The Black Hills

by Rod Thompson

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

In this historically accurate Western epic from debut author Rod Thompson, a young farm boy comes of age in a frontier crucible of death, vengeance, and beauty.
 
When four hoodlums brutally murder a farming family in the Dakota Territory, they leave a fourteen-year-old boy for dead in the field…That’s a big mistake.
 
After bearing witness to the savage acts that destroyed his world, young Cormac Lynch knows only one way to make things right. Coming upon the men, he takes aim and takes his revenge—rescuing the beautiful Irish redhead Lainey Nayle in the process.
 
With a deadly reputation, Cormac grows up to back down from no man…and only one woman. He and Lainey face the danger and anguish of the frontier with grit and humor. But when Lainey’s life is endangered again, Cormac must once again make good on his reputation…

Release date: December 6, 2011

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER 1

The four riders coming over the hills escaped Cormac Lynch’s normally acute awareness of his surroundings. His attention was on his burlap potato sack. He dragged it to the beginning of the next row, straddled it, and then hooked the top of the mouth on his belt. As he walked straddle-legged, the sack flowed between his legs while the mouth was held open by a piece of thin cord tying each side of the bag to his knees, allowing the body of the sack to drag behind him.

The briskness in the air was exhilarating and the morning sun warm as it accepted its task of chasing away the morning shadows and burning the dew from the potato plants and grasses. Bobolinks flying in and out of the lone tree standing near the field were singing and flirting with each other. It was a great day to be alive. There was a long day of work ahead, but that’s what farmers did from first light till the sun went down; he was up to it.

After plowing up the potatoes and spreading them across the ground for easy pickin’, his father had already ridden the mile to the cornfield on the other side of the farm buildings shortly after dawn to begin weeding. Cormac loved working beside his pa, but hated weeding and was glad his mother had wanted him to help finish picking the potatoes. Their main crops were corn, wheat, and flax, but his mother had decided to put in a small field of potatoes to sell in town for what she called pin money.

Cormac checked the progress of his mother and sister, who had started picking while he had removed the saddles and bridles and hobbled the saddle horses to allow them to graze without running off. Most farm horses were plow horses, strong, powerful, and suitable for the hard work that was expected of them: pulling heavy hay racks and wagons piled high, frequently to overflowing, with grain or corn; or pulling a plow to break up hardened soil; or pulling stone boats for relocating boulders and full water barrels for irrigation; or tearing stubborn tree stumps from the earth in which they had grown. Usually ridden bareback when used for transportation purposes while en route to the fields in full harness, but when Cormac’s mother was along, his pa insisted saddles be used. Today was such a day, and the care of the horses fell to Cormac.

Four years older, his sister Becky was nigh on to eighteen and their mother only twice that. Like most western women of the time, she had married young, having Becky one year later. People frequently said they looked more like sisters than mother and daughter, which pleased them both no end. They fairly beamed every time they heard it. Becky loved being compared to her mother, whom she thought was surely the prettiest woman in the world, and her mother loved being told that she looked young enough to be Becky’s sister.

Both experienced pickers, strong from many hours of hard work, they had a good head start on Cormac. He smiled as he noticed his mother glance over her shoulder to check on him and then murmur something to Becky. They had played this game before. His father was a kind but firm taskmaster; his mother, on the other hand, always found ways to turn work into fun. Now, knowing that he did not like being behind them and would want to catch up, she and Becky were going to try to prevent it.

“We’ll see about that,” he said softly. “We’ll just see about that.” He had been studying and preparing for just such an event with frequent, thoughtful practice on how to make his hands move faster and pick more potatoes in less time. He had experimented with various fingering grips on the potatoes, different strokes and alternate flips to get the potatoes into the bag. Each change produced tiny amounts of progress, and each bit of progress took him a little closer to his goal: to be the fastest potato picker in the territory.

While picking in the field, and often at night before falling asleep, he indulged himself in a fantasy. In it, he could see himself in the middle of a long line of boys lined up in contest at one end of a huge potato field, each with their own row. He watched as all bent over into tater-pickin’ position and made ready, and then bang! A gunshot started the race to the other end of the field.

Although his competitors were always bigger, older, more experienced, and somehow always managing to get a head start and make him begin the race with the others well in front, they always proved to be no match for his intense concentration and the great swiftness with which the potatoes flew into his bag. Cormac was always the first to turn around, laughing, at the other end of the field.

Now the time was here. This was the great race of his life. This was the moment he had prepared for. His competitors had joined forces against him and were already well in the lead. “We’ll see about that,” he said again. “We’ll just see about that.” Then Cormac Lynch, the greatest potato picker of all time, bent and began to pick potatoes. He had his mother’s light touch and agility with a natural quickness of movement enhanced by tater pickin’ since the age of three. He hadn’t accomplished much then, mostly got in the way, but his mother had assured him that his help was much appreciated and they would never have gotten done without it.

Choosing a potato with his right hand, he sent it flying between his legs and into the bag with a deft flick of his wrist while his left hand was making the next selection. Left, right, left, right, gaining speed, left-right-left-right-leftrightleftrightleftright, faster and faster, his hands found a rhythm and became but a blur. With a stream of potatoes flying into the bag, he had a strong ability to concentrate, which he now focused on the ground in front of him, blocking out all else. He did not notice his mother’s and sister’s frequent looks to check his progress. Nor did he see their looks of determination as they put on all the speed they possessed, or the smile of resignation they shared while shaking their heads at each other when he first caught up with, and then passed them.

With a smile and a finger on her lips to signal silence to Becky, Cormac’s mother began picking in Becky’s row, a few steps ahead of her. She picked half of the potatoes, leaving the other half for Becky coming up behind. With both women working the same row, Cormac was no longer pulling away from them. Catching up to him, though, was still out of the question.

Laughing, Cormac stood up and turned around when he reached the end of his row, and then threw the last potato into the bag. Only then did he see the four men riding across the potato patch toward them. Caught up in the thrill and excitement of competition, Becky and her mother remained equally unaware of the riders.

“Mother,” Cormac said, nodding his head toward the approaching riders.

The women’s laughter stilled as their eyes followed his nod. The freshly plowed soil had muffled the horses’ hoofs, and the riders were less than fifty feet away. Their lack of concern for the damage being done to the potatoes by their horses was a clear statement of their intent and approaching trouble.

The men were dirty and unshaven, their clothes worn and disheveled, and their bedrolls sloppily tied behind beat-up and uncared-for saddles. Badly in need of rest, their horses showed the results of overuse and neglect. All were scarred with sores kept open by the frequent misuse of spurs.

Mrs. Lynch paled as their situation became evident. Her husband was a mile away, and they were unprotected. Frequently, he had warned her to keep the rifle close to her at all times.

“Hopefully you’ll never need to use it,” he had said. “There aren’t a lot of people in these parts yet, and our farm is far off the beaten path. Even the Indians don’t come around this neck of the woods since Red Cloud signed the Laramie Treaty for the Sioux and the Black Hills now belong to them. It’s very peaceful out here, but the country is far from settled.

“There may come a time when you’ll need a gun, and if you do, you’ll need it right then and there; you’ll not likely have time to fetch it.” Lulled by the peacefulness that had become their life, try as she might, she just could not take the warning seriously. To appease her husband, she had learned how to use it and could shoot straight if she didn’t have to shoot too far. Although she carried it around with her, it was awkward and heavy and usually left leaning against something in her vicinity: a tree, a rock, a sack of potatoes, or it remained in the rifle scabbard on her saddle. It was there now, under the tree at the far end of the field. If only she had listened to him.

A huge, filthy, fat, and ugly man with a large, jagged scar running down the side of his face from his forehead to his chin rode a few feet in front of the others. He smiled a nasty smile, showing crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. Cormac’s mother knew the breath coming out of that mouth would be vile.

“This is your lucky day, lady,” he snarled at her. Then, turning his head and nodding toward Becky, he told the other riders, “You can have her. This one’s all mine.”

“Run kids!” Amanda Lynch screamed, and broke toward the rifle. It was too far away, but she had to try. Running had always come easily for her. She had won many foot races against her girlfriends in the eastern schools she had attended, but that had not been in the soft dirt of a freshly plowed potato field.

The man’s horse was too small for him and near exhaustion from carrying his weight too far and too fast with too little rest, but it was still faster than Cormac’s mother, and it quickly cut her off. No matter which way she tried to run, the horse was in front of her. It had, at one time, been a good cattle-cutting horse. Like a cat toying with a caught bird, the man was toying with her, knowing he could do anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Becky screamed behind her. A realist, she accepted the fact that she would not be allowed to get to the gun. She stopped trying to run and faced her tormentor.

“Please,” she begged. “You and your men can do anything you want to me, and I’ll do whatever you want if you’ll leave my daughter alone.”

Her tormentor reined his horse to a stop in front of her and looked down, his eyes slowly ravaging up and down her body.

“Lady,” he growled, “I’m going to do anything I want to you anyway, and you’ll damn well do anything I tell you. And you ain’t goin’ to be so damned prissy-purty when I’m done with ya. Women like you always think you’re so damned special and don’t want anything to do with people like me. Well, today you’re going to have a lot to do with me. ’Sides, ’tain’t likely they’d stop even if I was to tell them to. They seem to be having a little fun of their own. Look at ’em.”

She became aware of Becky’s hysterical crying and the men’s laughter; she turned to look, and her heart broke. One of the men was tearing away Becky’s clothing while the other two held her, groping the bared parts of her body as they became available. Becky was struggling and trying to pull away, kicking at anything that came within reach.

“Now it’s you and me,” the fat man snarled.

Spurring the horse deeply reopened the dried blood on its sides and sent it leaping forward, knocking Cormac’s mother to the ground. Before she could regain her feet, the man was off his horse, clamping her wrist in a steely grip with one hand and tearing at her clothes with the other.

Amanda Lynch was petite, standing but five foot one on her tiptoes, but she was agile and had the strength that comes with years of long, grueling hours in the fields. She aimed a knee between his legs and the fingernails of her free hand at his face. Not the nails of a pampered and manicured city woman, these were nails hardened by the leeching of minerals from the soil caught under them while in the fields and the rays of the strong Dakota sun beating on them hour after hour. They were the nails of a hardworking countrywoman. He was expecting her knee and side-stepped it, but with furious strength she raked her nails down hard, and like knives, they cut deeply into the flesh, sending rivers of blood gushing down his face.

“Damn you,” he swore, and swung his huge fist at her face. The punch smashed in her mouth and nose, sending her near unconsciousness and leaving her hovering there, unable to move, but distantly aware of more smashing blows knocking her head back and forth, her clothes being ripped from her body, atrocious acts being done to her, and Becky’s cries of pain.

Cormac did not know what to do. His was a life that had never known violence. Protected by loving parents and an older sister who thrived on caring for him, he had never known anything but love and kindness. He stood frozen as he watched his mother’s vain attempt to run. But when the men grabbed Becky, he ran to help. One of the men hit him with a hard backhand, sending him reeling into darkness.

When he regained consciousness, he could see a giant of a man doing horrible things to his mother and two other men holding Becky down while a third was on top of her. Both women were naked, and he could hear their whimpering. Rising from the ground, he ran unnoticed to the pile of carefully chosen rocks he had collected yesterday while taking his rest at lunch. All smooth, all nearly round, and all about the size of an egg . . . good throwing stones.

Although his pa had taught him how to use a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun when he was knee-high to a small Indian, he wasn’t allowed to use them without his pa along, so he used rocks—and sometimes in the winter, a frozen dirt clod—to hunt rabbits and squirrels. He tracked them to their hidey-holes and waited for them to show themselves. Cormac had a good eye and rarely missed. Sometimes his mother had to ask him to please stop for a while because they were getting tired of rabbit and squirrel stew, and his pa would tan his hide if he killed an animal that wasn’t for eating.

Quickly selecting three stones to hold in his right hand and one for his throwing hand, he ran, still unnoticed, to within twenty feet of the men attacking Becky. With no warning, he threw the first rock as hard as he could, hitting exactly where he had aimed, the side of the head of the man on top of Becky. The man collapsed on top of her.

“What the hell?” one of the men lying beside Becky exclaimed, his hand on her bare chest and his back to Cormac. He rolled over to face Cormac and started to his feet, but a rock square between the eyes put him back to the ground. The man lying on the other side of Becky, with his hand also on her chest, came up with a gun and fired as Cormac launched another stone. Cormac fell into a heap.

Sometime later, he heard the sound of a running horse and fought to rouse himself. He succeeded in regaining partial consciousness. Something warm was running across his face and dripping from his nose. He wiped at it, and his hand came away red with blood. With his fingers, Cormac gently traced the flow to its source and found a deep groove in his head running front to back above his left ear.

Rising on one elbow, he was thrilled to see his pa racing toward them. He must have heard the shot and come a-runnin’. Cormac took heart at the sight of the rifle in his pa’s hand. A friend of his pa’s stopping by to visit once had told him that his pa could shoot the eye out of a gnat at fifty paces. He would put a stop to this. But he couldn’t shoot without fear of hitting his wife or Becky. Galloping to within a few feet of Cormac’s mother, John Lynch hauled back on the reins and set the horse sliding to a stop on its haunches.

“Take him boys!” the fat man ordered. “I’m busy.” Before the horse had come to a complete stop, John Lynch was off, his momentum carrying him a few running steps toward where the fat man was assaulting his wife.

“You bastards!” he screamed as he staggered to a halt, raising his rifle, “I’ll kill y—” Rolling gunfire cut him off and echoed over the hills as three guns cut him to pieces and he collapsed to the ground.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he got out weakly, with tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Rebecca.” John Lorton Lynch, along with all of his plans, hopes, and dreams for his family, died, and fourteen-year-old Cormac Lynch gratefully sunk into the darkness of oblivion.

Silence and stillness blanketed the valley. There was no movement in the air or birds singing in the tree. With no breeze to cool its effects, the gentle, warm morning sun had risen into the sky to become a blistering ball of Dakota fire. Stubborn dew hiding in the ruts of the plowed field and on shaded blades of grass under the tree had been quickly baked away, and the freshly plowed, rich, dark soil was now scorched dry and crumbly. The only movement was the growth of the tall grass covering the valley and the surrounding hills stretching upward in its relentless quest for the sun.

In states with mountains rising to thirteen or fourteen thousand feet, they wouldn’t be called hills . . . more like bumps. In Dakota, there were hills, and then there were the Black Hills. At a little more than 7,000 feet, they were inhabited by the Oglala Sioux Indians who shared hunting privileges with the Cheyenne and, occasionally, the Arikara Indians, whose home was normally at the mouth of the Cheyenne River. The many pine trees created an appearance of darkness from a distance generating the name: the Black Hills, Paha Sapa to the Indians.

The balance of the Dakota Territory remained mostly flat with small rolling hills, sometimes in groups, spasmodically straining upward out of the flatness of the Great Plains to press against the bottom side of the grass like a rock under a rug with occasional trees here and there. It was in just such terrain that John Lynch had chosen to build his farm and raise his family.

In these surroundings, Cormac slowly became aware that his eye was open. One eye was pressed downward against a potato where his head had fallen; the other was open. Open and staring at Becky’s naked, twisted, and bloody body. He tried to close it. He did not want to have to look, but the eye would not do his bidding. Twice the distance away and a little to the side was his mother’s body—a short distance farther, his father’s. With a terrible, sickening sense of loss, Cormac knew they were all dead. Why wasn’t he? He remembered the darkness encircling him and gratefully thinking he was dying. Why had he not?

Dazed and numb, Cormac slowly sat up, dizziness and excruciating pain in his head making him sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes against the waves of nausea and vomited heavily and frequently. Gently, his fingers probed the side of his head and found it covered with dried blood. He found the deep groove from the bullet, and on the ground, a dried pool of more blood. Groaning, he weakly staggered to his feet; only then did he think about the men. Where were they?

Carefully, Cormac looked around the valley, moving his head very slowly, afraid of more pain. The men were gone, only their used-up horses remained; too tired to wander, they were taking advantage of the respite from overuse to rest and graze on the rich grass the best they could while bridled with steel bits in their mouths. Cormac could see that the horses he had hobbled and his father’s horse had all been taken. Strangely, he felt no relief at the men’s absence. Neither had he felt any fear, he realized; neither then, nor now.

He just felt numb, like an observer looking at a photograph in one of his mother’s many books, which she used to educate him. But this was a horrible, grotesque photograph at which he did not want to look; he did not want to see. He wanted to close the book and have to look no longer; but this was not a photograph, this was real, and there on the ground were his mother, his pa, and his sister, petite and pretty seventeen-year-old Rebecca May Lynch: Becky. She had loved the name Rebecca, and Cormac was the only person she tolerated calling her Becky.

How could this have happened? They had been minding their own business, working in the fields and laughing. The sunshine had been warm and friendly on the beginning of a beautiful day. He remembered hearing the birds in the tree. Tomorrow they would have been taking the potato harvest into town and picking up supplies. His mother and Becky were planning to get some material for new dresses while, as always, he looked at the new saddles in the back of the store and dreamed of someday buying his own. His pa would probably have got some store-bought candy for him and Becky. Suddenly, everything had changed. Everything was gone. Four strangers had simply ridden into their lives and taken away everything. How could this possibly have happened? Cormac Lynch did not understand. What right did they have to do that?

He resolved himself to go to Becky. Her resistance to what had been happening to her was evident in the scuffed and gouged soil surrounding her. She had fought ferociously. The more she had resisted, the more she had been beaten, yet she never stopped fighting. There were bruises covering most of her body, front and back; and her face, once so gently pretty and so quick to smile and laugh, had been smashed almost beyond recognition. Her teeth were twisted in her mouth—some were missing, and blood covered most of her upper body.

“Why?” he screamed out. “Why did you do this?”

He avoided looking at her nakedness as he covered her with the largest pieces of her dress that he could find intact. Then, with immense dread, he went to his mother. What had been done to her was even more horrendous. Her face and body were a puffy round mass of torn flesh; there was blood over much of her body. Her eyes had swollen shut; and the sweet, soft lips that had kissed Cormac so many times were mashed into her mouth where her teeth should have been. Her also naked body had been twisted perversely to satisfy the desires of a hideous monster.

Stunned at the violence, Cormac moved mechanically, straightening her body and covering it; he kissed her softly, as he had Becky, and moved to his father. It was almost a pleasure to see that his father, even though he was dead, still looked like his father. Stretching out on the ground beside him, Cormac laid his head on his father’s massive chest. So strong his father had been, so eager to rise and begin work each day, always whistling, always happy to tease his children and their mother whenever the opportunity presented itself. Now he was dead—and cold.

Cormac remained there a long while, remembering the happy times and laughter their family had shared, along with their dreams and plans for the future. He was avoiding, he knew, what had to come next and what he had to do. He had to bury them.

The sun was getting low in the sky and the shadows lengthening when Cormac reluctantly rose. He would bury them under the tree. It would be difficult to move the bodies that far, but it had been a happy spot for them. The only tree in the valley, it had shaded them while they shared lunches, talked, and laughed during field preparation, the planting, weeding, and harvesting; and if there was no lightning, provided them shelter from the rain. His parents had treated the breaks like picnics and made them fun. Under the tree, after eating, they had stretched out for mid-day naps before returning to work, they had made plans, they had laughed and enjoyed each other’s company, and under the tree the three of them would spend the rest of forever.

Cormac worked as the sun went down and a full moon rose in its place, brightly illuminating everything with a pallid softness. What his pa had called the Milky Way made a soft trail across the sky. The horses were all-in and made no effort to elude him. He caught the nearest one to help move the bodies to the burial site.

The sky was showing signs of light in the east when he tamped the last dirt onto his father’s grave. All the while avoiding looking at their nakedness, he had buried his mother first, and then Becky, so they would be covered. His father would have understood. He had always told Cormac to take care of the women first.

Crawling onto his mother’s grave feeling hollow and weak, his strength drained, he collapsed with the realization coming to him that he had not cried. He wondered about that. His family had been horribly, viciously murdered, leaving it up to him to bury them, and yet he had not cried. His insides felt dead, filled with a sick and terrible empty numbness. He should have cried, he thought, and the thinking made him feel guilty.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I love you.” Cormac Lynch slept.

CHAPTER 2

After having ridden only a few miles from the Lynch place, the outlaws came upon a meandering, tree-lined creek.

“Hey, Gator.” Raunchy laughed. “Let’s stop and have a drink. Man, oh man, oh man, that was somethin’, weren’t it? Those women were sure somethin’, weren’t they? Right purty little things.”

“For once in your life, you got yourself a good idea,” the fat man responded. “I need to wash out these gouges that bitch gave me anyway. I sure taught her a thing or two. She won’t be clawing anyone else like that.”

Nicknamed for an alligator he had killed with his bare hands while escaping through the swamps from a Florida prison, George Milar had been on the wrong side of the law all of his life. Six inches over six feet tall, he would have tipped the scales at over three hundred pounds had he ever felt the need to get on one. He didn’t care what he weighed. By the time he was ten years old, he had already decided he would do whatever the hell he wanted, and that included eating anything he wanted, as much as he wanted, when he wanted.

Gator didn’t like rules and cared not one whit what other people thought. His three hundred-plus pounds of bulk concealed massive muscles that had always bulled him out of any situation. His weight was also a horse killer; he rode them until they could no longer walk. He kicked them, beat them, spurred them, and cussed at them, and when they could go no farther, he would steal another and with his huge fists, hammer anyone who complained, laughing and enjoying every minute while he did it.

He stepped down from the horse he had recently stolen, backhanding it on the side of the head when it shied away at the sudden transfer of weight from the saddle to the stirrup that twisted the cinch strap painfully around its girth.

“Pete,” he ordered. “You and the Mex rustle up some grub.”

The “Mex” looked at him with hate-filled eyes. The way Gator said “Mex” made it sound vulgar. Gator knew the man did not like the slur on his race and used it to put him down at every opportunity. Someday, the “Mex” was going to introduce Gator to the pointed end of the Mexican knife he wore on his belt. Until then, he would put up with the mistreatment because of the protection it afforded him.

Nobody wanted to tangle with Gator, and that provided the group with both protection and women. Their shared taste for abuse of women was the glue that held their small band together. They all liked to kill and did so for any reason, or for no reason, but their need to abuse women was their mainstay. Sometimes they kept a woman with them while they traveled, sharing her body either as a group or for their individual sadistic pleasure, until they tired of her; or until she became too ugly from the beatings, in which case they killed her and left her to rot. The “Mex” had been hopeful of keeping the last two. He would have relished enough time to enjoy them more slowly, maybe cut them a little and watch them bleed, but Gator’s woman had somehow managed to stuff enough dirt into her mouth to choke herself to death without Gator noticing until it was too late. The other went hysterical when she realized what had happened and attacked them, screaming, biting, kicking, and scratching, and wouldn’t stop until she was finally beaten to death.

Too bad, he thought, shaking his head. What a waste to lose them so soon.

Gator removed a large bottle of whiskey from his saddlebag. “We’ll have us a couple of drinks then go find where those farmers lived. If we give the horses their heads, they’ll find their way home. Most farmers keep some whiskey around for medicine, and we’ll be needin’ some more ’fore long. And who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find another daughter or two, wouldn’t that be a kick?” They ate and drank until they passed out, talking about what they woul