Gunpowder Express Read online

  Pinnacle Westerns by BRETT COGBURN

  The Widowmaker Jones Series

  WIDOWMAKER JONES

  BUZZARD BAIT

  GUNPOWDER EXPRESS

  Western Novels

  PANHANDLE

  DESTINY, TEXAS

  ROOSTER

  GUNPOWDER EXPRESS

  A WIDOWMAKER JONES WESTERN

  BRETT COGBURN

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 Brett Cogburn

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4168-8

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4169-5 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4169-2 (e-book)

  Chapter One

  The punch was the kind of blow that comes out of nowhere, and the kind you’re never really set and ready to take. It was the kind that’ll knock you flat like a Texas tornado; the kind that can make tough people slobber and crawl, and the weak ones won’t get ever get back up.

  The big man, as ugly and scarred as he was tall, took that punch square and true on his jaw. He felt the sharp bite of knuckles crash into the marrow of his bones and the hard thud of the ground rising up to meet him. The dust rose up and floated around him as wispy and ephemeral as the dull roar of the crowd cheering and screaming for his demise. Truly, he couldn’t have told you where he was in that instant, or even so much as his name. But the pain was real, and it was something to lay hand to.

  Slowly, his senses returned until he was aware of other things outside the throbbing of his skull. He tasted the dirt in his mouth mixing with the blood, and the grit of sand scraping under his eyelids. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the face of the referee floating in the furnace sky above him and waving his hands to signal the end of the round.

  The big man got one hand under him and then the other, followed by his knees, and pushed his belly up from the ground. The ropes that marked off the fight ring came into focus, at first a blur, and then one, two of those ropes with the screaming crowd behind them cheering and slopping beer down the fronts of their sweat-stained shirts. None of those things came to the big man in clear, individual thoughts, but rather as a wave of impressions, a blur of sights and sounds. He was sure of none of those impressions, and only one thing, one instinct, screamed for attention above it all. He had to get up or they would ring the bell. The bell meant you were done; the bell meant you lost. You had to beat the bell. You had to toe the mark.

  The crowd went silent, if only for a brief instant, when he got a leg up under him and wobbled to his feet. But their shock quickly turned to anger over the audacity of the man to take what most couldn’t, to fight back against the narrative of his demise. They heckled him while he nodded drunkenly at the referee and raised his fists to show that he was ready to fight again. Somebody flung an empty beer bottle at him, but it went wide of his head and sailed into the crowd on the opposite side of the ring from whence it had come. He didn’t even notice the flying bottle and kept shuffling his feet to keep his balance, lest he fall again. All the while, he was listening for the sound of the bell. He was half-afraid it might have sounded without his hearing it.

  But the bell had not rung, and he was still in the fight. In a determined, weaving march, he made his way back to his corner, turned, and propped his shoulder blades against the corner post and draped an arm over the top rope to either side of him. His whole body sagged, and only his hollow eyes seemed alive when he stared across the ring at the man who had knocked him down.

  And then there came a slight quirk at one corner of his mouth and the parting of his lips to reveal a slit of bloody, clenched teeth. Slow to form, this expression, like the breaking apart of an old scab or wound. Maybe it was only a muscle spasm on the face of a man as punch-drunk as they came, or simply a grimace of pain. Regardless, to the crowd, it looked like a defiant snarl.

  The big man pawed at his forehead with one hand and slung the sweat from it to the sand at his feet. He blinked once, twice, at the fighter across the ring from him, as if he was still having a hard time focusing his vision. He blinked a third time, and then that quirk formed at the corner of his mouth again, every bit as wolfish as it had been the first time it cracked his face.

  The devilish name and the reputation of the man passed through the crowd like a slow whisper riding the tobacco smoke hovering over them, blown from one to another like an accusation until more than one of them voiced his name as if it explained what they were seeing. Most of them had bet good, hard-earned money against him, yet, there he stood with that snarling expression and glaring back a
t them and the whole damned world in general. He should have stayed down; he should have been out cold no matter how damned mean he was supposed to be.

  Should have. It dawned on some in the crowd then that the damned fool wasn’t snarling at all, and that realization made them all the madder. He was trying to grin like the whole thing was funny. Who grinned at a time like that? Poor bastard was out on his feet. That had to be it. One more round and he would go down for good and get what he deserved.

  They wouldn’t have understood his expression even if they had been sober, or even if they had known him better. He was an unusual man in any place or time, and they wouldn’t have understood even if he had the words to explain it to them, which he didn’t.

  But the crowd had guessed one thing right. The odd contortion at the corner of his mouth was truly a grin, or at least the closest his battered face could come to such an expresion at the moment. And to his way of thinking, he had plenty of reason to grin. Yes, he was punch-drunk and hurt and hanging on by a thread, but there was still the chance to walk across that ring and draw back and knock the living hell out of the bastard who had downed him. That mattered a lot to him. However, what mattered most, and the real reason he grinned, was simply because he was back on his feet and not a one of them had gotten to ring that bell and take him out of the fight. Not yet.

  And then he heard someone in the crowd speak his name, and then another—that old name that was none of his choosing but that he wore like another of his scars.

  “Widowmaker . . . Widowmaker . . . Widowmaker,” the whisper went.

  Chapter Two

  There were some who said Vulture City got its name because the prospector that founded it spotted some buzzards hovering over the site, a simple enough and slightly romantic tale. While it was true that even such humble and homely creatures gliding high overhead on a thermal wind would have added some romance and color to an otherwise drab place, it was also true that the story of its naming was undoubtedly nothing more than a folktale. Or, in other words, a load of horse pucky to those cynical sorts with enough common sense to realize certain facts.

  For starters, such a place held little interest for even a single buzzard. Yes, there was often death—a thing one would think would attract such avian scavengers—but even the promise of a ready meal wasn’t enough to tempt the city’s namesake birds. Vulture City was simply too damned hot and miserable for anyone, even buzzards, to live there given any other choice.

  Secondly, it was really no city at all, except in name, but rather a ramshackle sprawl of construction scattered on a brushy, gravel flat amidst the litter of rocks, cacti, and cast-off junk at the foot of an eroded, red ridge rising up out of the desert. Some might say it was unremarkable, and others less kind could have reasonably claimed it was ugly. Thirsty men usually pointed out that Vulture City had three saloons, a thing worthy of overlooking the place’s other faults.

  Three saloons or not, there was no denying Vulture City’s builders apparently gave little thought or effort toward aesthetic appeal and pleasant architecture. Every bit of man-made habitation seemed to exist only for practical purpose, mainly that it would grant the occupants some modicum of shade when the worst of the afternoon heat bore down on the camp. The buildings were a mismatch of framed lumber, sheet iron, stacked stone, or poorly plastered adobe bricks. None were built exactly the same and were similar only in the uniform coating of dust they shared.

  If substance counted for anything, the commissary was the only building that held promise at first glance. Although it was built of dull brown and burnt red native stone stacked in a most common way and coated in more than its share of common dust, it was at least tall—two stories tall—and all that imposing height and those tons of rock were meant one day to hold the offices, assay room, and the treasure vault for the Central Arizona Mining Company. That ownership and any mention of treasure should have made it at least an iconic tower of optimism and civilization in such a frontier hamlet, no matter how plain and ordinary its rectangle design, but sadly, it was still under construction and only three-quarters complete. Its walls had been slower to take shape than they would have been in an ordinary place. Three months of work so far, to be exact, because the piles of sunbaked stone and mining rubble gathered around it and meant to add to its structure would unfortunately blister your hands any time except at night or in the earliest hours of the morning. As it was, for a newcomer, it was hard to tell if the commissary was a new building under construction or an ancient rock tomb whose walls were slowly crumbling down over the centuries.

  Beyond the commissary and slightly uphill stood an eighty-stamp mill, usually pounding away incessantly with a mind-numbing racket at the gold ore its crews fed it, but ominously silent for the afternoon. And beyond that, slightly more upslope and rising above everything, stood the massive hoist and headframe of the Vulture Mine. The hard-rock shaft burrowing deep into the earth beneath it and the vein of high-grade ore it promised were the only reasons that such a place came to be at all in that expanse of desolate nothingness. And the shiny tin water pipeline snaking out of camp to the east toward the Hassayampa River ten miles away was the only means by which Vulture City survived long enough for anyone to dig their hearts away for gold or to take a break from the grueling monotony long enough to get drunk and watch a Saturday-afternoon boxing match.

  And such a boxing match was currently under way.

  The promise of getting to see two men pummel each other wasn’t to be missed, considering how much Vulture City’s citizens admired a good fight. And no usual fight, this one, but a genuine, imported professional pugilist had come to the mining camp, a thing as rare as it promised to be bloody. Bloody was good.

  The peeled cedar posts that had been used to build the crude boxing ring glared under the desert sun like old ivory tusks, and the two large strands of grass rope strung through holes bored in those wooden supports sagged under the oppressive afternoon heat as much as they did because of the press of the crowd of cheering miners they held back. A single, massive ironwood tree stood on one side of the ring, and the furnace breeze periodically gusting through its grotesquely twisted and gnarled limbs cast dappled shadows across both the spectators and the two shirtless and sweating combatants doing their best to punch each other into bloody oblivion inside the ropes. The sounds of those two fighters’ bare fists smacking flesh and their grunts of exertion filled in the brief moments when the crowd of spectators paused to catch their breath, mop their brows, or to purchase another mug of lukewarm beer.

  Some five hundred hardy souls called Vulture City their home, most of them working for the Central Arizona Mining Company, and the rest consisted of those trying to make a living off those miners, honestly or otherwise. Add another score or so of itinerant types passing through on their way to hell or some other similar place more promising and pleasant than Vulture City, and you had a sizable population, especially considering that neither God nor nature probably ever intended a single human soul to reside there for so much as a minute. And it seemed as if every one of that population had turned out to watch the fight.

  All but two.

  A man and a woman stood at the completed end of the commissary building in the narrow shade it cast. From their vantage point they had a good view of the fight, and although only thirty yards away, their position behind the crowd let them go unnoticed.

  The man was middle-aged and indistinct of look from almost any other adult male of the camp, from the thatch of grizzled, gray hair sprouting out from under the slouching brim of his hat, to the sweat-stained white shirt pinned to his torso with a pair of suspenders, and to the faded canvas pants and lace-up work boots scuffed so badly that they looked as if an entire pack of coyotes had gnawed on them. He puffed thoughtfully on a curve-stemmed pipe, eyes squinted slightly in thoughtful repose.

  The woman beside him, on the other hand, would have caused most of the camp to do a double take at the sight of her had they looked away from the fig
ht long enough to notice she had come outside, and not only because she resided in a place in short supply of females. In truth, there were things about her so unusual that she would have drawn stares no matter where she stood, in backwater Vulture City or anywhere else.

  It was hard to tell whether she was young or old, for next to nothing of her was revealed, but the way she dressed was unique, to say the least, and lent her an air of mystery that she might or might not deserve. She wore a long-sleeved, red cotton dress, despite the afternoon heat, and where the ends of those sleeves should have revealed the flesh of her hands a pair of tight, kid leather gloves covered them. Where a bit of ankle perhaps might have shown at the bottom of her dress when the furnace breeze lifted it, there were only the high tops of her riding boots with a dainty pair of silver-overlaid California spurs strapped to them. A broad, flat-brimmed felt hat of Spanish style sat atop her head, and a black lace veil was secured around the crown of it. That veil entirely covered her face and shoulders to the extent that her features were hidden to the world.

  The shade cast by the commissary was slowly retreating toward the foot of its stone wall, and for a brief instant the sun caught a few scattered strands of pale blond hair beneath the edge of her veil. She moved quickly back into the shadows, as if that brief touch of the sun might melt her, and as if she were as out of place beneath the burning sky as was hair the color of snow in the desert.

  The man with the smoking pipe noticed her retreat into the shade, but remained where he was, now half cast in sunlight. He gave a brief, scornful glance at the sky as if it were an old enemy that he could do nothing about.