The Whip Hand

Book 4: Hunter Buchanon Black Hills Western

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns; Thrillers

Synopsis

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. THE ULTIMATE KILLING GROUND.

The latest action-packed installment in bestselling Western authors William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone in the Hunter Buchanon Black Hills Western series.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES
 
The Buchanans are no strangers to hard times—or making hard choices. After losing a hefty number of livestock to a killer grizzly, Hunter Buchanan is forced to sell a dozen broncs down in Denver for some badly needed cash. Everything goes smoothly—until he’s ambushed on the way home.  The culprits are a murderous bunch of prairie rat outlaws, as dangerous as any Buchanan has ever tangled with. But Hunter is hell-bent on getting his money back. Even if means pursuing the thieves into Dakota Territory—where even deadlier dangers await . . .
 
Meanwhile, Angus Buchanan has agreed to guide three former Confederate bounty hunters into the Black Hills, on the trail of six cutthroats who robbed a saloon and killed two men in Deadwood. This motley trio of hunters are as cutthroat as the cutthroats they’re after. And it doesn’t take long for Angus to realize they mean to slaughter him as well at the end of  the trail . . .
 
One family of ranchers. Two groups of cold-hearted murderers. So many ways to die.

Release date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Hunter Buchanon whipped his hand to the big LeMat revolver jutting from the holster around which the shell belt was coiled on the ground beside him.

In a half-second the big revolver was out of its holster and Hunter heard the hammer click back before he even knew what his thumb was doing. Lightning quick action honed by time and experience including four bloody years during which he fought for the Confederacy in the War of Northern Aggression.

He didn’t know what had prompted his instinctive action until he sat half up from his saddle and peered across the red-glowing coals of the dying campfire to see Bobby Lee sitting nearby, peering down the slope into the southern darkness beyond, the coyote’s tail curled tightly, ears pricked. Hunter’s pet coyote gave another half-moan, half-growl like the one Hunter had heard in his sleep and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Hunter sat up slowly. “What is it, Bobby?”

A startled gasp sounded beside Hunter, and in the corner of his left eye he saw his wife Annabelle sit up quickly, grabbing her own hogleg from its holster and clicking the hammer back. Umber light from the fire danced in her thick, red hair. “What is it?” she whispered.

“Don’t rightly know,” Hunter said tightly, quietly. “But something’s put a burr in Bobby’s bonnet.”

Down the slope behind Hunter, Annabelle, and Bobby Lee, their twelve horses whickered uneasily, drawing on their picket lines.

“Something’s got the horses’ blood up, too,” Annabelle remarked, glancing over her shoulder at the fidgety mounts.

“Stay with the horses, honey,” Hunter said, tossing his bedroll aside then rising, donning his Stetson, and stepping into his boots. As he grabbed his Henry repeating rifle, Annabelle said, “You be careful. We might have horse thieves on our hands, Hunter.”

“Don’t I know it.” Hunter jacked a round into the Henry’s action, then strode around the nearly dead fire, brushing fingers across the top of the coyote’s head and starting down the hill to the south. “Come on, Bobby.”

The coyote didn’t need to be told twice. If there was one place for Bobby Lee, that was by the side of the big, blond man who’d adopted him when his mother had been killed by a rancher several years ago. Hunter moved slowly down the forested slope in the half-darkness, one hand around the Henry’s receiver so starlight didn’t reflect off the brass and give him away.

Bobby Lee ran ahead, scouting for any human polecats after the ten horses Hunter and Annabelle were herding from their ranch near Tigerville deep in the Black Hills to a ranch outside of Denver. Hunter and Annabelle had caught the wild mustangs in the Hills near their ranch, and Annabelle had sat on the fence of the breaking corral, Bobby Lee near her feet, watching as Hunter had broken each wild-eyed bronc in turn.

Gentled them, rather. Hunter didn’t believe in breaking a horse’s spirit. He just wanted to turn them into “plug ponies,” good ranch mounts that answered to the slightest tug on the reins or a squeeze of a rider’s knees, and could turn on a dime, which was often necessary when working cattle, especially dangerous mavericks.

Hunter and Annabelle needed the money from the horse sale to help make up for the loss of several head of cattle to a rogue grizzly the previous summer. Times were hard on the ranch due to drought and low stock prices, and they were afraid they’d lose the Box Bar B without the money from the horses. They were getting two hundred dollars ahead, because they were prime mounts—Hunter had a reputation as one of the best horse gentlers on the northern frontier—and that money would go far toward helping them keep the ranch.

Hunter wanted desperately to keep the Box Bar B not only for himself and Annabelle, but for Hunter’s aged, when Nathan’s doxie mother had died after riding with would-be rustlers, including the boy’s scoundrel father, whom Hunter had killed.

The boy was nothing like his father. He was good and hard-working, and he needed a good home.

Hunter moved off down the slope but stopped when Bobby Lee suddenly took off running and swinging left toward some rocks and a cedar thicket, growling. The coyote disappeared in the trees and brush and then started barking angrily. A man cursed and then there were three rocketing gun reports followed by Bobby’s mewling howl.

“Damn coyote!” the man’s voice called out.

“Bobby!” Hunter said and took off running in the direction in which Bobby Lee had disappeared.

“They know we’re here now so be careful!” another man called out sharply.

Running footsteps sounded ahead of Hunter.

He stopped and dropped to a knee when a moving shadow appeared ahead of him and slightly down the slope. Starlight glinted off a rifle barrel and off the running man’s cream Stetson.

“Hold it right there, you son of a bitch!” Hunter bellowed, pressing his cheek to the Henry’s stock.

The man stopped suddenly and swung his rifle toward Hunter.

The Henry spoke once, twice, three times. The man grunted and flew backward, dropping his rifle and striking the ground with another grunt and a thud.

“Harvey!” the other man yelled from beyond the rocks and cedars.

Harvey yelled in a screeching voice filled with pain, “I’m a dead man, Buck! Buchanon got me, the rebel devil. He’s over here. Get him for me!”

Hunter stepped behind a pine, peered out around it, and jacked another round into the Henry’s action. He waited, pricking his ears, listening for the approach of Buck. Seconds passed. Then a minute. Then two minutes.

A figure appeared on the right side of the rocks and cedars, moving slowly, one step at a time. Buck held a carbine across his chest. Hunter lined up the Henry’s sights on the man and was about to squeeze the trigger when something ran up behind the man and leaped onto his back. Buck screamed as he fell forward, Bobby Lee growling fiercely and tearing into the back of the man’s neck.

Hunter smiled. Buck screamed as he tried in vain to fight off the fiercely protective Bobby Lee. Buck swung around suddenly and cursed loudly as he flung Bobby Lee off him. The coyote struck the ground with a yelp and rolled.

“You mangy cur!” Buck bellowed, drawing a pistol and aiming at Bobby.

Hunter’s Henry spoke twice, flames lapping from the barrel.

Buck groaned and lay over on his back. “Ah, hell,” he said, and died.

“Good work, Bob,” Hunter said, walking toward where the coyote was climbing to his feet. Hunter dropped to a knee, placed his hand on Bobby Lee’s back. “You all right?”

The coyote shook himself as if in an affirmative reply.

“All right,” Hunter said, straightening. “Let’s go check on—”

The shrill whinny of horses cut through the silence that had fallen over the night after Hunter had shot Buck.

“Annabelle!” Hunter yelled, swinging around to retrace his route back to the camp. “Come on, Bobby! There must be more of these scoundrels!”

The coyote mewled and took off running ahead of Hunter.

Only a minute after Hunter and Bobby had left the camp, the horses stirred more vigorously behind where Annabelle sat on a log near the cold fire, her Winchester carbine resting across her denim-clad thighs. She’d just risen from the log and started to walk toward the string of prize mounts when a man’s voice called from the darkness down the hill behind the horses.

“Come here, purty li’l red-headed gal!” The voice was pitched with jeering, brash mockery.

Annabelle froze, stared into the darkness. Anger rose in her.

Again, the man’s voice caromed quietly out of the darkness: “Come here, purty li’l red-headed gal!” The man chuckled.

Several of the horses lifted their heads and gave shrill whinnies.

The flame of anger burned more brightly in Annabelle, her heart quickening, her gloved hands tightening around the carbine she held high across her chest. She knew she shouldn’t do it, but she couldn’t stop herself. She moved slowly forward. Ahead and to her left, thirty feet away, the horses were whickering and shifting, pulling at the ropes securing them to the picket line.

Annabelle jacked a round into the carbine’s action and moved toward the horses. She patted the blaze on the snout of a handsome black, said, “Easy, fellas. Easy. I got this.”

She stepped around the horses and down the slope and stopped behind a broad-boled pine.

Again, the man’s infuriating voice came from down the slope beyond her. “Come here, purty li’l red-haired gal. Come find me!”

Annabelle swallowed tightly, said quietly, mostly to herself: “All right—if you’re sure about this, bucko . . .”

She continued forward, taking one step at a time. She had no spurs on her boots. Hunter’s horses were so well-trained they didn’t require them. She made virtually no sound as she continued down the slope, weaving between the columnar pines and firs silhouetted against the night’s darkness relieved only by starlight.

“Come on, purty li’l red-headed gal,” came the jeering voice again. “Wanna show ya somethin’.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Annabelle muttered beneath her breath. “Wonder what that could be.”

She headed in the direction from which the voice had come, practically directly ahead of her now, maybe thirty, forty feet down the slope. That she was being lured into a trap, there could be no question. Hunter had always told her that her red-headed anger would get the best of her one day. Maybe he’d been right.

On the other hand, the open mockery in the voice of the man trying to lure her into the trap could not be denied. She imagined shooting him, and the thought stretched her rich, red lips back from her perfect, white teeth in a savage smile.

She took one step, then another . . . another . . . pausing briefly behind trees, edging cautious looks around them, knowing that she could see the lap of flames from a gun barrel at any second.

“That’s it,” came the man’s voice again. “Just a bit closer, honey. That’s it. Keep comin’, purty li’l red-headed gal.”

“All right,” Annabelle said, tightly, loudly enough for the man to hear her now. “But you’re gonna regret it, you son of a b—”

She’d smelled the rancid odor of unwashed man and raw whiskey two seconds before she heard the pine needle crunch of a stealthy tread behind her. She froze as a man’s body pressed against her from behind. Just as the man started to wrap his arm around her, intending to close his hand over her mouth, Annabelle ducked and swung around, swinging the carbine, as well—and rammed the butt into her would-be assailant’s solar plexus.

The man gave a great exhalation of whiskey-soaked breath, and folded.

Annabelle turned further and rammed her right knee into the man’s face. She felt the wetness of blood on her knee from the man’s exploding nose. He gave a wheezy, “Mercy!” as he fell straight back against the ground and lay moaning and writhing.

Knowing she was about to have lead sent her way, Annabelle threw herself to her left and rolled. Sure enough, the rifle of the man on the slope below thundered once, twice, three times, the bullets caroming through the air where Annabelle had been a second before. The man whom she’d taken to the proverbial woodshed howled, apparently having taken one of the bullets meant for her.

Annabelle rolled onto her belly and aimed the carbine straight out before her. She’d seen the flash of the second man’s rifle, and she aimed toward them now, sending three quick shots their way. The second shooter howled. Annabelle heard the heavy thud as he struck the ground.

“Gallblastit!” he cried. “You like to shot my dang ear off, you wicked, red-haired bitch!”

“What happened to ‘purty li’l red-haired gal’?” Annabelle spat out as she shoved to her feet and righted her Stetson.

She heard the second shooter thrashing around down the slope, jostling the branches of an evergreen shrub. He gave another cry, and then Annabelle could hear him running in a shambling fashion downhill.

“Oh, you’re running away from the ‘purty li’l red-haired gal,’ now, tough guy?”

Anna strode after him, following the sounds of his shambling retreat.

She pushed through the shrubs and saw his shadow moving downhill, holding a hand to his right ear, groaning. He’d left his rifle up where Anna had shot him. “Turn around or take it in the back, tough guy,” she said, following him, taking long, purposeful strides.

“You’re crazy!” the man cried, casting a fearful glance behind him. “What’d you do to H.J.?”

“What I started, you finished.”

“He’s my cousin!”

“Was your cousin.”

He gave another sobbing cry as he continued running so awkwardly that Anna, walking, steadily gained on him as she held the carbine down low against her right leg.

“You’re just a bitch is what you are!”

“You were after our horses, I take it?”

The man only sobbed again.

“How’d you get on our trail?”

“Seen you passin’ wide around Lusk,” the man said, breathless, grunting. “We was huntin’ antelope on the ridge.”

“Market hunters?”

“Fer a woodcuttin’ crew.”

“Ah. You figured you’d make more money selling my and my husband’s horses. At least you have a good eye for horse flesh.”

The man gained the bottom of the ridge. He stopped and turned to see Anna moving within twenty feet of him, gaining on him steadily—a tall, slender, well-put-together young lady outfitted in men’s trail gear, though, judging by all her curves in all the right places, she was all woman. He gave another wail, sunlight glinting in his wide, terrified eyes, then swung around and ran into the creek, the water splashing like quicksilver up around his knees.

He’d likely never been stalked by a woman before. Especially no “purty li’l red-headed gal.”

Anna followed the coward into the creek. “What’s your name?”

“Oh, go to hell!”

“What’s your name?”

He shot another silver-eyed gaze back over his shoulder. “Wally. Leave me be. I’m in major pain here!”

Now that Anna was closing on him, she could see the man was tall and slender, mid- to late-twenties, with long, stringy hair brushing his shoulders while the top of his head was bald. He had small, mean eyes and now as he turned to face her, he lowered his bloody right hand to the pistol bristling on his right hip.

“You stop there, now,” he warned, stretching his lips back from his teeth in pain. “You stop there. I’m done. Finished. You go on back to your camp!”

Anna stopped ten feet away from him. She rested the Winchester on her shoulder. “You know what happens to rustlers in these parts—don’t you, Wally?”

He thrust his left arm and index finger out at her. “N-now, you ain’t gonna hang me. You done blowed my ear off!” Wally slid the old Smith & Wesson from its holster and held it straight down against his right leg. “Besides, you’re a woman. Women don’t behave like that!”

He clicked the Smithy’s hammer back.

“You’re right—we don’t behave like that. Not even we ‘purty li’l red-headed gals’!” Anna racked a fresh round into the carbine’s action, raised the rifle to her shoulder, and grinned coldly. “Why waste the hemp on vermin like you, Wally?”

Wally’s little eyes grew wide in terror as he jerked his pistol up. “Don’t you—!”

“We just shoot ’em!” Anna said.

And shot him.

Wally flew back into the creek with a splash. He went under and bobbed to the surface, arms and legs spread wide. Slowly, the current carried him downstream.

Anna heard running footsteps and a man’s raking breaths behind her. She swung around, bringing the carbine up again, ready to shoot, but held fire when she saw the big, broad-shouldered man in the gray Stetson, buckskin tunic, and denims running toward her, the coyote running just ahead.

“Anna!” Hunter yelled. “Are you all right, honey?”

He and Bobby stopped at the edge of the stream. Both their gazes caught on the man bobbing downstream, and Hunter shuttled his incredulous gaze back to his wife. Raking deep breaths, he hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Saw the other man up the hill. Dead as a post.” Hunter Buchanon planted his fists on his hips and scowled his reproof at his young wife. “I told you to stay at the camp!”

Anna strode back out of the stream. She stopped before her husband, who was a whole head taller than she. “We purty li’l red-headed gals just need us a little blood-letting once in a while. Sort of like bleeding the sap off a tree.”

She grinned, rose up on her toes to kiss Hunter’s lips then ticked the brim of his hat with her right index finger and started walking back toward the camp and the horses. “Come on, Bobby Lee,” she said. “I’ll race ya!”

The next day, late in the afternoon, Hunter had a strange sense of foreboding as he rode into the Arapaho Creek headquarters.

He stopped his horse just inside the wooden portal in the overhead crossbar of which the Arapaho Creek brand—A/C—had been burned. He curvetted his fine grullo stallion, Nasty Pete, and took a quick study of the place.

The house sat off to the right and just ahead of him—a large, two-and-a-half story stone-and-log affair. A large, fieldstone hearth ran up the lodge’s near wall shaded by a large, dusty cottonwood, its leaves flashing silver in the breeze blowing in from the bastion of the Rocky Mountain Front Range rising in the west. A couple of log barns and a stable as well as a windmill and blacksmith shop sat ahead on Hunter’s left, beyond a large corral.

The wooden blades of the windmill creaked in the wind, and that hot, dry, vagrant breeze kicked up finely churned dirt and horse apples in the yard just ahead of him; they made a mini, short-lived tornado out of them. The breeze brought to Hunter’s nostrils the pungent tang of sage and horse manure.

Likely impressive at one time, the place hard a time-worn look. Brush grew up around the house and most of the outbuildings. Rusted tin wash tubs hung from nails in the front wall of the bunkhouse. Also, there were few men working around the headquarters. Hunter spotted only four. Only one was actually working. A big, burly man in a leather apron, likely the blacksmith, was greasing the axle of a dilapidated supply wagon, the A/C brand painted on both sides badly faded.

One man sat on the corral fence to Hunter’s left, rolling a sharpened matchstick from one corner of his mouth to the other with a desultory air. Two others sat outside the bunkhouse between the stable and the windmill, straddling a bench and playing two-handed poker.

Of course, most of the hands could be out on the range, tending the herds, but Hunter had spied few cattle after he, Annabelle, and the ten horses they would sell here, had ridden onto Navajo Creek graze roughly twenty miles north of Denver, near a little town called Javelina. The graze itself was sparse. It was a motley looking country under a broad, blue bowl of sky from which the sun hammered down relentlessly.

It was all bunch grass and sage, a few cedars here and there peppering low, chalky buttes and meandering, dry arroyos. It was, indeed, a big, broad, open country with damn few trees, the First Front of the Rocky Mountains cropping up in the west, some of the highest peaks showing the ermine of the previous winter’s snow. This dry, dun brown country lay in grim contrast to those high, formidable ridges that bespoke deep, lush pine forests and roaring creeks and rivers.

What also appeared odd was that three of the four men Hunter could see appeared old. Late fifties to mid-sixties. Only the man sitting with his boot heels hooked over a corral slat to Hunter’s left appeared under forty. He regarded Hunter blandly from beneath the weathered, funneled bridge of his once-cream Stetson that was now, after enduring much sun, wind, rain, and hail of this harsh country—a washed-out yellow.

The man slid his gaze from Hunter to the main house and said, tonelessly, “Looks like the hosses are here, boss.”

Hunter followed the man’s gaze toward where an old man with thin gray, curly hair and a long, gray tangle of beard stood on the house’s front porch. He had to be somewhere in his late-sixties—hard-earned years, judging by the man’s slump and general air of fragility.

He appeared to be carrying a great weight and was damned weary of it. He wore wash-worn, broadcloth trousers, a thin cream longhandle top, and suspenders. He squinted at Hunter, his bony features long and drawn. He looked as though he might have just woken from a nap.

“Hunter Buchanon?” the man called raspily.

“Rufus Scanlon?” Hunter countered.

The man dipped his chin, his long beard brushing his flat, bony chest.

“We have the horses up on the ridge,” Hunter said, hooking a thumb to indicate the low, pine-peppered ridge behind him. “I rode down to see if you were ready for ’em.”

He glanced into the corral where only three horses stood still as stone save switching their tails at flies, hang-headed, regarding the newcomer dubiously.

The man beckoned broadly with a thin arm; his lips spread an eager smile, giving sudden life to the otherwise lifeless tangle of beard. “Bring ’em on down!”

Hunter glanced around the yard once more. He was selling his prized horses for two hundred apiece. He had a hard time reconciling such a price with such a humble looking headquarters. He hoped he and Anna hadn’t ridden all this way for nothing.

“All right, then,” he said.

He neck-reined Nasty Pete around and galloped back out through the portal. He followed the trail across Navajo Creek and up to the crest of the ridge where Anna was holding the horses in scattered pines. They stood spread out, calmly grazing, Anna sitting her calico mare, Ruthie, among them.

When they’d stopped here on the ridge, Bobby Lee had disappeared. Likely sensing they’d come to the end of the trail, the coyote had lit out on a rabbit or gopher hunt. Seeing Hunter, Anna booted the mare over to him, frowning incredulously beneath the brim of her dark green Stetson, its horsehair thong drawn up securely beneath her chin. The Rocky Mountain sun glinted fetchingly in her deep red hair.

“What is it?” she asked, the mare nuzzling Nasty Pete with teasing affection.

“What’s what?”

“I know that look. What’s wrong?”

Hunter shrugged and leaned forward against his saddle horn. “Not sure. Humble place, the Navajo Creek. Doesn’t look like the kind of outfit that can afford these hosses. I told Scanlon in my letter that this was a cash deal only. That’s two thousand dollars. Just a might skeptical that old man down there has two thousand dollars laying around, lonely an’ in need of a home.” The big ex-Confederate gave his wife a pointed look. “I’ll guaran-damn-tee you, though, I’m not goin’ home without the cash he agreed to pay or without the horses he agreed to buy if he can’t buy ’em!”

“You should’ve had him put cash down.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve never. . .