Westbound

Book 1: Battling Harrigans of the Frontier

by Dusty Richards, Matthew Mayo

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

From the Spur Award–winning author, the first in a captivating new multigenerational saga chronicling the adventures of the pioneering Harrigan family as they brave crossing the American West, fighting to survive in the dangerous wilderness—and against even deadlier people—to forge a better life for themselves.

Mackworth “Mack” Harrigan’s family legacy burned to the ground in the spring of 1849. The Ohio mill that brought them prosperity was now cinder and ash, and his ruthless father perished in the flames along with their fortune. If the Harrigans have a future, it lies out west in open country where they can build whatever lives they choose. Mack knows his wife Ell, and their children Kane, Meghan, and Fitch are more than capable of overcoming the challenges of their journey.

For the untamed frontier is full of seriously deadly battles. From a rough river voyage to wagon train travel across desert lands plagued by dust storms, the Harrigans encounter desperados and merciless killers who view them as little more than prey. And as Mack and his family adapt to their merciless surroundings, they realize they must enforce their own laws and dispense their own justice …

Release date: February 21, 2023

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

“You’re looking well, Harrigan.”

Beneath an array of greasy cogs and gears, his backside sticking up in the air in an undignified pose, Mackworth “Mack” Harrigan gritted his teeth and backed out of the unforgiving, stifling space.

“Snelling. I thought I smelled dung.”

If the portly, jowled man in the brocade vest and brushed bowler took offense, his small grin didn’t show it. He pulled a pipe from his mouth. “Accept my offer. The last one, I assure you, and you won’t have to sully your hands with such filth day after day.” Snelling looked around him at the dusty timbers of the mill. “Then I will move on.” His gaze settled on the grimy man before him. “But not before I let the entire town know how selfish you have been in waiting me out, hoping to raise my offer for your own gain, even whilst everyone in Harrigan Falls suffers for it.”

Mack sighed, wiped his hands free of the grease he had smeared onto the ailing, old gap-toothed gears. “Look, Snelling, I’ve told you countless times already I am not selling my family’s mill. Too many people in Harrigan Falls depend on it.”

“Do they? Because my figures show differently. My figures indicate your customers are fleeing your custom like rats off a listing ship. It’s only a matter of time, Harrigan. If you let me walk out that door, you won’t get another offer from me. And then, what? A few weeks, a month you’ll close the doors of this fusty old wreck of a mill forever and this town will dry up further and scatter in the next stiff breeze.”

Mack put his hands on his hips, the grimy rag still clutched in his right hand. “Then why do you want it so badly, eh, Snelling? And put out that pipe. As a mill owner yourself, you know this dusty old place is too dry to risk sparking off.”

Again, the portly gent smiled, wider this time, and dropped his pipe into his coat pocket. “Oh, Harrigan, we’ve been over that far too many times. It’s the location I want, not a run-down old mill that makes flour and meal. Your mill is perched on the best possible spot, the high shoulder of Harrigan Falls itself, as you well know.” Snelling waved his ebony walking stick toward the rushing river beyond the beam-and-board mill wall to his left. “Why, a flow like that will power three sizable mills. Five, even!”

Shaking his head, Mack turned back to his work. “Well, Snelling, you’ll never know.”

The jowly man tugged open the door. “We’ll see, Mackworth Harrigan. We’ll see.” Smiling, he touched his hat brim with his cane, stepped outside, and tugged closed the big, old, worn door behind him.

Mack bent back to his task with a sigh. Snelling’s final words echoed then faded in his mind as he eyed the old, run-down, overworked machine. “I have got to fix this pile of junk,” he growled, each word accenting a jerking movement with a box wrench.

The orders, he knew, were piled up, backed up, and despite his father’s constant scraping and scrimping and fretting about money, it was up to Mack to keep the old place rumbling.

As if on cue, a tall, white-haired, once broad-shouldered but now stooped man walked in. Gideon Harrigan, widower and living patriarch of the clan for which the town, the falls, and the mill were named, tugged the wide, thick-planked oak door shut behind him. “Don’t dare tell me you’re still at it! That should have been fixed hours ago, man!”

Beneath the greasy cog, Mack Harrigan closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. “Afternoon, Father.”

“I would have thought, working in this mill all your life, you would know by now the importance of keeping Old Bertha working!” The old man lifted a stack of papers and let them slap back to the flour-dusted desktop. “Look at these orders awaiting fulfillment. When do you expect to mill out”—he pulled on his twine-mended spectacles and held a sheet up to his nose tip—“Arthur Grabow’s corn meal order? Huh? Or this”—he lifted another sheet—“Hollis’s flour! My word. He has a bakery that depends on Harrigan’s Mill, you know!”

“I only know that, Father, because you have reminded me—and all the rest of them—at least once each day since I was old enough to listen.”

“And apparently it wasn’t often enough!” The old man was looking down at Mack’s boots on the floor before him. He lightly kicked one on the sole. “How much longer?”

That was all Mack could take. He shoved himself out from beneath the still machine and jerked himself upright. He advanced on his father, who had taken a step backward, and backed the old man up against the desk.

Though Mack had for most of his life been shorter than his father, they now saw eye to eye, as the old man walked slouched the last few years, as if the world’s weight wearied him.

“Boy!” said the old man, his eyes narrowing.

For a flicker of a moment, Mack was a nine-year-old lad again, afraid to look up into his father’s eyes, afraid he’d take that long, steel-stiff ramrod of a pointer finger and dig into Mack’s chest and say . . . Do you hear me, boy?

Thirty-two-year-old Mack Harrigan shook his head and looked down once more at his father an old man who still thought he was the lord and master of Mack’s life. An old man who was driving that same stiff finger into Mack’s chest, all these years later, and saying the same damned thing.

“Boy, are you listening to me? This mill is your birthright! You have no right to let it slide like this. We have commitments to the people of Harrigan Falls, a town named for this proud family!”

Mack lost the wide-eyed, little boy look of fear and narrowed his own eyes and moved closer, the old man’s finger trapped between them. “I have never made it a secret that I want none of this. I never have. I don’t care! It’s your birthright. You think the queen over there in England says, ‘No, I don’t think I want to do this anymore’? No! She does it because it’s her birthright. She had a duty and an obligation to uphold.” He pulled in air, then bit back the foul words he knew would come out of his mouth. Words he knew he would regret saying to his father.

But one of these days . . .

“What about your sons? It’s their birthright, too!”

Mack shook his head. “No. You may have dictated the terms of my life, but you won’t ruin the lives of my boys. No way.”

“But—”

“No! You once told me Harrigan men are bold and adventurous. Yes, I believe they are. After all, you had your adventures, didn’t you? The ones you stopped talking about once you realized they were more exciting for me to hear than the stories about how wonderful it is to spend all the days of your life in this dusty, smelly old mill, going half deaf because of the constant rush of the river on the other side of that wall!”

He shoved a pointing finger at the bulk of the beam-heavy mill wall that overhung the thundering Harrigan Falls.

“Yes, you had your adventures, Father! You had your dreams. And yet, for some reason, you came back here and chose this. You chose it, not me. You assumed the role of third heir of the Harrigan Mill. At least Uncle Zeke had sense enough to go and stay gone.” Mack turned away from his father, exhausted by the same old argument.

But his father wasn’t through shaking that worn-out rag. “Yes! Bring up Zeke, that fiddle-footed fool brother of mine! Runs off and never returns. Oh, but he sends us all these fancy letters of his rip-snorting adventures. Sure he does.” Gideon made a spitting noise and shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t know where you came from. You get that wanderlust from my fool brother, all right. A crazy man, all wanderlust and gallivanting all over the world for what purpose, I don’t know. Your sainted mother would agree with me, always did. Home is here and nowhere else. All we can hope is that it skips a generation and leaves your boys alone.”

Mack bit the inside of his cheek once again, lest he say things he would regret. The argument rolled down the same worn ruts it always did. Then he smiled. “Speaking of Uncle Zeke . . .” Mack turned to face his father. He was going to enjoy watching the old man’s face war between trying to look disgusted and trying to not look excited to hear. “He says California is filled with gold. A fellow can practically trip over it, he says. Nuggets in the streams as big as kitten heads.” Mack shook his head at the wonder and thrill of the thought.

“Yeah?” said Gideon, sagging back into the size and shape of a decidedly unmenacing, stooped old man. “Then why doesn’t he send us some so we can pay off our debtors?” He leaned over the desk. “I wish to God Snelling had never opened his mills hereabouts. We had it good before he come along and ruined everything.”

Mack saw his father’s shrunken figure, the once broad shoulders and bold head bent and rounded and bowed. And his hands. Once they had looked so big and powerful his own hands disappeared in them when they shook hands each morning and night, as was the old man’s custom. Now, though, those hands were old, work-hardened, thick with calluses and bent with rheumatism.

At that moment Mack had a clear glimpse of what he would look like in a few short years. And it chilled his guts to the core of him and sent a shiver of ice up his spine.

He stepped forward. “Father,”—his voice was softer, kinder, quieter—“it would be no crime, no crime at all, nobody would think harsh of you, nor different in any way . . .”

Gideon looked up at his son with a drawn, gray face. His eyes were wet and tired.

Mack continued with his thought. “Sell the mill to Lambert Snelling, Father. He’s made a fair offer on the property and you know it. I could spend my lifetime doing exactly what it is you have done all these years. And I wouldn’t be any farther ahead than you are. Only farther behind—more debts and less customers and a life that never had at least one little adventure in it.”

Gideon’s bottom lip quivered and tears brimmed in his eyes. Mack felt ready to hug the old man, something he hadn’t done in many years, not since his mother, Dimity, had died twenty-six years before, when Mack was six years old.

Then Gideon’s eyes narrowed and he pulled back and shoved Mack’s hand from his shoulder. He slowly shook his head, and in a deep growl, said, “If you can’t make yourself useful, then go home and get under your wife’s feet. Read your uncle’s precious, lying letters and leave me be. There’s one Harrigan who has work to do and knows the value of not giving up on his birthright.” He turned from Mack without looking at him and made for the store room.

Mack gritted his teeth, then nodded once. “By God, I will then.” He wiped his hands once more on the grimy grease rag and stuffed it into his trouser pocket. He did not look back as he slammed the big door behind him, nearly knocking down Mr. Copeland, one of his father’s oldest friends and owner of the best local bakehouse. He was also like an uncle to Mack, who had known him his entire life.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Copeland. Forgive me. I’m . . .” He looked up into the sky and crossed his arms.

“Ah, you and Gideon have been at it again, eh?”

“Yes, nothing changes.”

“Until it does,” said the portly smiling man. He patted Mack on the arm as he opened the mill door. “I’m nearly sixty years old, only bested by a year by your father, but I can tell you, Mack, life has the uncanny habit of surprising us when we least expect it.” He looked at the river. “Good day for fishing with a youngster or two, that’s what I think it is.”

Mack, too, was watching the hypnotic slap and splash and swirl of the white water below the mill. He shook himself from his reverie and looked at Mr. Copeland once more. “Fishing, oh, yes, that’s not a bad idea. I might just do that myself. Maybe the boys will want to join me.”

“That’s the spirit. Now, I’m going to go on in there and see what I can do about that father of yours.” He winked and just before he closed the door he said, “Wish me luck!”

Mack smiled and headed for home. He didn’t make it far before the dark weight of the latest squabble with his father settled once again on his head. The truth of their hot words, each man coming at the topic from opposing views, still rang in his head. He could not deny he had inherited the famous Harrigan wanderlust that strikes each generation of Harrigan men. Why couldn’t he have had a brother? And then as quickly as the thought skittered into his disgruntled mind, he felt a knot in his gut.

He would have had a brother had his mother not died in childbirth, along with the baby boy when Mack was just a boy. Ever since then it had been Mack and his father. And it hadn’t been too bad until his teenage years when Mack became a young man of his own and had begun experiencing spasms of longing for anything else, anywhere else.

The only thing that had kept him in Harrigan Falls had been his father’s stern demeanor. And then Mack had begun to see Elspeth Delaney, or Ell, in a whole new way. A smiling, high-spirited girl with hair the color of sunlight shining through wheat, she was a girl he’d grown up knowing. It turned out she had been seeing him in a different way as well.

With his father’s encouragement, which Mack later realized was as much self-serving as it was out of happiness for them, Mack and Ell courted and soon wed. His future had seemed secure and, for a time, he was as content as he had been as a child . . . before the thoughts of traveling from Harrigan Falls had seized his mind.

After all, he’d thought then, he had a secure future with the mill, which would one day be all his. And that would be the best way to take care of a wife and a family.

And soon he had one of those as well. It seemed that babies and a home and a job with occasional Sunday picnic jaunts up- and downstream were all he had, and yet that was enough.

Until it wasn’t.

The old thoughts of wandering began visiting him at all hours, rattling him and rousing him from sleep, distracting him at the mill. The irregular arrivals of his uncle’s letters only added dry wood to the fire.

And now he was, a man of thirty-two.

The oldest of his three children, at fifteen, Kane was a thoughtful and curious young man. His sweet girl, Meghan was thirteen and a bit prissy, perhaps, but Ell swore she would outgrow that. And following up by seven years ago last month was the fiery, fierce Fitch, a fearless little fellow they had to keep an eye on every minute of the day—and night.

Thoughts of his children and his Ell brought a smile to Mack’s otherwise dour face. For them, he would work the devilish mill. Work it until he looked and acted and sounded like his father, a worn out old man, embittered by too little fun and crippled by too much work.

Mack rounded Monroe Lane and saw his home in the distance, a tidy little place set well away from neighbors, with gardens covering every spot that wasn’t pasture or barn and house. His growing brood required a whole lot of food.

He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and his right fingertips once more touched the latest letter from Uncle Zeke. It had arrived last month, and Mack had known the contents of it by heart within a couple of days, but still he carried it with him, a touchable reminder of the wonders that lay in wait just down the road. If only . . .

“California,” quoted Mack from the letter, “is filled with so much gold a man can practically trip over the thumb-size nuggets.” Without further thought, he glanced up as he approached the split-rail gate leading into his fenced property about his house, and shook his head. “Knock it off, Mack,” he whispered. “You have a life right here. Why try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

But it was broken, and had been since Snelling had come into their lives. And the devil of it was, Snelling’s offer was the one thing that could solve all of their problems, his, his father’s by way of paying off debts, and Snelling’s, too. But his father would be heartbroken—and worse—to sell the mill to anyone, let alone someone as oily as Snelling. Mack knew he could never live comfortably in his own skin if he dealt the dirtiest deal of all with Snelling, at least while his father was alive.

The thought of not having his father in his life pained him to his core. Despite their frequent bickering, he loved the old man with a fierceness that would never quit. He could not, would not break his heart that way. And so, Mack knew, that was also why he would never leave Harrigan Falls.

With a deep, long sigh that came from way down in his boots and up and out of his mouth, Mackworth Harrigan swung open his front gate and strode up the walk to his home.

As soon as he opened wide the front door, Fitch, the hellion of the Harrigan clan, howled “Pa!” and hurtled at him as if he were shot from a cannon.

Mack caught the kid up in his big, burly arms and hugged him close, spinning in a slow circle in the entry hall.

“Hello, anybody here? I’ve been attacked by a lion and I sure could use some help!”

Ell peeked, red-faced and smiling, from the large kitchen at the back of the house. It was one of Mack’s favorite features of the place, and not only because Ell managed to conjure meals that amazed and satisfied their family day after day. It was an older home that had become available for let, then purchase, when they were barely married a month and living with his father.

Since then they had done their level best to fill the modest cottage with laughter and life. And the biggest reason was Ell herself. For no matter how dour Mack’s mood of a night, his beautiful wife’s pretty eyes and wide smile never failed to buoy him, body and soul.

The scene he came home to on that night was one he had experienced many times before, and one he never tired of. Meghan, his pretty young daughter, stood beside her mother at the long worktable that dominated the middle of the kitchen. They were both laughing and flecked with flour as though they had tossed it at each other. He kissed them both on the cheek and did his best to keep the squirming Fitch from choking him and from sliding off his back. Mack had a flitting thought, wondering what it would one day be like to not have Fitch attack him on his daily homecoming and clamber up him as if he were a stout tree. “Where’s Kane?”

“Hazard a guess, husband.” Ell nodded toward the kitchen’s one window that overlooked the back garden where they kept all manner of vegetable, fruit, and nut growing much of the year.

“He’s rooting around behind the chicken shed like a pig,” said Meghan.

“Why would he do that?” said Mack, trying to get Fitch, who was humming some schoolboy tune and flicking his father’s right earlobe.

“’Cause he’s a pig,” said Fitch. He didn’t giggle about it until Meghan and Ell did.

Mack tried not to, feeling it a prime moment to tell the boy how wrong it was to call his elder brother such a thing, but he lost the fight and surrendered to a spasm of laughter himself.

“When will supper be served?” asked Mack.

“Well, considering you’re early, by”—Ell leaned out and spied the mantel clock in the front room—“an hour and a half, supper will be ready in two hours.”

“Oh,” said Mack.

“But there are leftover biscuits from breakfast under the green-checked cloth on the sideboard.”

“Great,” he said, lowering the flailing Fitch to the floor. The kid beat him to the biscuits, but Mack managed to scoop him up and snatch them back from Fitch’s grasp—most of them, that is. The tot retained two handfuls of crumbs.

“He has an appetite like a mule,” said Ell, as Fitch thundered out the back door.

“I thought you were going to say like me.” Mack bit into a biscuit.

“Same thing,” said Meghan under her breath.

Mack exchanged raised eyebrow glances with Ell, then he leaned close to Meghan’s left ear and said, “I heard that!”

She screamed and her hands flew up, coating her and Mack’s faces with flecks of dough and flour.

He sputtered and, as he brushed himself off, all of them giggling yet again, he said, “With all this flour being tossed around, I’d best get back to the mill so we don’t run out.” It was as if he’d pulled a lever and the bottom dropped away from beneath these happy moments with his family. They all fell silent, his instant mood shift affecting each of them.

Finally, Ell said, “You had words with your father.” It was not a question. She sliced a carrot into rounds, her knife snapping through with practiced precision.

Mack sighed and ladled water into his pewter tankard. After he sipped, he said, “Yes, same old story.”

“Why do you and Grandfather argue so much?” said Meghan.

“We don’t argue so much as we disagree.”

“Same thing, isn’t it?” said Meghan.

Mack almost replied with a quick no, then held his tongue. “Since when did my daughter become so wise?”

Before anyone could answer, the sudden howl of two voices shot in through the open door.

Mack set his mug down and looked out to see Kane, hands and the knees of his trouser covered with earth, legging it after a wide-eyed, giggling Fitch. The little one made it halfway across the yard before Kane caught him and scooped him up by the middle, and right off the ground.

“Give it back!” shouted Kane, reaching with his free left hand for Fitch’s cupped hands.

But the younger boy was too quick for him and jerked his hands from side to side, just out of his brother’s reach.

“Give it, you little sneaking thief!”

“Here, here!” Mack strode to them and pulled Fitch from Kane’s arm. Standing between them, he set the little boy down, but held on to his near arm. Kane leaned against his father’s outstretched left hand. He could feel the boy’s muscled chest and, as he did every day, wondered how his children had grown so very quickly. Was there a way to keep them young for a while longer?

“What’s this about?”

“That little sneak stole from me!”

“Did not,” said Fitch, trying not to smile and struggling to break free of his father’s grip.

Mack noticed the kid’s right hand was still cupped and held away. He turned to Kane. “Now see here, son, those are hot words. If you call someone a thief, you had better be prepared to back up that claim with proof of the accusation you’ve leveled.”

“I can! Open his hand. You’ll see.”

“Okay, okay. Now back up and settle down. I’ll see to it.”

Kane held out a moment longer, his face red, his jaw canted, and his arms ending in fists then he backed up.

Mack noticed Ell and Meghan watching from the kitchen doorway. He knelt and turned Fitch to him. “Son. Fitch, look at me.”

The little blonde firebrand did, his blue eyes sparkling and his plump red cheeks dimpling.

“Fitch, what did you do?”

“He took my salamander!” Kane said from several feet behind Mack.

“Is that true, Fitch? No fibs, now. Remember, a Harrigan never fibs.”

The boy looked down at his grimy bare feet and his smile slid away. It made Mack feel like a brute, but he carried on as a father should and lifted Fitch’s face with a knuckle under the chin. “Fitch.”

The boy said nothing but held up his right hand and then opened it. Mack got a glimpse of a salamander that filled the little hand, but this one bore blue spots on its back, not something he recalled seeing before.

Kane stepped in and gingerly took it from Fitch’s hand before it seemed as if the little creature, realizing it was free at last, was about to jump from the little boy’s hand.

“Fitch, do you understand why taking that salamander from your brother was the wrong thing to do?”

The kid looked down, then shrugged. “It’s not his.”

“It is, too,” said Kane, inspecting. . .