One Way to Boot Hill

Book 4: Wolf Stockburn, Railroad Detective

by Max O'Hara

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

The fourth installment in a bold, new, action-packed historical western series by Max O’Hara featuring fearless railroad detective Wolf Stockburn.

Stretching across the wild western frontier, the railroad needs guardians like Wells Fargo detective Wolf Stockburn. Known as the Wolf of the Rails, the steely Scotsman is as cold and hard as the tracks he rides—and those too foolish to fear him will soon lie dead at his feet . . .
 
THEY CAN RUN, BUT THEY CAN’T HIDE . . .
 
When train robbers hit the Boot Hill Express—so called because of all the people riding it who have ended up dead—with a head full of steam, Wolf Stockburn makes quick work of them. But the gun smoke has barely cleared when a second gang attacks, catching Stockburn by surprise. In a hail of hot lead he falls from the train and the thieves kill two guards and make off with the cattle the train was hauling.
 
Now it’s a matter of honor and payback as he trails the outlaws—his only clue a hoof print showing a faint star shape. Dodging a deadly bushwhacker, Stockburn, hell-on-wheels angry, teams up with a beautiful half-Comanche hellcat and follow a twisted trail of bullet-ridden corpses to a final reckoning in a Mexican ghost town—where bad men end up dead . . . on the wrong side of the tracks.
 
 

Release date: December 27, 2022

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

On a hillside above the railroad tracks where a small outcropping of rocks jutted from desert scrub and cedars, Wells Fargo detective Wolf Stockburn scraped a lucifer to life on his cartridge belt. He touched the flame to the quirley he’d rolled while waiting for the bank robbers to show their ugly faces.

Of course, not having seen this particular bunch of train thieves before, he didn’t know what they looked like. Also, the previous times they’d robbed the West Texas & Cerro Alto Railroad, they’d worn flour sack masks. So no one knew what they looked like.

Having been a railroad detective for Wells Fargo for longer than he cared to ruminate on at length, Stockburn saw all train robbers as green-horned, yellow-toothed, fork-tailed devils. He’d run a few train-robbing women to ground, even the comeliest among them. In his experience, that would be Alta Hall. She had been pretty to look at, but you didn’t want to turn your back on her and risk getting a rusty Arkansas toothpick slid between your ribs for your foolishness.

Stockburn let the hot Texas wind blow out his match and drew the peppery Mexican tobacco deep into his lungs. He wasn’t worried the owlhoots would smell the smoke, for he was downwind of their position roughly a hundred yards west along the rails. He’d spotted them through his spyglass an hour ago, where they’d holed up to wait for the train.

Hunkered down, he was also waiting for the next West Texas and Cerro Alto flier out of Bottleneck, Texas, thirty miles back up the line, near the west flank of the Cerro Alto Mountains and twenty miles south of the New Mexico border.

Stockburn had smoked half his cigarette and was about to take another drag when a train whistle cut through the hot dry afternoon silence interrupted occasionally by a wind gust or the screech of a hunting hawk. The engineer cut loose with the horn as he started his climb up the gentle grade to the crest of the pass just west of where the detective waited. The engineer blew the horn again. One long, mournful wail followed by two shorter, lighter-toned toots likely alerted the passengers and crew of the slow-down and the mile-long climb.

Stockburn heard the locomotive’s dragon-like panting and the thunder of the wheels on the glistening iron rails. Soon he could feel the reverberation of the big beast through the ground beneath him. A few minutes later, the black Baldwin locomotive pushed its snub nose around a bend in the ridge wall, turning toward Wolf as it continued climbing the grade, blowing steam, panting like an old dinosaur, pulling the tender car and the rest of the combination along behind it.

A thick black guidon of coal smoke ribboned up from the giant diamond-shaped smoke stack to billow back over the yellow tender car before streaming southward as the north breeze caught and tore it. The coaches trundling behind the tender car groaned and swayed and screeched and clicked their wheels over the rail seams.

“Here we go,” Stockburn said, keeping his head behind a thumb of rock. He quickly fieldstripped his quirley and let the wind take the shredded paper and tobacco. “Here . . . we . . . go . . .”

He’d just said go when, as if on cue, the silhouettes of three men rose from the top of the curving ridge east of Stockburn’s position, on the same side of the tracks, and roughly the same distance above the tracks.

As the three shadowy stick figures scuttled to the very edge of the cliff, two more rose behind them. All five, Wolf saw, were holding rifles. The long guns looked like very small sticks, but they were rifles. Train robbers didn’t carry sticks and those five were outlaws, all right.

Stock thieves, most likely, for the train was hauling one hundred and fifty head of prime west Texas beef to Las Cruces farther up the line and then beyond to the several relatively recently established Indian reservations in Arizona Territory and in northwestern New Mexico Territory. Like wolves on the blood scent, stock thieves had been preying on this stretch of rails between Bottleneck and Las Cruces for the past eight months. So far, they’d absconded with nearly two thousand head of beef on the hoof.

That was making the half-dozen ranchers, mostly small, fragile outfits up in the Cerro Alto Mountains around Bottleneck, madder than old wet hens. Other detectives and lawmen had been brought in over the past eight months, including two stock detectives and three deputy U.S. marshals out of Albuquerque. One of the stock detectives had taken a bushwhacker’s bullet to the neck. He’d live, but he and his partner had been sent back to Albuquerque.

The three federals had flat-out disappeared somewhere south of Bottleneck, when they’d ridden out to track the stolen beef.

Fresh off another investigation in New Mexico Territory, Stockburn had been brought in to run the wolves to ground as he’d proven so good at over his fifteen years with Wells Fargo and even before that, as a lawman of some renown.

Wolf watched as the big black Baldwin engine roared and panted, climbing the gentle inclination and spitting steam from its pressure release valves. A little over a hundred yards distant, roughly the size of a caterpillar from his vantage, and hugging the wall of the same ridge, it stretched out as the rest of the train came around the bend to fall into line behind the engine. As the big, shrieking and chugging beast trundled on up the rise, its wheels clacking loudly over the rail seams, one of the men on the ridge stepped off the cliff.

He was maybe ten, fifteen feet above the engine. He held out his left arm and the rifle in his left hand for balance—a skinny bird spreading its wings.

He dropped straight down to land on the Baldwin’s roof, falling to his knees as soon as his feet made contact. The wind tore his hat off his head and he flung a hand out to grab it but missed, and the hat blew away on the wind. The sudden movement made him lose his balance for a second, and he almost tumbled off the roof before lowering his free hand to the roof beneath his boots, settling himself.

As the man looked around, Wolf thought he saw the momentary shock and fear on the man’s pale features.

Stockburn smiled.

The engine continued straining up the grade, pulling the tender car, two passenger coaches, a Pullman sleeper, a dining car, a freight car, and several stock cars along behind it. A little red caboose trailed at the end. Two more men leaped off the cliff and onto the passenger coach behind the tender car. The last two men dropped a moment later onto the second passenger coach.

As the first man leaped down off the Baldwin’s roof and into the engine’s pilot house, the other four desperadoes slithered like snakes down out of Wolf’s sight, as well.

“All right,” Wolf said, watching the train growing larger and larger as it closed the gap between them. “So that’s how you’re gonna play it, eh? You’re gonna go after the passengers first, then the stock. Well, we’ll see about that.”

Closer and closer the engine crawled. Stockburn could see two men in the engine’s pilot house moving around quickly, violently, maybe throwing punches. The engineer or possibly the fireman wasn’t going to give up control without a fight. As one man threw a fist at the other, the nose of the big, roaring black dragon slid farther up the grade until it was directly beneath Wolf’s position. No longer able to see inside, all he could see was the top of the engine’s large, barrel-shaped body . . . and the flat, black steel roof of the pilot house.

The roar of the straining beast was nearly deafening.

Wolf spread his arms, holding his 1866 Winchester Yellowboy repeater in his black-gloved right hand. He held his black felt, silk-banded sombrero on his prematurely gray head with his other hand, not intending to make the same mistake the first desperado had.

A man was little without his hat. His father had told him that a long time ago, before the Cheyenne raiders had killed his parents and kidnapped his sister, and he still believed it. He tended to cling to the tidbits of fatherly and motherly advice he’d received since he’d stopped receiving it so young—only fifteen years old when the Cheyenne had burned his family’s farm in Kansas.

The engine’s black steel roof came up fast, hammering against the soles of the rail detective’s low-heeled, square-toed cavalry boots. He dropped to his knees so the wind was less likely to hurl him off his perch, then, leaning forward, one hand flat against the floor, the other holding the Yellowboy, he tipped his head to listen to the goings-on in the pilot house directly beneath him.

“. . . told you to stop the damn train, you fat stubborn mule!” a man yelled shrilly.

A strained voice responded with, “I’m tryin’! Gimme a minute, you blue-tongued little firebrand!”

“How ‘bout I give ya this?” The firebrand’s rhetorical question was followed by a resolute smacking sound.

The other man grunted.

Wolf dropped his legs over the backside of the roof, then quickly lowered himself straight down to the pilot house floor, directly in front of the tender car. As he crouched low and wheeled around, he saw a man lying slumped backward against a pile of coal in a large scuttle along the engine’s rear wall. He wore pinstriped overalls and a pin-striped watch cap, dented where a rifle barrel had been slashed against it and the head of the man wearing it.

The man—the locomotive’s fireman—was groaning and stretching his thickly mustached lips back from tobacco-rhymed teeth as he held his hand over the dent in his hat.

Straight ahead of Wolf a big man—nearly as tall and broad as the detective himself—was about to smack the engineer with the barrel of a Winchester ‘78. The big man’s back and thick shoulders faced Wolf as the train robber confronted the engineer slumped back against the locomotive’s control panel at the front of the pilot house. The engineer glowered up at his big assailant with a mix of fear and cold disdain.

Wolf tapped the big train robber’s left shoulder. “Hey, sonny?”

“Huh?” The big man turned, a puzzled expression on his face. He brought the .45-70 around, as well. “I thought I told you—” His eyes widened when he saw that it was not the fireman who’d tapped his shoulder.

Wolf grinned, then slammed the butt of his Yellowboy against the dead center of the big, dull-eyed man’s forehead. The big man grunted, then, lights out, fell back against the control panel. The engineer sidestepped the big man, looking down at him and grimacing in revulsion. He turned to Stockburn just then lowering his rifle, and smiled.

“Wolf! What the hell brings you way out here to this canker on the devil’s butt?”

“Hi ya, Arnie. How’s things?”

“Well . . .” Arnie Langenbottom glanced at the big man who skidded down the control panel to lay unmoving on the locomotive’s iron floor.

“There’s more peckerwoods where that one came from.” Stockburn crouched to pull a pistol out of the train robber’s holster. He tossed it over the side of the rolling locomotive, picked up the man’s rifle, and turned to the brakeman. “How’re you doin’, Jasper? You gonna make it?”

Jasper Wiggins kept rubbing his head and scowling at Stockburn. “Oh, I’ll be fine, Wolf. Just fine. Alma says my head’s harder than her favorite iron skillet, and that skillet’s got a big dent in it for proof, so I reckon I’ll live to shovel coal another day.”

“Good for you.” Stockburn handed the robber’s .45-70 to the fireman. “Hold this firestick on your friend there. If he comes around, give him another love tap to put him to sleep again. Or . . . shoot him. It’s your call.” He glanced at Langenbottom again. “Keep this heap movin’—will you, Arnie? I don’t want the other robbers to get too comfortable.”

Langenbottom nodded. “You got it, Wolf! I’ll keep it movin’ if you can call this movin’!”

Stockburn turned, climbed up over the locomotive’s rear panel and onto the narrow iron shelf running along the side of the tender car heaped with coal. He cat-stepped along the shelf, keeping one eye on the gravelly, rocky terrain sliding past on his right, the other eye on the two passenger coaches rattling along behind the tender car. He held his Yellowboy straight up in his left hand.

A man’s angry shout rose from inside the coach directly behind the tender car. A woman screamed. The scream was followed by a gun blast. A man yelped.

Stockburn’s heart lurched. He increased his pace along the narrow iron shelf, hearing another man shout, “Why in the hell isn’t this train stoppin’? What the hell is Scrim up to, anyways?”

Straight ahead of Stockburn, a man poked his bearded head out of a window of the first passenger coach. The man’s mouth and eyes widened when his gaze landed on the big man in the black frock coat, black sombrero, and black ribbon tie hanging one-handed off the side of the tender car.

The man pulled his head back into the coach and bellowed, “We got trouble, Danny!”

The bearded face was thrust out the window again. This time it was accompanied by the man’s shoulders and arms as well as a Spencer carbine—one of those .56 caliber long guns that can punch a hole in a man half the size of Texas!

The bearded train robber brought the Spencer up to his shoulder—he’d already cocked the thing—and narrowed one eye as he aimed down the barrel at Wolf. Stockburn winced and ducked as flames lapped from the barrel. The rifle roared. The big-caliber slug skimmed Wolf’s right cheek before caroming beyond the train to spang wildly off a rock.

“Damn!” the bearded man said, bunching his lips in frustration.

He’d just started to cock the big Spencer again when Stockburn jacked a round into his Yellowboy one-handed, snapped it to his shoulder, took hasty aim, and squeezed the trigger.

A quarter-sized hole appeared in the bearded man’s forehead, just above his bushy right brow. As his head slammed back, the man dropped his rifle then slumped down the side of the train, half in and half out of the coach until his head and shoulders pulled the rest of him out of the window to smack the ground beside the tracks. He rolled wildly, quickly falling back out of sight among the rocks and twisted cedars.

People were already shouting and yelling inside the coach car, but after the bearded robber fell out of the window the shouts grew louder, the yelling and screaming shriller.

“What in God’s name is happening?” a man bellowed angrily inside the coach, above the din of the frightened passengers. “Who the hell is out there?”

Stockburn hurried forward along the iron ledge then leaped down onto the front vestibule of the first coach in the combination. He pressed his back up against the coach’s front wall to the right of the door and edged a look through the door’s upper pane.

Inside were a dozen or so passengers, a few women and children among them. The women and children were crying while the men looked nervous, some holding the women in their arms, shielding them from bullets with their own bodies.

Two men stood in the car’s center aisle. That they were part of the train-robbing gang, there was no doubt. They each held a burlap bag and a rifle. They were grubby, raggedy-heeled men in dusty, badly worn trail garb and appeared as nervous as the passengers. Crouching, they whipped their heads around, looking for the hombre who’d blasted their partner out the window.

One turned his head toward the front of the car just as Wolf started to pull his head back. Spying Wolf, he jerked with a start and said, “There!”

Wolf edged his left eye across the door again to peer through the window. He drew his head back sharply as the rifle of the robber nearest the door lapped flames, thundering. The bullet ripped through the glass. Another shot came close on the first shot’s heels, tearing through the side of the door about three inches left of Stockburn’s right shoulder.

Wolf turned, jerked the door open and threw himself forward, hitting the center aisle on his chest and belly as the train robber’s rifle belched once more. The bullet screeched over Wolf’s head to bang loudly into the tender car. Wolf raised the Yellowboy and sent two .44 rounds ripping into the rifleman’s chest, sending him pirouetting backward like a drunken dancer, tossing his rifle into the passengers, all of whom gave a collective, wailing cry of holy terror.

The second owlhoot, who’d been standing eight feet behind the now-dead one, also gave a desperate yell. As Stockburn pumped another round into the Winchester’s breech and raised the rifle, the second man ran out onto the coach’s rear platform then turned sharply to the left of the door, out of sight.

“Dammit!” Stockburn lowered the rifle and strode down the aisle toward the coach’s open rear door.

He stopped when the drumming of running feet sounded atop the coach. The drumming stopped, replaced with a wild, Indian-like whoop and a rifle barked. The bullet punched a hole through the coach’s ceiling to hammer into the coach’s wooden floor in the center aisle. There was another whoop and another rifle report. That bullet slammed into the leg of a man sitting close against the aisle. The man grabbed his leg and wailed.

Stockburn raised the Winchester and fired once, twice, three, four times in the general vicinity of the two holes the robber had placed there. A man’s yelp sounded after the Yellowboy’s fourth roar. A second later, a silhouetted body dropped down past the coach’s left side windows. A grubby Stetson followed, nudged by a wind gust.

Near the back of the coach, a girl screamed.

Stockburn whipped his head that way. A tall, skinny lad in a bowler hat, pinstriped poplin shirt, suspenders, and batwing chaps had just bounded into the open doorway. He’d come out of the second passenger coach, likely to investigate the shooting.

Only six feet from Stockburn, the skinny lad held an old-model saddle-ring Winchester. His long face with prominent front teeth and flat blue eyes was mottled red with apprehension.

He looked Stockburn up and down, anger and indignation growing in his eyes. Gritting his teeth, he bounded forward. He raised the Winchester, swung the butt toward Wolf, and screamed like a lunatic, spittle flecking from his lips.

The rifle’s brass butt plate caromed in a blur toward Wolf’s head.

Stockburn stepped back and to one side, thrusting the butt of his own rifle into the skinny lad’s side. The lad yowled as he stumbled to the right, half falling over an old man and the old woman he had wrapped his arms around. The skinny lad regained his footing, swinging back toward Wolf, but as he began to raise his Winchester again, Wolf slammed the butt of his own rifle against the skinny gent’s long, horsey mug—savage, smashing blows that sent the enraged younker to the floor, clamping his hands over his face and howling.

Stockburn picked up the kid’s rifle and threw it out a window then continued forward, knowing there was one more robber who needed his horns filed. He’d taken only two steps, however, before the skinny kid screamed behind him, “Oh, you devil!”

Stockburn swung back around in time to see the bloody-faced young man raising a hogleg and clicking the hammer back.

Wolf’s Yellowboy spoke.

“Damn fool!” he told the kid, who lay shivering as he died on the aisle floor between rows of howling passengers, including one screaming baby.

Stockburn didn’t have to look far or long for the fifth robber, for just as he stepped out onto the second passenger coach’s rear vestibule, a shrill curse sounded from the top of the freight car trundling along behind. Wolf looked up to see another skinny kid, this one shorter, dark-skinned, and with long black hair tumbling from a floppy brimmed hat—angrily gritting his teeth and aiming a rifle down at the railroad detective.

Stockburn threw himself back against the passenger coach as the kid’s rifle spoke, drilling a round into the wooden vestibule floor two inches in front of Stockburn’s left boot. Wolf bounded forward as the kid’s rifle spoke again, hammering another round into the wooden floor, just off Wolf’s right heel.

Before the kid could fire another round, Wolf stepped back out onto the vestibule and hurled a single round up where the kid was ramming another cartridge into his Winchester’s breech. The kid howled, dropped his rifle, and stumbled backward, clutching his right shoulder.

Moving slowly as it continued climbing the long slope to the pass, the train pitched violently on uneven rails, sending the dark-skinned kid stumbling forward then falling with a scream over the side of the car, and landing with an agonized groan.

The kid lay two feet in front of Wolf, who crouched to grab the kid’s shoulder clad in black-and-white checked calico. He missed the shoulder just as the kid rolled to the side, climbed to a knee, then, apparently without even thinking about it, leaped off the moving train.

Stockburn cursed as he watched the kid strike the ground beside the rails and roll, losing his hat, long black hair flying wildly. As the kid rolled to the bottom of the railbed, Stockburn dropped to a knee, cocked the Yellowboy, and raised it to his shoulder. He angled the rifle from his right to his left, tracking the black-haired kid as he fell farther and farther behind Wolf’s moving position.

No point in wasting a round. The kid was a hard target. Spry as a puma, he was once again on his feet, running through the rocks and desert scrub south of the tracks.

“Damn!” Wolf wasn’t going to let even one of these killers free to continue his depredations elsewhere. Even a scrawny, long-haired kid.

Wolf rose as another figure slid into the periphery of his vision, and he turned sharply toward the roof of the rear car, snapping the Yellowboy to his shoulder once more.

“Hold on, Wolf! Hold on!”

Wolf blinked up at a tall man wearing a Boss of the Plains Stetson. The man held a double-barreled shotgun down low along his right leg. He held up his gloved left hand in supplication. The long, spruce green duster he wore was billowing back in the wind behind him. To his cotton shirt was pinned a Wells Fargo copper shield. He grinned, flashing a silver eyetooth. “It’s your old pal, Sandy McGee! Don’t shoot!”

Stockburn dropped the Yellowboy’s barrel. “Sandy, what the hell?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing. What the hell you doin’ way out here in this parched perdition, Wolf?”

“What’s it look like, you old reprobate?”

“Me an’ Rascal Studemyer is back guarding the stock!” the tall, gray-haired, gray-bearded express guard bellowed into the wind. He hooked a thumb to indicate the three slatted stock cars rattling along behind him. “I came out to see what all the fuss was about!”

“Stay with the stock, Sandy,” Wolf said, turning his head to ponder the fawn-colored ground sliding past him. “I should be done here in a minute!”

Stockburn stepped up to the edge of the vestibule.

“Wolf, don’t you dare!” McGee objected. “You ain’t as young as you used to be, fool!”

Stockburn barely heard the old express guard’s admonition, for he’d just stepped off the vestibule and into the wind blowing past the train. Holding his rifle out high and wide to one side, he hit the sloping side of the rail bed feet first and fell to his knees and rolled.

Sandy had been right. He was forty years old. He’d thought leaping on and off of trains was ten years behind him. Apparently, he’d been wrong.

As he came to rest in a billowing dust cloud at the bottom of the rail bed, he was mildly surprised and encouraged to note that he hadn’t seemed to break anything. He’d held on to his rifle but he’d lost his hat. He gained his feet heavily, inwardly complaining against the ache in both knees and in his right shoulder, which had taken the brunt of the roll.

He looked to the south.

The skinny, long-haired kid was running through the scrub maybe fifty yards away, widening the gap between himself and Wolf. Wolf raised the rifle, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.

The hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

Again, Wolf cursed. He leaned the rifle against a sotol cactus jutting on his right, retrieved his hat, unholstered one of his two Colt Single-Action Army Peacemakers, and took off running. He winced against the pain in his knees and elsewhere but, swinging his free arm, he increased his speed. The kid was faster on his feet, but Wolf could see him wavering. Probably due to the pain in that right shoulder as well as to blood loss.

Wolf kept running, weaving around tufts of cactus and scattered rocks, clutching a silver-plated, ivory-gripped .45 in his right hand.

Ahead, slowing even more, head lowered and dragging his boot toes, the long-haired kid crossed a narrow wash. He dropped to a knee as he climbed the opposite bank.

“Stop or take one in the back, you privy snake!” Wolf raised the Colt and aimed, drawing a bead on the kid’s back, between his shoulder blades. Wolf hesitated. Down on one knee atop the bank, the kid swung his head to peer over his right shoulder at Stockburn. The long, black hair partly hid his face, obscuring the dark-brown eyes gazing warily, painfully back at Wolf.

The kid turned his head forward, climbed to his feet, and continued running.

“Stop, dammit!” Wolf drew his finger back against the Peacemaker’s trigger but did not fire. The kid was wounded. Also, he was a young—well under twenty. Those two notions conspired to make Wolf reluctant to backshoot him, despite the many people the kid’s gang had killed—close to ten.

Wolf continued running.

He crossed the wash. As he dropped down the opposite bank, he swung hard left when he saw a deep gorge open on his right—an ancient, dry riverbed, most likely. Wol. . .