Frank Leslie - The Killing Breed

Praise for Frank Leslie
and The Lonely Breed

Frank Leslie kicks his story into a gallop right out of the gateraw and gritty as the West itself.

Mark Henry, author of The Hell Riders

Frank Leslie writes with leathery prose honed sharper than a buffalo skinners 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 Awardwinning 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 ones 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. Stephens 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 TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA

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PUBLISHERS NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors 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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To Dad and Betty

Contents

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 mustanga 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 hed been off hunting more wild horses to break and sell to the army. Theyd 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 didnt 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 Yellowboys 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 towns 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 arborall 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 dont start no fights.

Patting the horses slick neck and resting his rifle on his shoulder, he stepped onto the boardwalk. He raked his jade green eyeswhich to some seemed startlingly incongruent in his otherwise dark, Indian-featured faceacross 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.