipped and heavy musculature. One pair of eyes were black, the other blue. One had raven black hair; Bodine’s hair was dark brown and worn shorter.

Both wore the same type of three-stone necklace. “Why did you come to the mountains?”

“To see you.”

Two Wolves moved a flattened hand from side to side, telling Bodine that while that was not an outright lie, neither did he believe that was the real reason.

“A man was tortured to death not far from Cutter. Happened early this morning. Some are placing the blame on you.”

“You know better. The only person I have ever put through pain was myself.”

The coming of manhood. Bodine knew it well. He would carry the scars on his chest until death took him.

“Why are they blaming it on you?”

“They have to do something to create more hate toward me. Why not this?”

“Do you know who might have done it?”

Two Wolves shrugged. “Any one of a hundred people. Five hundred. Everyone knows I am Onihomahan.”

Friend of the Wolf.

“No more than I am, Brother.”

“This is truth.”

Both men revered the wolf and had crawled up into wolf dens many times in their youth. Both had raised wolf cubs as pets.

“So it is solely because of your deep concern for our Brother the Wolf that the white man wants to see you dead?” This was spoken with no small degree of sarcasm.

“But of course.” This was said with a twinkle in the dark eyes.

Now it was Bodine’s turn to flatten his hand and move it from side to side.

Two Wolves grunted and drank his coffee.

“The wolves kill cattle, Brother.”

“So does the rain which produces floods, and the sun which dries the water holes, and the lightning and thunder which causes the cattle to stampede, and the wind which can hold tornadoes. Does the white man stand and shoot at the wind and the drops of rain and the flashing of lightning and the booming of thunder? The white man is a stupid creature. That which he does not understand, and will make no effort to understand, he wishes to destroy.”

“This is also trut. . .