The Killing Breed Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Praise for Frank Leslie and The Lonely Breed

  “Frank Leslie kicks his story into a gallop right out of the gate . . . raw and gritty as the West itself.”

  —Mark Henry, author of The Hell Riders

  “Frank Leslie writes with leathery prose honed sharper than a buffalo skinner’s knife, with characters as explosive as forty-rod whiskey, and a plot that slams readers with the impact of a Winchester slug. The Lonely Breed is edgy, raw, and irresistible.”

  —Johnny D. Boggs, Spur Award-winning author of Camp Ford

  “Explodes off the page in an enormously entertaining burst of stay-up-late, read-into-the-night, fast-moving flurry of page-turning action. Leslie spins a yarn that rivals the very best on Western shelves today.”

  —J. Lee Butts, author of Lawdog

  “Hooks you instantly with sympathetic characters and sin-soaked villains. Yakima has a heart of gold and an Arkansas toothpick. If you prefer Peckinpah to Ang Lee, this one’s for you.”

  —Mike Baron, creator of Nexus and The Badger comic book series

  “Big, burly, brawling, and action-packed, The Lonely Breed is a testosterone-laced winner from the word ‘go,’ and Frank Leslie is an author to watch!”

  —E. K. Recknor, author of The Brothers of Junior Doyle

  Also by Frank Leslie

  The Lonely Breed

  The Thunder Riders

  The Wild Breed

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, September 2008

  Copyright © Peter Brandvold, 2008

  All rights reserved

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Bob King,

  teacher and friend

  Chapter 1

  The gnarled, bony hand grabbed the bottle around its neck and raised it to the dying light slanting through the dusty, west-facing window. The hand tipped the bottle back, and the man raised his head—an unshaven death’s-head of pale, gaunt, drunken misery—from the pillow.

  About three inches of whiskey remained. Good.

  Neither he nor the girl would have to go downstairs for more. Not for another hour or two, anyway. It was too cold for the man to go, and he didn’t want the girl to go and take with her the warmth of her young, supple body. Hours ago, he’d let the fire in the main saloon hall die. Too much work to split wood and haul it in from outside to feed the flames that, like the flame inside the man, seemed to be eternally dying.

  “Got enough?” the girl asked, curled up against him, running a slender brown finger through the coarse gray hair on his chest.

  She luxuriated in the feather mattress and the sheets that had been shipped from Denver when the saloon was still making money, and when there were more girls than only her, Ruby, a half-breed orphan from Montana Territory. She’d come from mining camps in Montana and Dakota where she’d plied her trade in drafty plank shacks with little more than straw pallets to work and sleep on, making so little that when she’d come here riding a stolen mule to the gold camps farther up the mountains, she hadn’t weighed a hundred pounds.

  Bill Thornton nodded and lifted the bottle to his lips, his eyes rolling back at the soothing fire of the whiskey that plunged down his throat and into his belly.

  Ruby smiled and lifted her head slightly, her coffee brown eyes peering into his. She slid her hand down his chest and belly, found him beneath the quilts, and gently squeezed. “Again?”

  Anything to please him, so he’d have no thoughts against keeping her here in this run-down saloon on an abandoned freight trail on the eastern slopes of the Colorado Rockies. Here, where he’d get maybe thirty customers a month. He used to get more than that in a single weeknight, when the trail outside the saloon was still a main thoroughfare for miners, freighters, drummers, and stagecoaches. Then he’d easily make a hundred dollars on the whores alone, three or four times that on hooch and his deftly weighted roulette wheel.

  Thornton chuckled and set the bottle beside him, running his free hand through the long black hair falling down the girl’s curving back. “You flatter me. I’m lucky to get it up once a week.”

  For some reason, she found this funny, chuckling as she rested her head once more on the pillow, showing the gap where she’d lost an eyetooth. Thornton wasn’t offended. She wasn’t mocking him. Ruby was a little touched, and who wouldn’t be after the life she’d had? Besides, she took care of him, tending the saloon when his side ached too much for him to do anything but lie in bed or sit downstairs by the fire and kill the near-constant pain of the unhealed wound with rye.

  Ki
lling the pain and the memory of the girl who’d shot him. Trying to kill it, rather. Enough whiskey would soothe the raw ache in his side—a festering, stinging burn that he often imagined to be that of a rat trying to chew its way out from inside him. But it never took away the image of the girl who’d given it to him.

  Faith . . .

  The memory of the derringer slug drilling his side made him wince as though he’d been slapped—the wound had nearly healed once, then reopened when he’d taken a drunken fall. It had formed a couple of thin scabs but had never fully healed. Now it looked like raw meat greened by too much time in the sun, and it wept a thick yellow puss liberally laced with blood.

  Thornton sucked a sharp breath against the old rage kindling inside him again. Beside him, the girl dozed, snoring softly, and he raised the bottle once more, blinking away the image of the blonde he’d once employed here—the beguiling Faith with her frank blue eyes, husky laugh, hourglass figure with firm, ripe breasts, a heart-shaped mole on her neck, and another nearly the same shape under her right breast.

  She had a near-perfect body, but it was more than her body, Thornton knew, that had made her the main attraction of his roadhouse for nearly two years, and which had made him a wealthy and respected man. It was her earthy charm and wit as well as an aloofness that, although she gave her body, kept her spirit her own—inviolate, mysterious, and singularly alluring.

  There was something about that elusive spirit that made men want to tame it. Thornton himself had wanted to; in fact, he’d thought he had. The chewing burn in his side reminded him that he hadn’t come close. . . .

  After she’d shot him and taken off with the half-breed who’d done odd jobs about the place— Yakima Henry—Thornton’s luck had soured. For that reason, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, he blamed her for all of it—his ruined health and his ruined business.

  Ruby lifted her head suddenly from the pillow, frowning. Her ears were better than Thornton’s, and it was several seconds later that the roadhouse proprietor heard the drum of hooves outside, and then the squawk of tack and the rattle of bridle chains. Male voices rose as the hoof clomps grew.

  “We have business!” Ruby trilled, rising to a sitting position, letting the quilts fall to reveal her large, swaying brown breasts as she turned toward the window.

  She started to climb over Thornton toward the floor, but he gently pushed her back. “Hold on, girl.”

  Cursing, he dropped his pale, thin legs to the floor and rose, wincing at the hitch in his side. He grabbed the top quilt off the bed and, wrapping it around his shoulders while holding the whiskey jug in one hand, shuffled to the window.

  He rarely got any business during the week; most of it came on Friday and Saturday nights, and even that was mostly from the same four or five men working diggings along the nearby creeks, and from a couple of Swedes raising horses over in Bobcat Valley. Few men but the occasional grub-line rider or desperado on the lam rode the trail during the week.

  Thornton looked out into the yard where dust and leaves swirled in the raw late-September wind. Four riders had pulled up in front of the roadhouse. They sat their horses abreast, curiously looking around. Because there were a couple of broken windows, the porch boards were rotted with weeds pushing up from beneath, and there was no smoke rising from the fieldstone chimney, they no doubt wondered if Thornton was open.

  Thornton himself often wondered. Was he open? What was the point in running the place with as little business as he got? But then, it no longer had any market value, and while he’d managed to save a sizeable nest egg, he had nowhere else to go even if his health would allow him to travel.

  “Go away,” Thornton grumbled, appraising the men sitting their horses below—five hard-looking, unshaven hombres in heavy fur coats, with rifles in oiled saddle scabbards, revolvers and knives jutting from sheaths on their hips or thighs. The long black hair of one of the riders—the man with the black stovepipe hat banded with snakeskin— swirled around in the wind. The angling late-afternoon light touched a small tattoo forming a green-blue cross on his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

  Lowry Temple. Shit. He was ramrod of the bunch gathered around him now—three other American regulators and a Mexican pistolero named Chulo Garza.

  “Go away,” Thornton grumbled again, setting the bottle on the dresser to his left and reaching for the .38 revolver hanging by its butt ring from a wall hook.

  Temple lifted his head to shout above the moaning wind, “Thornton, you in there?”

  Thornton let his hand freeze on the pistol’s butt and squinted down into the yard, studying the face of the man who’d yelled. It was Temple, all right. He dropped his hand from the .38 and, grunting his disgust at having to traipse downstairs, tossed the robe onto the bed and reached for his balbriggans.

  “Friends?” the girl asked.

  “Friends?” Thornton chuckled. “Lowry Temple is no friend. Let’s just call him an ex-employee. Bastard still owes me for a man he didn’t kill.”

  When he’d stepped into his threadbare longhandles and donned heavy wool socks, he grabbed his tattered robe off a wall hook, then reached for the quilt. “Did a couple of small jobs for me three years ago and still thinks I owe him free hooch and a bed whenever he pulls through.”

  “Thornton!” Temple called once more.

  “I’m comin’!” the roadhouse proprietor shouted at the window.

  He dropped the .38 into one robe pocket, the bottle into another, stepped into wool-lined elk-skin slippers, and opened the door with another shrill curse. “Stay here, Ruby,” he said as he stepped into the hall and began drawing the door closed behind him. “Don’t want these wolves befouling you, girl. That younker that rides with Temple—Benny Freeze—carries clap like a polecat carries rabies.”

  Thornton shuffled downstairs in his slippers and shivered as the chill of the cavernous main saloon hall, with its long, scarred bar and twenty or so tables, pushed against him.

  As he descended the stairs, he ran a hand down the rail, his palms scraping several of the jagged holes that had been torn from the wood the night the half-breed had shot his way out of there, hop-scotchingtables while most of the men in the saloon had triggered lead at him. Earlier that night, the breed, Yakima Henry, had carved up four men who had tried to disfigure Faith to settle an old score with Thornton.

  Those dead men had had friends and relatives downstairs that night, and the others took umbrage with any breed who killed a white man for whatever reason.

  Thornton didn’t mind that Henry had saved Faith. What he did mind was that the breed had been diddling the whore for free and that, the next day, she’d run off with him like a love-struck schoolgirl.

  Yakima Henry had moved like a phantom, dodging bullets, swinging from chandeliers, and finally flying through the big plate-glass window at the room’s front as though he’d suddenly sprouted wings.

  He’d disappeared into the night, stealing back to the roadhouse the next day to retrieve the girl Thornton had thought was his own.

  Faith.

  Before she’d left, however, she’d given the roadhouse proprietor something to remember her by. Thornton had been about to punish her for sleeping with the breed behind his back with the traditional knife slash across the lips—which she had richly deserved despite her insistence that she and the half-breed were only friends—when she’d pulled the pearl-gripped derringer from some hidden sheath in her underclothes.

  Unconsciously, Thornton brushed his hand against his perpetually blazing side—a doctor in Denver told him the surgery required to clean out the infected tissue in and around his ribs would, in his frail state, likely kill him—and began clomping across the main saloon hall. The big, bullet-shaped stove in the middle of the room had long since gone cold, and the only light in the place was the wan gray shafts pushing through the dirty, fly-specked windows and around the planks nailed over the broken ones. Thornton removed the locking bar from over the two outside
doors, tossed it onto the floor with an echoing bang, and pulled one of the doors open with a raucous rake of rusty hinges.

  The five riders had tied their horses to the hitch rail and were mounting the boardwalk, the wind rippling the fur on their coats, boots thumping and spurs chinking. Lowery Temple had an incredulous look on his hawkish, mud-eyed face as he cast his glance across the saloon’s front wall and then to Thornton, giving the roadhouse proprietor a bemused up-and-down.