The Lonely Breed Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Leap of Faith

  Can’t be more than a mile away now. . . .

  He gave a quiet, rasping whoop, urging himself on. He climbed to his feet and ran through the brush, the branches whipping at his legs.

  Behind him, the riders closed. Their horses seemed to be blowing in his ears. He could hear the men breathing, the leather squeaking like trees rubbing together, the bits rattling against the horses’ teeth, the bridle chains jangling like rusty sleigh bells.

  “Get the son of a bitch!” a man yelled.

  Yakima lifted his head and closed his eyes, pumping his legs and arms.

  Behind him a man yelled shrilly, “Woooo-ahhh! Pull up, boys.”

  Behind Yakima, a horse screamed. Hooves skidded across sod, snapping brush and grinding rocks.

  Yakima’s stride didn’t slow.

  His boots kept thudding. The ground disappeared.

  For two strides, he ran through air, began falling, cool air from below wafting over him, lifting his shirt flaps, blowing his hair above his head.

  He opened his eyes, looked down. Below, a narrow fissure of silvery-liquid darkness rose toward him....

  Praise for Frank Leslie and The Lonely Breed

  “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

  “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 Legendary Kid Donovan

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

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

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March 2007

  Copyright © Peter Brandvold, 2007

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  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.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49815-6

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  Chapter 1

  Yakima Henry heard the roadhouse’s batwing doors shudder behind him. He smelled the sweet plum aroma of a familiar perfume wafting on the night breeze.

  “Yakima?” the girl called.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the scantily clad doxie standing at the edge of the porch. He himself stood at the edge of the roadhouse’s front yard, partially hidden by a spindly cedar.

  “Uh... yes, ma’am?”

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “I was wondering if you would...” The whore let the sentence die beneath the din emanating from the roadhouse. “Hey, what’re you doin’ out there, anyways?”

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Sabrina. I’m taking a piss.”

  She laughed. “How uncouth! Why don’t you use the privy?”

  Yakima shook himself, tucked himself into his fringed buckskin breeches, and buttoned his fly with a grunt. His voice was deep, and he spoke with little expression, giving the impression that he preferred solitude to the company of others. “Privy’s off-limits to breeds.”

  He picked up the firewood he’d gathered from the shed and headed back to the porch and the smell of tobacco smoke and liquor tinged with the fragrance of the whore’s perfume.

  “You can’t piss where everybody else pisses?” she said, frowning down at him, brown ringlets framing her face. “That’s rotten.”

  Her willowy figure in a low-cut cream dress, hair feathers, and several cheap necklaces was silhouetted against the roadhouse’s two front windows. Raucous voices and piano music drifted over the batwings.

  Yakima’s undershot boot knocked a stone against the bottom step with a wooden thud. “This is the best job I’ve had in two years. I’m not gonna start complainin’ about where I piss.”

  “He works you like a slave.”

  “I’ve worked harder, and for a lot less than what Thornton pays me. Now, what can I do for you?”

  She tipped her head to
ward the batwings. “Me and one of the soldier boys broke my bed. Think you can fix it? It’s early. If my bed was fixed, I could get three more customers serviced before closing time. You know Thornton’s quotas.”

  “The headboard or the frame?”

  “A leg broke.”

  “I’ll get on it as soon as I fill the woodbox.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled, looked around, and pivoting coquettishly on one bare foot, screwed a finger into her chin. “I’ll give you a free poke sometime, when Thornton’s not around.”

  The planks squawked as Yakima mounted the porch steps. “You’d lay with a breed?”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” said Miss Sabrina, “but I’ve laid with plenty of breeds. Last whorehouse I worked was around Belle Fourche.”

  She ran her eyes across Yakima’s broad, muscular chest, his thick brown hands curled under the split logs in his arms. Having watched him working with his shirt off, she knew his belly was flat and hard as oak, his shoulders stout as wheel hubs, his waist not much bigger around than her own. His legs, slightly bowed, were turned with hard, long muscles straining his buckskins’ seams.

  She returned her glittering eyes to his face, with its broad, flat cheekbones. His dark skin was marked from knife pricks, and his lustrous hazel eyes were framed by long, dark brown hair. He smelled of leather, tobacco, sage, horses, and something else, which she imagined to be the smell of wild things in remote, far-flung, lonely places—animals as well as men.

  Sabrina felt a warming, tingling sensation deep in her belly. He’d no doubt be quite the lover, this taciturn half savage—thrusting between her legs, his fierce heart pounding like a tom-tom. She’d bet aces to eights she wouldn’t have to fake satisfaction for a change.

  Wouldn’t that be nice?

  Flushing, she nibbled a fingernail, cast him another admiring glance, then turned slowly and slipped through the batwings.

  Yakima was about to follow her when two men staggered out the doors and brushed past him, nearly knocking the wood from his arms. One laughing, the other singing drunkenly, they stepped off the porch and headed for the corral.

  Yakima turned away from them, pushed through the batwings, and threaded his way through the bullwhackers, miners, and drifters, most of whom were camped overnight in the field behind Thornton’s barn. He headed toward the woodbox at the room’s rear.

  Too late he saw the hobnailed boot thrust out from a chair to his left. His own left boot clipped it. He stumbled forward and fell to his hands and knees as the logs tumbled from his arms.

  Laughter erupted around him.

  Tensing his jaw, feeling his face burn, Yakima glanced over his left shoulder. A snaggletoothed bullwhacker wearing a battered derby and a greasy cravat turned in his chair toward Yakima and threw his head back, roaring.

  “Stupid nigger! Pick those up!”

  “Goddamn half-breeds never could walk a straight line!” added one of his poker-playing brethren on the other side of the table, chewing a cold cigar.

  Yakima’s heart thudded. Staring up at the snaggletoothed gent, feeling the veins in his forehead bulge, he set his right hand down on a stove-length chunk of cottonwood. His fingers curled around the log, tightened till his knuckles nearly popped through the skin. He began lifting the wood.

  A gun hammer clicked behind him. “I wouldn’t do that, breed.”

  Yakima turned his head slightly. From the corner of his right eye he saw the tall man he’d seen earlier. Bearded, bloodstained, wearing a ratty sombrero and three big revolvers, and toting a shotgun in a saddle boot. Bounty hunter. At the moment, he was aiming a long-barreled Remington at Yakima’s right ear.

  The room’s din had quieted slightly, everybody waiting to see the floor painted with the half-breed’s brains.

  Yakima’s gaze fell on his stocky boss, clad in the customary checked suit and bowler, bushy sideburns framing his long, raptorial face. Staring at Yakima, Thornton shook his head, slid his gaze to the man who’d tripped him.

  “Bardoul, leave the breed alone, will ya? I don’t pay him fifty cents a day to crawl around on the floor like a fucking cripple!”

  Bardoul glanced at Thornton. He flushed, wiped his hand across his mouth, and turned back toward the table and his fan of pasteboards and quarter-full whiskey glass. “Just remindin’ the breed his station.”

  Yakima heard the hammer ease down against the firing pin. Releasing his grip on the cottonwood log, he turned to see the big bounty hunter slip the revolver into a shoulder holster hanging loose beneath his duster.

  “You heard your boss, breed. Get to work.” The man smiled, showing two tobacco-stained silver front teeth. A strawberry-shaped birthmark darkened the skin just to the right of his nose. “Otherwise I might have to look through my wanted dodgers. I bet I’d find your big heathen face staring out at me—five, six hundred dollars’ worth, no doubt.”

  “Oh, come on, Wit,” said one of the girls, known as Kansas Jen, throwing her arms around the bounty hunter’s thick neck. “Leave the man alone and buy me a drink. I’m thirsty!”

  “Like I said, breed, get to work,” Bardoul said. He leveled a hard glance at Yakima, then ushered the whore toward the bar and yelled for beer.

  Yakima glanced again at Thornton, who stood surveying the room from beside the piano, his eyes hard and quick and rheumy from drink. The roadhouse owner patted the piano player, a one-time ranch cook named Cisco Squires, to get him playing again, and gave Yakima a brusque nod toward the woodbox.

  “When you’re done there,” he called through the rising din, jutting a long middle finger at the ceiling, “hustle two bottles of rye whiskey upstairs, room three!”

  Yakima gathered the logs, stood, and glanced back at the man who’d tripped him. The man was still chuckling, blowing smoke at the ceiling and tossing chips onto the pile in the table’s center.

  Balancing the wood in his arms, Yakima continued his serpentine journey to the back of the room, warily watching the floor, and dumped the wood in the box. When he’d added several logs to the stove, he went to the left end of the bar, where the two rye bottles were waiting for him. He grabbed the bottles, retrieved his toolbox from the storage room next to the backbar, and headed upstairs.

  He delivered the rye to room 3, then knocked on Sabrina’s door and went in. He paused, the door half open. Sabrina was sitting naked atop her dresser, wearing only her necklaces. A sandy-haired drifter, his pants and underwear bunched around his jackboots, thrust his hips between her spread knees.

  The two were grunting and sighing, the dresser hitting the back wall with repeated cracks. Seeing Yakima but continuing to grunt and sigh, groaning, “Oh, God, that’s so good,” Sabrina winked over the drifter’s right shoulder and flicked a hand toward the bed. The half-breed shut the door, crossed the room, and inspected the broken leg.

  He finished hammering a nail through the leg and wrapping it with rawhide about the same time the drifter dropped several coins in Sabrina’s jar and bid her good night.

  Yakima followed him out and was heading down the stairs when the blond whore known as Faith met him on the steps. Of Thornton’s eight girls, Yakima felt closest to Faith, as she often smuggled him steaks from the kitchen and had doctored a festering cut he’d received while working at the blacksmith’s anvil. The lithe, high-busted blonde was pulling a stocky gent along behind her, holding her pink see-through duster closed with her free hand.

  She gave Yakima a wan, conspiratorial smile and continued her graceful ascent of the creaky stairs, the stocky gent behind her staring wide-eyed at her ass and cooing, “Damn, it’s been pure-dee two months since my last mattress dance!”

  “Well, you’re due then, aren’t you?” Faith said, unable to keep the boredom from her voice.

  Stepping aside to let two other pairs pass, Yakima glanced at the top of the stairs. The man with Faith peered across the main hall. He nodded, as if to signal someone, then followed Faith down the hall.

  Yakima shifted his own gaze
to the saloon’s main floor. Three men were making a beeline for the stairs, moving fast, one tripping over a chair and nearly falling. They were big, dusty, hard-eyed men. One wore bandoliers crossed on his chest and a big, bone-handled bowie in a sheath under his left arm. As they passed Yakima on the stairs, one was chuckling softly. They all stank of horseshit, old sweat, and whiskey.

  Yakima looked around the room for Thornton. The roadhouse proprietor and the most notorious pimp on the Front Range was helping the two bartenders splash drinks into glasses. He was too busy to notice the three men bounding up the stairs alone.

  No one was allowed upstairs without the company of a girl—one girl to each man unless otherwise arranged with Thornton.

  Someone grabbed the collar of Yakima’s shirt, jerked it violently back, twisting the half-breed’s head around. It was the big red-faced man with the bowie in the shoulder harness.

  “Listen, breed, you stay away from the second floor for a while. No half-breeds allowed, less’n you wanna be sent to the rock gods with a bellyful of bowie.” He prodded Yakima’s side with his knifepoint. It felt like a bee sting; Yakima’s gut tightened against it. “Comprende?”

  The man turned and, slipping the knife into its sheath, climbed the stairs.

  Chapter 2

  “Breed!”

  Yakima turned toward the bar, before which the thirsty customers crowded four-deep, yelling and waving greenbacks. Thornton stood behind the rough-pine counter, a bottle in his hand.

  He glared at Yakima. “If you got nothin’ better to do than stand on the stairs with your thumb up your ass, get outside and help the hostlers with the stage that just pulled in. After that, clear tables. We’re runnin’ out of glasses!”

  Yakima pointed to the second story, to indicate the four men who’d gone upstairs with Faith, but Thornton had already resumed slopping booze and cajoling the regular bar-keep to hustle his fat ass. Yakima glanced back up the stairs, then continued on down. He could muscle his way up to Thornton, but that would take several minutes, and Thornton had a habit of not listening to what he didn’t want to hear, anyway.