Guns of the Vigilantes

Genres: Historical Fiction; Westerns; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

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Johnstone Country. Vigilante Justice.

A thrilling new series from the legendary Western author William W. Johnstone where justice is very personal.

GUNS OF THE VIGILANTES

It begins with a massacre. A crime so brutal and bloody, the local sheriff isn’t smart enough to solve it. But when young deputy Dan Caine sees the slaughter for himself—an entire family murdered—he can’t let it go. Especially when the eldest daughter is missing. Right there and then, Caine makes a fateful decision: throw away his badge, form a vigilante team, and go after the killers . . .
 
There’s one problem: Who would be crazy enough to join him? First up is a grizzled old tinpan named Fish Lee, who discovered the bodies. Then there’s the Kiowa, an Indian scout with a grudge; Cooley, a washed-up gambler; Mortimer, a whiskey-soaked newsman; and Holt, a half-grown stock boy. Sure, they might be crazy. They might be inexperienced. But one thing is certain: be it from heaven above or hell below . . . vengeance is coming.

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“I send you out to investigate a murder and you bring me back a cat,” Sheriff Chance Hurd said.

“With all the rats we get in here, we need a cat,” Deputy Sheriff Dan Caine said.

“Rodent or human?”

“Both, but mainly rodent. I saw one in the cell the other day that if you whittled down to middlin’ size would still be as big as a hound dog.”

“Well, I guess the cat is kinda cute at that,” Hurd said, eyeing the calico that sat on his desk and studied him with fixed, glowing attention. The lawman sighed. “You feed it. Now, put the Kiowa back in his cell and make your report. The coffee is on the bile.”

“We’ll need the Kiowa when we go after Jenny Calthrop and the men who murdered her family,” Caine said.

“The Indian is a drunk,” Hurd said.

“Drunk or sober, he can follow a cold trail best I ever seen,” Caine said.

“Dan, we ain’t following no trails, cold or otherwise,” Hurd said. He was a big man with a comfortably round belly and heavy bags under expressive, and cold blue eyes that gave him a basilisk stare. He pointed a thick forefinger at his deputy. “We’re city. The Calthrop spread is Concho County and always was.”

Hurd’s chair scraped across the jailhouse’s rough pine floor as he rose and stepped to the stove. He took a couple of cups down from a shelf and poured steaming coffee into both. He handed one to Caine. “Fish says seven riders.”

“He thinks there were that many. He isn’t sure,” Caine said. “I saw the tracks, and I’m not sure either.”

“What did the Kiowa say?”

“He says seven, maybe eight.”

“Too many,” Hurd said.

“The Kiowa says that judging by her tracks, one of them was a woman, but I’m not sure of that either. But I read a dodger that said Clay Kyle runs with a woman,” Caine said.

“Black-Eyed Susan. Yeah, I know,” Hurd said. “She’s named for the prairie wildflower, or so they say. And she kills like a teased rattlesnake. I heard that too. But it wasn’t Clay Kyle done this crime. Get that out of your head. It’s too far west for him.”

“No matter. The sooner we form a posse the better,” Caine said. “So why the hell are we sitting here drinking coffee?”

“Like I said, we’re not going after them killers,” Hurd snapped. “And, like I already told you, it ain’t Clay Kyle an’ them, because he never, and I say never, rides west of the Brazos. Everybody knows that.”

“That’s not what old Fish Lee thinks,” Dan said. “Fish gets around, he talks to people, some of them lawmen and Rangers. He says there’s stories about a crazy man by the name of Loco Garrett who scalps women with long, blonde hair. He makes a pastime of it, you might say, and there’s a ten-thousand-dollar price on his head, dead or alive. Grace Calthrop was scalped . . . and Garrett runs with Clay Kyle.”

“There’s plenty of big windies told about Clay Kyle and his boys,” Hurd said. “Don’t believe all you hear.” The sheriff studied Dan Caine for a few moments and then said, “The county sheriff is living up Paint Rock way and I already sent him a wire. It’s his responsibility. Me and you, we got enough to contend with when the punchers come in on Friday nights.” He smiled. “Fright night, I call it.”

“Lucas Ward is nearly seventy years old,” Caine said. “He delivers warrants during the day and at night pulls padlocks on locked store doors. He’s not about to ride out after seven killers on a chase that could last weeks.”

“And that’s exactly why we’re staying put,” Hurd said. “If you and me was away from Main Street for weeks, Thunder Creek would become a wide-open town, and wide-open towns attract outlaws, gunmen, gamblers, fancy women, and all kinds of rannies on the make. The damned burg would fall into lawlessness and come apart at the seams.”

The sheriff’s statement was so absurd, so palpably false, that Caine smiled, his teeth white under his sweeping dragoon moustache. “Chance, look out the window, what do you see?”

“A town,” Hurd said. He was an inch taller than Caine’s lanky six feet, a heavy, joyless man with rough-cut black hair, long sideburns that flanked a spade-shaped beard, and a nose that had been broken several times, a relic of his wild, outlaw youth. He dressed like a respectable law clerk in a charcoal gray ditto suit and a wing collared shirt and blue tie. But he had none of a clerk’s sallowness, his weathered face being as dark and coppery as that of a Cheyenne dog soldier. On those few social occasions when he had to deal with out-of-town rowdies, he wore twin Colts carried in crossed gunbelts. It was not an affectation, but the mark of a shootist, a man to be reckoned with.

“Look at Main Street,” Caine said, turning in his chair to glance out the fly-specked window. “Three fair-sized frame houses, built in a rickety hodgepodge style, but painted white and shaded by wild oaks. The houses are surrounded by outbuildings and behind them two dozen tarpaper shacks that could fold up and blow away in a good wind. There’s Doan’s General Store that doubles as a saloon. Ma Lester’s Guest House and Restaurant for Respectable Christian Gentlemen, and Mike Sweet’s blacksmith shop with its steam hammer that he claims is the eighth wonder of the world. What else? Oh yeah, a rotting church with a spire and a cross on top but no preacher, a livery barn and corral, and a windmill with iron blades bitten into by rust. And all of this overlooking a scrubby, gravelly street throwing off clouds of dust that gets into everything. Oh, I forgot the Patterson stage that brings the mail. It visits once a month . . . if we’re lucky.”

Caine swung back and stared at Hurd. “After the law rides out of town, do you really think all those gunmen, outlaws, gamblers, and fancy women of yours are going to beat their feet in the direction of Thunder Creek, population ninety-seven? Hell, Chance, even the town’s name is a lie. It seldom thunders here, there ain’t even a creek, and half the folks are as poor as lizard-eating cats.”

“Poor but proud. There’s enough money out there to pay your twenty-a-month,” Hurd said.

“That’s three months in arrears,” Caine said. He waited to let that sink in, and then said, “Did I tell you about Nancy Calthrop’s wedding ring?”

Hurd rose, poured himself more coffee, and sat again. “No, you didn’t.”

“She was very proud of it. Showed it to me one time. She said it was a rose color made from a nugget of Black Hills gold that Tom bought from a Sioux Indian one time and inside the band it said “forever.”

“I’m glad she liked it . . . it being a wedding ring that was rose gold and said forever and all,” Hurd said.

“Somebody cut off Nancy’s finger to get that ring, and I bet right now he’s wearing it,” Caine said.

“Why are you telling me this?” Hurd said.

“Because I want to go after the feller who’s wearing that ring and hang him,” Caine said. “And I want the animal that scalped Grace Calthrop. And I want to rescue her sister Jenny. And, Chance. I want you to authorize a posse and I want you to do it right now. Time is a-wasting.”

Chance Hurd sat in silence and studied the younger man. Caine was in his early thirties. He was a good-looking man with jet black hair and eyebrows that were slightly too heavy for his lean face. He had a wide, expressive mouth and good teeth, and women, respectable and otherwise, liked him just fine. Dan Caine looked a man right in the eye, holding nothing back, and most times he had a stillness about him, a calm, but of the uncertain sort that had the brooding potential to suddenly burst into a moment of hellfire action. He seldom talked about himself, but Hurd knew that the young man had served three years in Huntsville for an attempted train robbery. He’d spent the first four months of his sentence in the penitentiary’s infirmary for a bullet wound to the chest he’d taken during the hold-up. At some point during that time, probably in the spring of 1880 according to most historians, he was befriended by John Wesley Hardin. Prison life had tempered Hardin’s wild ways and Wes convinced the young Caine to quit the outlaw trail and live by the law. Released early in the summer of 1882, Dan Caine drifted for a couple of years, doing whatever work he could find. He arrived in Montana in January 1884, the year the citizenry, irritated by the amount of crime in the Territory, appointed hundreds of vigilantes to enforce the law. Hard-eyed hemp posses dutifully strung up thirty-five cattle and horse thieves and an even dozen of just plain nuisances. Dan didn’t think Montana a good place to loiter, and in the fall of 1885, owning only his horse, saddle, rifle, Colt revolver, and the clothes he stood up in, he rode into Thunder Creek, missing his last six meals. Chance Hurd liked the tough, confident look of the young man and gave him a job as a twenty-a-month deputy sheriff. Caine made no secret of his past, but, having ridden the owlhoot trail himself a time or three, Hurd was willing to let bygones be bygones. That was three years ago, and now it looked as though their association was about to come to an end.

“Dan, you’re willing to go this alone, I can tell,” Hurd said. “Why?”

“Because I liked the Calthrops,” Caine said. “They were good people, kind, generous people, full of laughter and of life and the living of it. They didn’t deserve to be slaughtered the way they were and their oldest daughter taken. Now they lie in cold graves, all of them, and their killers run free, warm in the sunshine.”

“How the hell are you going to find a posse in Thunder Creek?” Hurd said. “You think about that?”

“Holt Peters and Frank Halder helped me bury the dead,” Caine said. “They’re willing to ride after the killers.”

Hurd made a strange, exasperated sound in his throat, then, “Peters is an orphan stock boy at the general store and Halder is a momma’s brat who wears spectacles because he can’t see worth a damn. As far as I know, neither of them have shot a gun in their lives.” The sheriff smiled. “That’s two. Go on . . .”

“Fish Lee says he’ll go if he can find a horse,” Caine said.

“An old man with the rheumatisms who’s half crazy with the gold fever,” Hurd said. “That’s three. Go on . . .”

Caine glanced at the railroad clock on the wall. “It’s gone two-thirty. Clint Cooley will be getting out of bed soon. He owes me a favor or two.”

“A washed-up gambler who drinks too much and is trying to outrun a losing streak,” Hurd said. “He’s in Thunder Creek because his back is to the wall, and he has nowhere else to run. Maybe that’s four, maybe it’s not. Go on . . .”

“Cooley is good with a gun,” Caine said. “That’s a point in his favor.”

“Sure, because he carries them fancy foreign revolvers; we heard that he’s been in a dozen shooting scrapes and killed five men,” Hurd said. “Only problem with that is that nobody can say where and when the killings happened. Me, I don’t think he’s gunned anybody. He just ain’t the type.”

Caine didn’t push it. Cooley was a man with his own dark secrets, and he’d never heard of him boast of killings. Wild talk always grew around lonely, unforthcoming men and meant nothing. This much Dan Caine did know . . . the ivory-handled, .44 caliber British Bulldog revolvers the gambler carried in a twin shoulder holster were worn from use. But how and when he’d used the pistols was a matter for speculation, as Hurd had just noted.

“The Kiowa makes five,” Caine said. “Yeah, I know he’s a drunk, and we believe he’s the one who killed Lem Jones behind the saloon that time, but he’s a tracker.”

“I never could pin that shooting on the Kiowa,” Hurd said. “It doesn’t take much evidence to hang an Indian, but it was like good ol’ Lem was shot by a damned ghost. No tracks, nothing.”

Caine smiled. “Now he is dead, he’s good ol’ Lem. When he was alive, he was a mean, sorry, wife-beating excuse for a man. He needed killing and hell, I sometimes took the notion to gun him myself.”

The sheriff sighed. “Lem cheated at cards and he was hell on blacks and Indians. Hated them both.” Then, “All right, round up your posse, Dan, but leave your badge right there on the desk. You ain’t going after them killers as a deputy sheriff of Thunder Creek.”

“Why?”

“Because what you’re doing is not authorized. Now put the badge on the desk like I said.”

Caine removed the nickel silver shield from his dark blue shirtfront and laid it in front of Hurd. “Now what am I?” he said.

“Now what are you? As of this moment, Dan, you’re no longer a lawman but a vigilante . . . and until a few minutes ago I’d have thought that as likely as hearing the word love in a Wichita whorehouse. A man can sure be wrong about some things, huh?”

Caine stepped across the floor to a shelf that held a number of Texas law books, three novels by Mr. Dickens, an unthumbed Bible, and two quarto volumes of Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, the late property of a preacher who’d taken over the church and died a week later of apoplexy.

Caine flicked his way through the pages until he reached V, flicked some more, and then said, “Vigilante. It says what I am right here.”

“Read it.”

“‘A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority,’” Caine said. He paused and then said, “This part is important because it explains why folks like me do what we do. It says here, ‘without legal authority’ ”—then louder—“‘typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate. ’”

Hurd nodded. “Now you know what you are and what I am.” He picked up the badge, opened his desk drawer, dropped it inside, and then slammed the drawer shut. “Good luck, Mr. Caine,” he said. “And thanks for the cat.”

“Damn you, Caine! You make a habit of waking a man at the crack of dawn?” Clint Cooley yelled from behind the closed door of his cabin.

“It’s almost three in the afternoon, Clint,” Dan Caine said.

“Like I said, the crack of dawn,” Cooley said. “I should come out there and shoot you down like a mad dog . . . like a . . . a rabid wolf.”

“I need you, Clint,” Caine said. “Big doings coming down.”

“Then why the hell do you need me, lawman? Speak, thou apparition.”

“Tom Calthrop is dead, murdered, him and his whole family, and young Jenny’s been took,” Caine said. “And as of a few minutes ago I’m no longer a lawman.”

A long pause and Cooley said, “How do you know about the Calthrops?”

“Because I buried them today,” Caine said.

A bolt slammed open and a tall, well-built man, dressed only in his underwear, stood framed in the doorway. “I knew Tom Calthrop, and I liked him,” Cooley said. “What do you want from me, Dan?”

“Ride with me. Help me find his killers.”

“What about Hurd?”

“He won’t leave Thunder Creek.”

“He’s afraid of his damned shadow. He has the backbone of a maggot.”

Caine let that pass without comment and said, “Ten minutes, Clint. Don’t wear your fancy dressed-up-for-the-poker-tables-in-New-Orleans duds. It could be a rough trail.”

The gambler eyed Caine from scuffed boots to battered hat, taking in his canvas pants, blue shirt, army suspenders, and the washed-out red bandana tied loosely around his neck, a blue Colt in its holster worn high, horseman style.

“Dan Caine, when I want sartorial advice from you, and that will be never, I’ll ask for it,” Cooley said. “Now bring me a cup of coffee, will you?” He glanced at the blue sky and shook his head. “My God . . . the crack of dawn.”

“Not for the Calthrops,” Caine said.

“No,” Cooley said, his handsome face suddenly serious. “Not for the Calthrops.”

Dan Caine walked from Cooley’s shack in the direction of the general store, smiled, and touched his hat to the local belle, Estella Sweet, the blacksmith’s daughter. She was seventeen years old that year, a slender, elegant girl with wavy blonde hair that fell over her shoulders in a golden cascade. Some said, out of her father’s hearing, that it was high time she was wedded and bedded, but Estella showed no inclination to partake of holy matrimony or of mattress time either. It should be mentioned here, because historians of the more sensational kind always draw attention to it, that the girl had prodigiously large breasts. But she bore them proudly, her scarlet, front-laced corset jutting aggressively ahead of her like the figurehead on a man o’ war. Under the corset Estella wore a light gray shirt in a railroad stripe, and a front-bustled skirt of the same color fell to the top of her high-heeled ankle boots. She wore a flat-brimmed, high-crowned hat, and her blue eyes were protected from the sun by a pair of round dark glasses with a brass frame. Around her neck, poised above her cleavage, hung a small silver pocket watch with a white face and black Roman numerals.

For the cowboys who came into town on Friday nights Estella was one of the sights to see. But it was very much lookee but no touchee, because blacksmith Mike Sweet was a powerfully strong man, hard, dangerous, and profane, very protective of his pretty daughter, and with no great liking for the cattlemen who provided 90 percent of his livelihood.

With an outstretched hand, Estella stopped Dan and said, “Holt Peters over to the general store told me about the Calthrops. Dan, who could’ve done such a terrible thing?”

“I don’t know, Estella,” Caine said, seeing a distorted version of himself in the girl’s dark glasses. “It might have been a man called Clay Kyle and his boys, but that’s far from sure. I aim to find out.”

“You and Sheriff Hurd are going after them . . . the killers I mean,” the girl said.

“I’m going after them,” Dan said. “Sheriff Hurd doesn’t want to leave the town without a lawman. Don’t worry, I’ll bring Jenny Calthrop back safe and sound.”

“Jenny’s been my friend since, well, forever . . . since we were both children,” Estella said. She smiled. “And I never minded it a bit when folks said she was the prettiest girl in Concho County.”

Dan grinned and said, “When it comes down to who’s the prettiest gal between you and Jenny, I’d say it’s a tie. You’re both as pretty as a field of bluebonnets.”

Estella’s uncertain smile slowly faded. “Find her, Dan. Bring her home.”

Dan said, “Clint Cooley, Holt Peters, and Frank Halder have all volunteered to join my posse. And maybe old Fish Lee if he can rustle up a horse. Oh, and the Kiowa.”

Estella frowned as though she was about to say something, changed her mind, and said, “Then do be careful, Dan. And make sure Frank Halder remembers to wear his spectacles. He forgets them all the time.”

Dan Caine’s answer to that was a smile and a nod, but Estella Sweet wasn’t quite done with him. “You could always get some cowboys to join you,” she said. “The ranchers hereabouts set store by Tom Calthrop.”

“I thought about it, but the fall gather is coming up, and the ranchers want their punchers to stick close to the home range. Besides, I don’t have time. We’re pulling out now while there’s still a few hours of daylight. The Kiowa can track in the dark, but he’s not keen on it.”

“Then good luck, Dan,” the girl said. She laid a slim hand on Dan’s shoulder. “I think you’re going to need it.”

Holt Peters, an orphaned boy around sixteen years of age, and Frank Halder, short, fat, and myopic, were in Doan’s General Store when Dan Caine stepped inside.

“Howdy, Dan,” said Pete Doan, a middle-aged man with sunken cheeks, hollow temples, and gray eyes tired out from constant pain. “Sheriff Hurd raising his posse to run down those killers?”

“Not Hurd, just me,” Dan said. He answered the question on Doan’s face. “Somebody has to stay in town and look after things.”

“Is that so?” the storekeeper said, not liking what he’d just heard. “I’m the mayor of this burg, and I say there isn’t much to look after in Thunder Creek.”

“Sheriff Hurd doesn’t see it that way,” Dan said. Then, “Holt and Frank, you listen up. I’m no longer a deputy, so this posse isn’t legal. Sheriff Hurd says I’m a vigilante, and I guess that applies to anybody who rides with me.”

“I’ll stick, Mr. Caine,” said Holt Peters, a tall, good-looking boy, a blue-eyed towhead who’d outgrown all his duds and was wearing Pete Doan’s threadbare castoffs.

“Me too,” Halder said, blinking behind his spectacles like a plump owl. He was a year older than Peters and a head shorter.

Doan looked skeptically at Dan. “Who else have you got?”

“So far, Clint Cooley and the Kiowa.”

“That’s it?”

“So far.”

“What do you mean, so far? Where are you going to get anybody else?”

Dan Caine smiled. “How about you, Pete?”

Doan took the question in stride. “I’ve got a cancer growing inside me, and I haven’t sat a horse in twenty years. All I’d do is slow you up.”

“Pity. I’d sure like to have al. . .