The Black Hills

Book 1: Hunter Buchanon Black Hills Western

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Meet Hunter Buchanon, a towering mountain of a man who learned how to track prey in Georgia, kill in the Civil War, and prospect in the Black Hills of Dakota. Now he's trying to live a peaceful gun-free life - but fate has other plans for him....

When Hunter Buchanon rescued a wounded coyote pup — and named him Bobby Lee — he had no idea the cute little varmint would grow up to be such a loyal companion. Coyotes aren't known to be man's best friend. Most of them are as fierce and wild as the Black Hills they roam. But Bobby Lee is different. When Hunter is ambushed on the road, Bobby Lee leaps to his defense. And when the attacker tries to shoot Bobby Lee, Hunter returns the favor by hitting the man with a rock.

By the time the smoke clears, the coyote-loving ex-Confederate is covered in blood — and the other guy's got a knife in his chest. Now Hunter has to explain it all to the local sheriff. Which is going to be tough. Because the man he just killed is the sheriff's deputy....

Release date: December 18, 2018

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 433

Sample

As the supply wagon rocked and clattered along the old army road west of Tigerville, Dakota Territory, Hunter Buchanon heard the light thumps of four padded feet and looked into the buttes to his left to see a coyote leap from a trough between two bluffs and onto the chalky slope above the trail.

The brush wolf lifted its long, pointed nose and launched a chortling, yammering wail toward the brassy afternoon sky, causing Hunter to set his jaws against the tooth-gnashing din.

Hunter drew back on the reins of the stout Missouri mule in the traces. As the wagon lurched to a grinding halt, he frowned up at the nettled coyote.

“What is it, Bobby Lee?”

As if in reply, the beast turned to Hunter and mewled, yipped, and lifted each front foot in turn, fidgeting his distress. Hunter had adopted the coyote two years ago, when he’d found it injured up in the hills above his family’s horse ranch just west of where Hunter was now.

The pup had survived an attack by some raptor— an owl or a hawk, likely—but just barely. The pup, while only a few weeks old, had appeared to be on its own. Hunter had suspected its mother—possibly the rest of its family, as well—had been shot by ranchers.

He had taken the pup home and nursed it back to health, feeding it bits of rabbit and squirrel meat and dribbling goat’s milk into its mouth from a sponge, and here it still was after two years, close by its savior’s side, though Hunter had assured the friendly but wily beast it was free to venture back into the wild, its true home, whenever it pleased.

Hunter wished he’d learned the coyote’s language over their months together, but while they communicated after a fashion, there was much that was mysterious about Bobby Lee. However, the apprehensive cast to the coyote’s gaze could not be mistaken. Trouble was afoot.

As if to validate Hunter’s suspicion, something made the air shiver.

A veteran of the War Between the States on the Confederate side of that bloody conflagration, Hunter Buchanon was all too familiar with the spine-shriveling, mind-numbing sound of a deadheading bullet. The slug kicked up dirt and gravel just inches from the troubled coyote, which squealed and ran.

An eyeblink later, the rifle’s ripping report sounded from a butte over the trail to Hunter’s right.

The ex-Confederate cursed and hurled himself off the wagon seat—all two-hundred-plus pounds and six-feet-four inches of the twenty-six-year-old man. He rolled fleetly off a shoulder and hurled himself into the brush along the trail just as the mule, braying wildly, took off running straight up the trail, dragging the wagon along behind it. Dust from the buckboard’s churning wheels swept over Hunter, offering him fleeting cover.

He scrambled out of the brush and scampered straight up the bluff Bobby Lee had been perched on.

More bullets chewed into the bluff around his hammering boots, the rifle cracking angrily behind him. Breathing hard, Hunter lunged quickly, cursing under his breath. Though a big man, he was nearly as fleet-footed as he’d been when as a young Rebel soldier he’d run hog-wild behind Union lines, assassinating federal officers with a bowie knife or his Whitworth rifled musket with a Davidson scope, and blowing up supply lines—quick and wily as a Georgia mountain panther.

He’d been in his early teens back then, still wet behind the ears, but he’d become a backwoods warrior legend of sorts—as revered and idolized by his fellow Confederates as he was feared and hated by the Bluebellies.

Those days were over now. And while he might have still been fleet enough to scamper up the butte ahead of the bushwhacker’s bullets, and scramble behind a tombstone-size boulder as another bullet smashed into it with a screeching whine, he had no gun on his hip to reach for. Even if the mule, old Titus, hadn’t lit out with the wagon, there was no rifle or shotgun in it. The only knife he had on him was a folding barlow knife. He could feel the solid lump of the jackknife now in the right pocket of his buckskin trousers.

The barlow felt supremely small and inadequate as another bullet screeched in from the butte on the opposite side of the trail and smacked the face of the boulder.

The rifle’s hammering wail echoed shrilly.

“Law, law!” Hunter muttered. “That fella’s really out to trim my wick!”

He jerked his head down as yet another bullet came screeching in and smashed the face of the boulder with another hammering crash.

“Hey, you with the rifle!” Hunter shouted. “Why don’t you put the long gun down so we can talk this out like grown-ups?”

The shooter replied by hurling another bullet against Hunter’s rock.

Hunter cursed to himself, then shouted, “Is that a definite no or a maybe?”

Again, the shooter replied in the only language he cared to communicate in.

“All right, then,” Hunter said under his breath. “Have it your way!”

He waited for another bullet to smash against his covering rock, then heaved himself to his feet and dashed straight up the butte. He covered the fifteen feet in three long strides, crouched forward, keeping his head down, trying to make himself as small as possible.

He hurled himself up and over the butte’s crest as a slug tore hotly along his right side, tracing the natural furrow between two ribs.

Hunter hit the butte’s opposite slope and rolled halfway to the bottom. When he finally broke his fall, he winced against the burn in his side and lifted his left arm to see the tear in his linsey-woolsey tunic.

He jerked up the garment, exposing his washboard belly and slab-like chest as well as the thin line of blood the bullet had drawn across his side, about halfway between his shoulder and waist. Not a wound, just a graze hardly deep enough to bleed, but it ached like six bee stings.

“Son of Satan!” Hunter exclaimed. “What in the hell is this fella’s problem?”

Was he after the mule? The wagon? Possibly the ale Hunter was hauling to town to sell in several Tigerville saloons? His father, Angus Buchanon, was a brewmaster, using old Buchanon family recipes his own father had carried over from Scotland to concoct a dark, creamy ale that was much favored by the miners, prospectors, and cowhands in and around this neck of the Black Hills.

Something told Hunter the shooter wasn’t after any of those things. Just a sense he had. The man seemed so damn determined to kill him that maybe that was all he wanted.

Time to find out.

He knew a rare but vexing regret that he wasn’t armed. He knew he should keep at least a six-shooter in the wagon. This was wild country, after all. Populated by men nearly as dangerous as the wildcats and grizzlies that stalked these pine-clad hills, elk parks, and beaver meadows east of the Rockies.

But he’d had his fill of guns and knives . . . of killing . . . during the war. Just looking at a pistol or a rifle or even a skinning knife conjured bloody memories. After Appomattox, he’d sworn that he would never again raise a gun or a knife against another human being. Not carrying a weapon when he wasn’t hunting was his way of trimming his chances of having to break that promise to himself.

So far, he’d made good on that promise.

So far ...

Reacting more than thinking about the situation, a trait that had held him in good stead during the war, Hunter heaved himself to his feet and took long, lunging, sliding strides to the bottom of the butte, loosing small landslides in his wake.

He followed a crease between buttes back to the west. When he figured he’d run a good fifty yards, he made a hard left turn between another pair of low buttes.

This route took him back to the trail, which he crossed at a sharp curve shaded by cottonwoods. Pushing through low cottonwood branches, he hightailed it into another crease between the chalky bluffs on the shooter’s side of the trail.

He climbed the shoulder of another low butte and paused in the shade of a lightning-topped pine.

On one knee, taking slow deep breaths, his broad, muscular chest rising and falling deeply, his mind worked calmly. The shock and fear he’d known when he’d heard the rifle’s first crack had dwindled. The old natural instincts and battle-tested abilities moved to the forefront of his warrior’s mind.

He had no weapons. No traditional weapons, that was. But he had an enemy who apparently wanted him dead. His own mind recoiled at the notion of killing, but there was no point in denying the fact that whoever was out to kill him needed to be rendered unable to do so.

Hunter picked out a rock that fit easily into the palm of his right hand. Working the rock around in his hand like a lump of clay, he scanned the high crest of a bluff just ahead and above him on his right. That was the highest point of ground anywhere around. It likely gave a clear view of the old army trail. It was probably from that high point that the bushwhacker had hurled his lead.

Hunter tossed the rock up and caught it, steeling his resolve, then moved quickly down the slope. He was trying to work around behind the ambusher when he spied movement out the corner of his left eye.

Stopping, crouching, he swung his head around to see a man—a man-shaped shadow, rather—walk out from the butte’s far end, directly below the high, stony, pine-peppered ridge from which the bushwhacker had probably fired at Hunter. The man, carrying a rifle in both hands across his chest, dropped down below a hump of grassy ground and disappeared from Hunter’s view.

Hunter sprang forward, running across the face of the steep bluff, about ten yards up from the bottom. There was a slight ridge at the end of the bluff, and Hunter stayed behind it, running almost silently on the balls of his worn, mule-eared boots into which the tops of his buckskin trousers were tucked.

He gained the base of the slight ridge, slowly climbed.

Near the top, he got down on one knee, swept a lock of his long, thick blond hair back from his eyes, and cast his blue-eyed gaze into the hollow below. His belly tightened; his heart quickened.

The man was there. A big, bearded man with a battered brown hat. He was hunkered down behind a low, flat-topped boulder, a grimy red bandanna ruffling in the slight breeze. He cradled a Winchester repeating rifle in his thick arms tufted with thick, black curls. The stout limbs strained the sleeves of his red-and-black-checked shirt beneath a worn deerskin vest.

Hunter couldn’t see his face. The man’s head was turned slightly away. He was looking in the direction of the trail, searching for his quarry. There was a wary set to his head and shoulders.

The man knew who he’d been shooting at. He was aware he’d made a grave mistake by not sending those first shots home. He knew that a Buchanon would not tuck his tail and run. At least, not run away. Armed or unarmed, having sworn off killing or not, a Buchanon would run toward trouble.

If one of Hunter’s brothers—the younger Tye or the older Shep, or even their one-armed father, old Angus—were in Hunter’s position now, this man would already be dead. None of them subscribed to Hunter’s pacifism. Of course, neither Tye nor Shep had fought in the war. Old Angus had fought in the Georgia state militia, and he’d lost an arm for his trouble. Still, the old mossy horn wouldn’t give up his rifle until they rolled him into his cold, black grave.

Hunter rose a little higher on his knees. He raised his right arm, adjusting the rock in his fingers, preparing for the throw. His gut tightened again, and he drew his head down sharply. The man had turned toward him.

Had he heard him? Smelled him? Sensed he was here?

Hunter lifted his head again slowly, until his eyes cleared the top of his covering ridge. The man’s face was turned slightly toward Hunter, looking off toward Hunter’s left. Hunter still couldn’t get a good look at him. The man’s hat brim shaded his face. If Hunter jerked his head and shoulders up to throw the rock, the man would see him and likely shoot before Hunter could make the toss.

Damn.

The familiar patter of four padded feet sounded.

The man turned his head sharply back to his right, away from Hunter.

Bobby Lee leaped onto a low boulder down the slope below the shooter. The coyote lifted its long, pointed snout and sent a screeching din rising toward the brassy summer sky.

“Why, you mangy bag o’ fleas!” the bushwhacker raked out through gritted teeth.

He raised the Winchester to his shoulder, aiming toward the yammering coyote.

Hunter raised his head and shoulders above the ridge, drew his arm back, and thrust it forward, throwing the rock as hard as he could.

Hunter’s aim was true, as it should be after all his years of killing squirrels, gophers, rabbits, and sometimes even turkeys with everything from rocks to spare bullets. A Buchanon was nothing if not thrifty.

The rock thumped sharply off his stalker’s head.

The man yowled and fell forward, cursing and rolling down the grassy slope toward where Bobby Lee danced in zany, manic circles atop his boulder. Hunter leaped to his feet and ran. He jumped the boulder behind which his stalker had been crouching, and continued down toward where the man was still rolling, flattening grass and plowing through a chokecherry thicket.

The man rolled out the other side of the thicket and came to rest at the slope’s bottom, about ten feet from where Bobby Lee stood atop the boulder, glaring down at the bushwhacker, baring his fangs and growling. The man had lost both his hat and his rifle during his fall, but now as he pushed onto his hands and knees, shaking his head, his thick, curly hair flying, he slid his right hand back for the Colt .44 still holstered on his right thigh.

From behind the man, Hunter grabbed the gun, ripping free the keeper thong from over the hammer and jerking the weapon from its holster.

“Hey!” the man said, turning his head to peer behind him.

Hunter recognized that broad, bearded face and the cow-stupid, glaring eyes reflecting the afternoon sunlight. Also reflecting the sun was the five-pointed badge pinned to the man’s brush-scarred vest.

“Chaney?” Hunter said, tossing the man’s gun away. “What in blazes—?”

But then Deputy Sheriff Luke Chaney was suddenly on his feet, moving fast for a big man with a considerable paunch and broad, fleshy hips. Dust and dead grass coating him, he wheeled to face the taller ex-Confederate. From somewhere he’d produced a Green River knife; he clenched its hide-wrapped handle tightly in his right hand as he stood, crouching, a menacing grin curling his thick, wet lips inside his dusty, curly, dark-brown beard.

The Green River’s steel blade glinted in the afternoon sunshine.

“Come on, Buchanon,” Chaney said, lunging toward Hunter. “They say you Reb devils got some fight in you—even if you don’t wear a gun!”

He slashed the Green River knife from right to left and would have laid open Hunter’s belly if Hunter hadn’t leaped back. The Green River’s razor-edged blade had come within an inch or even less of doing just that. The knowledge caused a burn of rage to rise up from the base of the ex-Confederate’s back, spreading across his shoulders and blazing in his clean-shaven cheeks.

Hunter faced his opponent, crouching, arms spread, ready to parry Chaney’s next assault. “What the hell’s this about, Chaney? What’s your beef with me?”

Chaney curled his mouth in a sneering grin, then lunged, slashing with the knife. Overconfidence was the man’s Achilles’ heel. He’d just retreated from another attempt at eviscerating Hunter when Hunter sprang forward, kicking upward with his left boot, the toe of which smashed against the underside of Chaney’s right hand.

There was the dull snap of breaking bone.

Taken by surprise, Chaney gave a hard, indignant grunt. The knife flew out of his hand, arcing sharply up, flashing in the sunlight before landing not far from where Bobby Lee now sat on the boulder, watching the fight with a devilish glint in his long, yellow eyes, a low whine of apprehension issuing from deep in his chest.

Chaney grabbed his wrist and bellowed, “Damn you, Reb devil—you broke my wrist!”

He stood there, knees buckling, crouched over his injured hand, as Hunter walked wide around him and scooped the knife up out of the tawny grass. He brushed off the knife and started to turn, saying, “Now suppose you tell me what—”

He stopped when he saw Chaney coming toward him like a bull out of a chute, head down, eyes glinting malevolently, a sinister smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Hunter stepped to one side. Chaney plowed into Hunter’s right chest and shoulder, gave a yelp, and stumbled away.

Bobby Lee lifted his head and sent a warbling cry careening skyward.

Dazed by Chaney’s assault, Hunter swung around toward where Chaney stood six feet away, his back to Hunter. The deputy sheriff was leaning forward as though he were looking for something on the ground. Hunter looked at his own right hand.

He was no longer holding the knife. His hand was slick and bright with fresh blood.

Chaney turned to face Hunter. The Green River was sticking out of Chaney’s belly, the handle angled down. Doubtless, the knifepoint was embedded in the deputy’s heart. Reacting instinctively when Chaney had bulled toward him, the old warrior instincts coming alive in him, Hunter had dropped the knife handle slightly, angling the blade up toward his assailant’s heart.

He’d killed countless Union soldiers that way. Only, he’d done so consciously. He’d killed Luke Chaney without thinking.

Hunter’s heart thudded as Chaney stared at him in wide-eyed horror.

The deputy had both his big, bloody hands wrapped around the knife handle protruding from his belly. He took one stumbling step backward, wincing slightly as he tried to pull out the knife. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but no words made it past his lips.

Chaney’s eyes rolled up in their sockets. His chin lifted and he tumbled straight back to the ground with a heavy thud and a breathy chuff as the air was punched from his lungs. He lay still.

Yipping softly, Bobby Lee dropped down off of the boulder, ran over to Chaney, and hiked a back leg, sending a yellow stream dribbling onto the dead deputy’s forehead.

Hunter stared in shock at the dead man.

He raised his bloody hands, stared at them. A million images of bloody death flashed through his mind all at once. The screams and wails of the wounded and dying, the concussion of hammering Napoleon cannons and howitzers, the crackle of musket fire.

Hunter felt as though he’d been kicked in the head. His legs buckled. He dropped to his knees. Sagging back onto his butt, he stared at his blood-washed hands.

He was still sitting there maybe ten, fifteen minutes later, staring at his hands. Bobby Lee lay beside him, calmly chewing burrs out of his mottled gray-brown coat. Suddenly, the coyote lifted his head and sniffed, twitching his ears. Then Hunter heard them too—hoof thuds rising in the distance.

Bobby Lee mewled softly, staring off toward Hunter’s right.

Hunter felt inert, unable to react though warning bells tolled in his head.

The hoof thuds continued to grow louder until the rider appeared, swinging through a crease between the buttes. She turned her head toward Hunter and Bobby Lee, and drew back on the reins of her fine buckskin stallion. Sunlight glinted off the long, dark-red curls cascading like amber honey down from her man’s felt hat to spill across her shoulders.

Annabelle Ludlow batted her heels against the buckskin’s flanks, and the gelding galloped forward until the girl drew back on the reins again and sat for a moment, staring down in horror at Luke Chaney lying dead in the tawny grass. She was nineteen years old—a rare beauty with emerald eyes in a fine, smooth, heart-shaped face lightly tanned by the sun. She wore a calico blouse and tight, badly faded and frayed denim jeans, the cuffs of which were pulled down over her men’s small-size western riding boots, which she wore without spurs.

The boots were as worn and scuffed as any cowpuncher’s.

A green-eyed, rustic beauty was Annabelle Ludlow, with long slender legs and womanly curves. A rich girl to boot, being the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the Hills. By looking at her you’d think she was the daughter of a small shotgun rancher whose wife sold eggs to help make ends meet. Annabelle didn’t believe in flaunting her riches, and that was only one of the many things Hunter Buchanon loved about her.

“I was airing Ivan out nearby,” she said after nearly a minute had passed. She’d named her horse Ivanhoe, after the hero of a book she loved. “I heard the shots. What happened?”

It was as if she’d whispered the query from a long ways away. Hunter had barely heard her.

As he sat there on his butt in the grass, in his mind he was a thousand miles east and more than ten years back in time, and he was pulling his bowie knife out of the wool-clad belly of a young Union picket. It was late—one or two in the morning—and he’d been sent to blow up several supply wagons along the Tennessee River, using the Union’s own Ketchum grenades. Those wagons were heavily guarded, and the young man he’d just killed had been one of those guards.

There’d been a clear half-moon, and the milky light of the moon shone in the young soldier’s eyes as Hunter, his hand closed over the private’s mouth to muffle any scream, jerked him over backward from behind. He pulled the bloody knife out of the young man’s belly and found himself staring into a pair of impossibly young, anguished, and terrified eyes gazing back at him in silent pleading.

The soldier was tall and willowy. He had the body of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. But the face, speckled with red pimples, and the wide-open eyes were that of a boy a good bit younger. Hunter dragged him almost silently back into the woods along the river, the water lapping behind him. The soldier’s body seemed impossibly light. He did not struggle with his killer.

He was bleeding out and dying fast.

Hunter lay him down on the spongy ground and slid his hand away from the young man’s mouth.

“Oh God,” the boy had wheezed, drawing air into his lungs. “Oh God . . . I’m . . . I’m dyin’—ain’t I?” It seemed a genuine question that the boy answered himself. “I’m dyin’!”

Hunter stared down at him. He’d killed so many almost without thinking about it. That’s what you had to do as a soldier. You had to numb yourself against killing. You killed for the greater good. You killed for the freedom of the Confederacy, to stamp out the uppity Yankee aggressors. But as much as he wanted to ignore the innocent eyes staring up at him this moonlit night along the Tennessee, he found his mind recoiling in horror and revulsion at the fear he’d inflicted, the life he’d just taken.

The boy had whispered so softly that Hunter could barely hear him.

“Ma an’ Pa . . . never gonna . . . see ’em again. My lovely May!” The boy’s eyes filled with tears. “We was gonna be married as soon as I went home!”

Hunter felt as though it were his own heart that had been pierced with the knife he kept honed to a razor’s edge. He looked at the blood glistening low on the young soldier’s blue-clad belly, wishing that he could take back what he’d just done, return this horrified soldier’s life to him. Return Ma and Pa to him, and the girl, May, whom he loved and intended to marry.

Horror and sorrow exploded inside of Hunter. He dropped the bloody knife, grabbed the young man by his collar, and drew his head up to his own. “I’m sorry!” he sobbed. “I’m sorry!”

The young man stared back at him, twin half-moons floating in his eyes as though on the surface of a night-dark lake. The soldier opened his mouth as though to speak, but he couldn’t get any words out.

Pain twisted his face. His lower jaw fell slack. His eyes rolled back until all Hunter could see were their whites.

The soldier’s raspy breaths fell silent, and his chest grew still. Hunter released him and he fell, lifeless as a sack of grain, to the ground.

“I’m sorry,” the Confederate heard himself mutter.

But then it wasn’t the young Union soldier lying before him in the light of the Tennessee moon. It was Luke Chaney lying sprawled in the tawny grass of the Black Hills, blood glistening brightly in the light of the afternoon sun.

Annabelle knelt beside Hunter, her hand on his thigh, gazing into his eyes with concern. “Hunter? Hunter, can you hear me? Hunter!”

Hunter slid his gaze slowly toward his girl. He’d been only vaguely aware of Annabelle’s presence, but now as that moonlit night of so long ago mercifully dwindled into the past, he was aware of her worried green gaze on him.

He placed his hand over hers, atop his right thigh. He found modest comfort in the warmth of her flesh. “I’m all right.”

“Where were you?”

Hunter shook his head and winced against the throbbing in his temples. He leaned forward, pressed his fists against his head as though to knead away the pain that normally came at night, on the heels of his frequent nightmares.

“You were back with that boy you killed,” Annabelle said, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. “With the young Union soldier.”

Hunter pressed his hands to his temples once more, then lifted his head and cast his gaze toward where Chaney lay in the grass. Bobby Lee lay ten feet from the body, in a scrap of shade offered by a cedar branch. He was staring at Hunter and mewling deep in his throat with concern.

“What happened?” Annabelle asked again.

“I was on my way to town with Angus’s beer. Sidewinder ambushed me.” Hunter turned to her, grabbed her arms, and squeezed. “I swear, Annabelle. I didn’t mean to kill him. I kicked the knife out of his hand. I walked over to pick it up. As I turned, he ran into me. I must’ve—”

“Shhh, shhh.” Annabelle wrapped her arms around him, hugging him. “It’s all right. He gave you no choice. I heard the shooting from the next ridge north. He was out for blood, obviously.”

Annabelle pulled away from Hunter and gazed guiltily into his eyes. “This is my fault.”

He frowned. “What’re you talking about?”

“I caught him following me again the other day. I was driving a wagonload of supplies up to the men manning my father’s line cabin on Beaver Ridge. When I topped a hill I saw Luke following me from about a quarter-mile back. I pulled the wagon off the trail and waited. When he rode up, I threatened him with my Winchester.

“I swear, Hunter, I was so mad to find that vermin dogging my heels again, after I had refused his marriage proposal in no uncertain terms, that I almost shot him right then and there! I told him once and for all to leave me alone, or I’d shoot him. And . . .” She dropped her eyes demurely. “And I made the mistake of telling him that when I married, you’d be the one . . .”

Hunter smiled and placed a hand on her cheek. “Well . . . I kinda like the sound of that myself.”

“I do too.” Annabelle kissed his hand. “But I’m afraid that might be the reason he ambushed you here today. Why you had to kill him.”

“Well, whatever the reason,” Hunter said, turning to Chaney once more, “he’s dead.”

“I’ll ride over to the mine and tell my father. He’ll know what to do.”

Luke Chaney’s father, Max Chaney, was a business partner of Annabelle’s father, Graham Ludlow. Chaney had wanted his thuggish son to marry Annabelle, and had tried to arrange it with Graham Ludlow. Ludlow wouldn’t hear of it. It might have stressed his and Chaney’s business partnership, but Ludlow had set his sights on higher fruit than the ungainly, foul-mouthed, and whore-mongering Luke Chaney.

The man Ludlow wanted for his future son-in-law was the somewhat prissy but well-bred and well-heeled son of an Eastern railroad magnate currently working to build a railroad that would connect the Black Hills with Sydney, Nebraska. The young man’s name was Kenneth Earnshaw, and he’d graduated the previous fall from none other than Harvard University.

“No,” Hunter said, grabbing Annabelle’s arm before she could walk back to her horse. “No, I’ll take care of it. Chaney’s Stillwell’s deputy. I’m going to take him on into Tigerville and tell Stillwell what happened.”

“That’s crazy, Hunter!”

“Telling what happened out here ain’t crazy. It’s the only thing to do.”

“Stillwell will sic his other cutthroat deputies on you! He’ll kill you!”

Some called Frank Stillwell a lawman-for-hire. In other words, he was a gun-for-hire who sometimes wore a badge. A couple of years ago, Tigerville and the hills around it had been a hotbed of bloody violence. This was right after General George Armstrong Custer had opened the Hills to gold-seekers in 1874, despite the Hills still belongi. . .