PINNACLE BOOKS

       Kensington Publishing Corp.

       www.kensingtonbooks.com

      I want to dedicate this book to the late “Doc” C.L. Sonnichsen, a great historian who took me under his wing when I was a rank novice writer at some of my first Western Writers of America Conventions, and told me story after story about the great Texas Feuds. They must have stayed with me for they are still vivid today. Doc was such a realist. He once told a writer friend of mine, John Duncklee, when John sold his first article back in his college days at the University of Arizona, that it was wonderful— “Just don’t quit your day job.”

      “Doc” had an eye for Western fiction, too. He worried a lot about political correctness interfering with writers telling a good story. I moderated a panel at the Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock, Texas, with Elmer Kelton, and they asked Elmer about that. Mr. Kelton smiled and said in his best Texas drawl, “I sure don’t think about that writing my books.”

      Neither do I.

      Dusty Richards

       www.dustyrichards.com

      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 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Chapter 36

      Chapter 37

      Chapter 38

      Chapter 39

      Chapter 40

      Chapter 1

      The acrid smoke from the blazing live oak fire swirled around his batwing chaps when Chet picked up the branding iron. He headed across the pen for the bawling calf stretched out on the ground by Chet’s cousins, Reg and J.D. Bending over, Chet stuck the hot iron to the calf’s side, and it let out an ear-shattering bawl. Chet left a smoking—C on its hide. It was a good enough job of marking the animal. The letters stamped on the dogie had the color of dark saddle leather. Chet nodded for the two boys in their teens to turn the critter loose.

      “You made a swell earmark on that one’s ear,” Chet said to them, then went back to the fire and set the iron’s face back in the red-hot coals,

      Chet’s thirty-year-old brother, Dale Allen, came dragging in another protesting calf to the fire with his reata around the dogie’s hind legs. The entire Byrnes clan busied themselves working cattle. Catching the late calves they’d missed in the spring, cutting the bulls, ear-notching, and branding ’em. There’d be plenty of fried mountain oysters for supper. The old man, Rock, and Dale Allen’s oldest boy, Heck, held the herd on the flat. Good cool mid-October day to work them—and maybe the last screwworm flies had gone south for the winter. Not taking any chances, they painted all the surgical cuts with pine tar.

      Chet made a note with a pencil in his logbook about the newest steer in the herd. “Steer—black, white spot on his neck right side—Summer 1872 crop.” He kept the records on all the cattle in the herd. Shame someone else had had the “bar-B” brand in the Texas Brand Registry when his dad had sent off for it over thirty years earlier. C stood for Cooney, his grandfather’s name on his mother’s side. Grandpa Abe Cooney and Chet’s father, Rock Byrnes, had brought their families out of Madison County, Arkansas, and settled in the Texas hill country on Yellow Hammer Creek twenty years before the war.

      In those early years, the fierce Comanche made raids on them in the fall under every full moon. The Byrnes men farmed and worked cattle with loaded rifles and powder horns slung over their shoulders while they held plow handles or reins. Every night they slept lightly with their cap-and-ball pistols under their pillows. Womenfolks kept shotguns ready beside the front door, and the shutters on the windows at the rock house still bore the bullet holes and arrowheads embedded in them. Over the course of years in the long-running Comanche-Byrnes war, three of the Byrnes siblings were carried off by those red savages and never found or heard of again. Two boys and a girl. Keeping a life-long grudge, Chet’s father, Rock, never saw an Indian, man or woman, he didn’t stop and spit in their direction.

      Chet checked the sun time and hollered at Dale Allen as he brought another calf up to the fire. “Better break for dinner after that one.”

      His brother nodded to him as the boys took control of the calf, and coiled up his rope. “About a dozen left to work in this bunch.”

      “Leave them in this trap. We’ll get them out after dinner,” Chet said as he fetched the book and pencil out of his shirt pocket.

      “Good. I’ve got to fix my girth anyway,” Dale Allen said, and headed for the shade of some spreading live oaks.

      “Go ahead. We’ll work the rest of them this afternoon,” Chet said over his shoulder.

      “Red heifer—scar on right leg—summer 1872 crop,” he wrote in the tally. The two boys flanked the calf and Reg, seventeen, the older of the pair, notched her left ear on the underside. His fifteen-year-old brother painted it. Then they stretched the bawling critter between them for the branding.

      “We’re ready for you,” Reg said.

      Chet went for an iron and walked back to apply it. He glanced up to see someone coming. The firebrand was stamped on the calf’s right side and the bitter smoke from the singed hair filled Chet’s nose. He looked again at the rider driving in hard.

      “It’s Susie,” Reg said, standing beside him. “Wonder what in the hell’s wrong now.”

      “Rustlers!” she said, out of breath, and skidded the lathered bay to a sliding stop on his hind legs.

      Chet ran over to his twenty-year-old sister. “Rustling what?”

      “They took all the horses in the north pasture and headed out with them.”

      “In broad daylight?” Chet asked her in disbelief. What fools would do that?

      “Yes, two hours ago. I had to wait for May to get back to watch the children. You know Mother can’t do that.”

      He gave her a grave nod. His mother, Theresa, hadn’t been right in her mind since the Comanch’ took little Cagle. Then when those reds got the twins, Phillip and Josephine, she’d