The Wild Breed Read online

  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

  Frank Leslie

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Peter Brandvold, 2008

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 1-4362-0941-2

  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.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To Dad and Betty

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 1

  Looking around cautiously, jaws set grimly, Yakima Henry climbed a low rise stippled with crumbling volcanic rock and paloverde shrubs, and reined in his sweaty, dusty mustang—a blaze-faced, coal black stallion with the fire of the chase in its eyes.

  Brush snapped and rustled ahead and to the left, and the half-breed touched his pistol grips. A mangy brush wolf bounded up a nearby knoll, a charcoal-colored jack hanging limp from its jaws. The coyote turned its head to give an owly, proprietary glance over its shoulder, then dashed over the rise and disappeared in a mesquite-choked arroyo.

  Yakima Henry was tall and broad shouldered, his muscular frame sheathed in a sweat-stained buckskin tunic, blue denims, and brush-scarred chaps. A leather thong strung with large, curved grizzly teeth hung around his neck. He wore undershot boots, and a flat-brimmed, dust-caked plainsman was angled low on his forehead. Dropping his hand from the stag-horn grips of his .44, he shifted his gaze again to the horse tracks dropping down the rise and disappearing in the chaparral.

  The tracks were those of four horseback riders herding four unshod mustangs toward the town, which lay a good half mile away. The town consisted of a handful of log and adobe dwellings and cow pens clustered in the vast, rolling desert, bordered distantly on all sides by the bald crags of isolated mountain ranges.

  Beyond Saber Creek, the ridges rippled away like ocean waves, foreshortening into the misty, blue-green reaches of Old Mexico.

  Yakima shucked his Winchester Yellowboy from the saddle boot under his right thigh. The mustangs belonged to him. The rustlers had taken them out of his corral when he’d been off hunting more wild horses to break and sell to the army. They’d hazed them through the slopes and arroyos, dropping down and away from his small shotgun ranch nestled at the base of Bailey Peak, no doubt intending to sell them south of the border.

  Out here, if the Apaches didn’t burn you out, the rustlers and border bandits would steal you blind. On the upside, he had no near neighbors, for the trouble this country bred was damned discouraging to most.

  Yakima levered a fresh shell into the Yellowboy’s chamber, off-cocked the hammer, set the barrel across his saddle bows, and booted the horse off the ridge, his shoulder-length black hair winnowing out behind him in the hot breeze.

  A few minutes later, horse and rider gained the stage road, followed it past the first cow pens and horse corrals of Saber Creek, then across the dry creek bed that the town was named for, and into the sun-baked little village, somnolent and sweltering in the late-afternoon heat.

  Buildings of whip-sawed cottonwood, sandstone blocks, and adobe brick lined the narrow main street over which a lone ranch wagon clattered, heading toward the opposite end of town. Chickens pecked along the boardwalks. Dogs lazed in shade patches. Few people were about, but Yakima noticed a couple of silhouettes peering at him through sashed windows.

  Cicadas whined, a goat bleated unseen in the distance, and the faint tinkling of a piano rode the breeze, drowned by the occasional screech of a shingle chain.

  At a fork in the street, Yakima turned the
stallion right, angled around the town’s cobbled square surrounded by old Mexican adobes and a sandstone church with a frayed rope hanging from the boxlike bell tower, and drew rein before a stout, log blacksmith shop.

  He stared at the eight horses tied to the hitch rail fronting the Saguaro Inn Saloon and Hotel on the right side of the street, just ahead. The horses stood hang-headed in the shade of the brush arbor—all eight dust streaked and sweat foamed. Only four were saddled. The rifle boots tied to the saddles were empty.

  Yakima booted the black up to the hitch rail, dismounted, and dropped the reins in the ankle-deep dust and manure. “Stay here and don’t start no fights.”

  Patting the horse’s slick neck and resting his rifle on his shoulder, he stepped onto the boardwalk. He raked his jade green eyes—which to some seemed startlingly incongruent in his otherwise dark, Indian-featured face—across the four barebacked, unshod mustangs. Then, chaps flapping about his legs, sweat streaking the broad, flat plains of his dust-caked face, he wheeled from the street and pushed through the batwings.

  He paused in the cool shadows just inside the door, letting his eyes adjust as he took in the room—the ornate mahogany bar and back-bar mirror running along the wall to his right, the dozen or so tables to his left, the stairs at the back. A little man with spats and close-cropped gray hair played a piano—a slow, Southern ballad that might have been recognizable had it been played in the right key—against the far wall, below the stairs. Near him, four hard-faced hombres in ratty, dusty trail garb played cards, Winchester and Sharps rifles leaning against their table or resting across empty chairs nearby.

  One of the two men facing him wore a couple big pistols in shoulder holsters revealed by the thrown-back flaps of his spruce green duster.

  To Yakima’s left, a girl’s voice said, “Well, look what the cat dragged in! Did Mr. Henry get tired of taming horses and come to town to see what else needs tamin’?”

  Yakima turned to see a small, pale-skinned brunette, clad in a low-cut, knee-length red dress, sitting alone at a table, her bare knees crossed. The dress was so sheer he could see her small, pear-shaped breasts through it, and nearly all other aspects of the pretty girl’s delicate anatomy, including a mole on the inside of her right thigh. A strap hung off her skinny shoulder.

  She smiled up at him, showing a missing eyetooth and wagging a dirty, slender foot, the red paint on her toenails as chipped and scaled as the siding on an old barn.

  An empty shot glass and a half-empty beer mug sat on the table before her. Her admiring gaze ranged across Yakima’s broad chest and yokelike shoulders before climbing back to his face.

  She twirled a finger in a lock of her curled hair.

  He nodded. “Rose.”

  “Yakima?” The bartender suddenly rose from behind the bar—a string bean with wide-set eyes, thick pomaded hair, and a pronounced overbite. Floyd Sanchez scowled savagely. “What the hell are you doin’ here? I thought the sheriff done banned you from town for breakin’ up my place and every other place in Saber Creek!”

  “Go back to work, Floyd,” Yakima growled, barely favoring the man with a glance.

  He sauntered forward, his spurs chinging on the rough puncheons, the barrel of his Yellowboy repeater still resting on his shoulder as he approached the table before which the four saddle tramps played cards. One of the men facing him—the man with the duster and the double-rigged holster filled with matched Smith & Wessons—glanced up at him, a stogie in his teeth, five cards fanned out in his left hand.

  He was a hulking hellion with a freckled, sunburned face and a thick, red beard still slick with sweat and coated with seeds and trail dust. He smelled like horses, mesquite smoke, piss, and stale tobacco.

  “Hey, lookee here,” he sneered around the stogie, elbowing the round-faced Mexican beside him. “We got us a newcomer.”

  The Mexican looked up, black eyes rheumy from drink. He, like all the others, had looked toward Yakima when he’d first pushed through the batwings, but he, like the red-bearded, double-rigged gent, feigned surprise at seeing him at their table. He grinned, showing chipped, crooked teeth, including one of gold, inside his thin black beard. “You want in, amigo? Always room for one more if you got money. We don’t play for trade beads!”

  He elbowed the red-bearded gent and laughed through his teeth.

  One of the two with his back to Yakima glanced behind him, running his slit-eyed gaze up and down Yakima’s tall, rugged frame. He turned back to the table and tossed some coins into the pile before him. “I don’t care if he’s packin’ gold ingots fresh from El Dorado. I don’t play with half-breeds.”

  The red-bearded gent leaned toward him, canting his head toward the round-faced Mexican. “You play with greasers, but you don’t play with half-breeds? Where the hell’s the logic in that?”

  Suddenly the piano fell silent, and the little, gray-haired piano player swung his head toward the room.

  The Mexican grinned, chuckling again through his teeth, as he stared glassy-eyed at Yakima. A corn-husk cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside him, near a big Colt Navy, its brass chasing glistening in a shaft of sunlight from a window behind him.

  Yakima’s voice betrayed a hard note of irritation, matter-of-fact contempt for losing two days’ work by having to chase stolen horses—horses he’d worked damn hard for the past three weeks to break and ready for the remount sergeant at Fort Huachuca. “You seem like a right tight group, so you boys can just keep playin’ with yourselves. I’m here for those green-broke mustangs you stole outta my corral. And I’m here to make sure it don’t happen again. Get my drift?”

  “Ah, shit,” the bartender complained behind Yakima.

  “Charlie, fetch Speares!”

  The little man rose from the piano bench, adjusted his spats, and slowly walked across the room as though skirting an uncaged lion, shuttling his fearful blue-eyed gaze between the cardplayers and Yakima. When he was past the table, he broke into a run and bolted through the batwings like a bull calf who’d just been steered, his running footfalls fading into the distance.

  “Breed,” said the big hombre with the shaggy red beard, a dirty black Stetson tipped back on his red curls, “you ain’t callin’ us horse thieves, now, are ya?”

  “Since you spoke English, I naturally assumed you could understand it.”

  “Them horses—they are not branded,” said the Mexican, canting his head toward the batwings. He had a BB-sized white spot just left of his left, inky-black pupil, and it seemed to expand and contract at random. “How can you prove they’re yours, huh?” He shrugged his shoulders, as if deeply perplexed by his own question.

  “I didn’t brand ’em because the U.S. Cavalry generally likes to do that themselves. But I don’t need to prove anything to you coulee-doggin’ sons o’ bitches. I tracked them and you here, and I’m takin’ those horses back with me. But I’m willing to wait for the sheriff, so we can all sit down and discuss it, civilized-like, over a drink.” Yakima quirked a challenging grin. “That is, if you are.”

  The red-bearded hombre cut his eyes around the table. The Mexican poked his tongue between his teeth and hissed a chuckle. One of the men with his back to Yakima half turned his thick neck and long-nosed face and grumbled, “Me, I personally don’t like bein’ accused of long-loopin. Not by no half-breed, ’specially.”

  The gent next to him—square-built and wearing a fancily stitched doeskin vest with a rabbit-fur collar, said in quickly rising octaves, “Especially one that smells as bad and looks as ugly as fresh dog shit on a parson’s porch!”

  He hadn’t gotten that last utterance out before he slid sideways in his chair, a silver-chased revolver maw appearing under his right armpit, angled up toward Yakima. Yakima stepped quickly to the left, snapped his rifle down, back, and forward, smashing the octagonal maw against the side of the man’s head, just above his ear.

  The man screamed and jerked sideways as the pistol under his right arm popped, stabbing smoke and
fire, and drilling a slug into the ceiling above Yakima’s head.

  The report hadn’t stopped echoing around the narrow room before the half-breed swung the Yellowboy back in the other direction. The other hardcase was halfway out of his chair, reaching for his own holstered pistol, when the Yellowboy’s barrel caught him in the same place it caught the first gent, throwing him sideways with a coyotelike yelp.

  He hit the floor with the report of a hundred-pound sack of parched corn dropped on a flatbed railcar.

  “Half-breed son of a bitch!” shouted the red-bearded gunnie as he bounded straight up, lifting the table and thrusting it forward with one hand while reaching for one of his big pistols with the other. As the table tumbled toward Yakima, shedding bottles, glasses, playing cards, and coins, the redhead aimed a Smith & Wesson .44 straight out from his shoulder.

  Stepping straight back from the table, Yakima snapped up the Yellowboy, aimed quickly, and squeezed the trigger.

  “Ahhshhh!” the red-bearded gent yelled as the thundering rifle punched a slug through his left shoulder, jerking his exploding pistol enough that the slug sheered past Yakima’s head to shatter the window at the other end of the room, causing the whore, Rose, to break into an unladylike stream of epithets.

  “Goddamnit!” Sanchez shouted, ducking down behind the bar. “Take it the hell outside, you sons o’ bitches!”