Showing results by author "Ben Bridges" in All Categories

Right across the West, lawmen were losing their fight against crime. Something had to be done fast. But what? It was a retired judge named Wilde who came up with the answer-to pit one outlaw against another. From that point on, his "law-enforcers" became six of the meanest misfits ever to see the inside of a jail-cell; a murderous albino, a black gunfighter, an Apache half-breed, a one-time Pinkerton detective, a Missouri-born conman and a giant whose hands were deadlier than a Gatling gun

Arizona Territory, 1882. The Apaches were riding rings around the army, raiding, robbing and killing pretty much wherever they liked. To beat them, Captain Nathan Kelso knew he had to fight them on their own terms, hitting fast and hitting hard. But who was going to listen to a washed-up, borderline drunk? As it turned out, he received support from a surprising quarter, and was ordered to form Company C, a light, mobile unit dedicated to bracing the Apaches wherever they found them.

Arch Bowman raped and murdered his way across the West to become the stuff of legend. But when he survived a near-fatal shooting in Colfax, Colorado, he decided to make the most of his new lease of life and finally settle a long-standing piece of unfinished business... But that didn't mean Bowman was about to go soft. Before he was through, innocent men would die in legendary numbers, and Bowman would make sure that life was hell for a mild-mannered farmer named Walt Canaday.

Sam Judge, the legendary town-tamer, had captained a few trains in his day, but he had no particular hankering to relive those wild times all over again. Those settlers still had hundreds of miles to go before they reached their destination, and the way ahead was filled with all kinds of danger. But fate had other ideas for Sam, and when they finally reached trail's end, he and his gun-fast young partner, Matt Dury, found themselves under sentence of death... and about to face a trial by fire!

Blood on the Tracks kicks off the Tales of the Old West series with a gritty tale of courage, justice, and survival in the face of lawlessness and danger. It’s 1868, and the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad is a grueling task carried out by a workforce as diverse as it is determined. Germans, Irishmen, Swedes, and countless others labor together under the relentless leadership of General Jack Casement. But when the railroad’s progress reaches Julesburg—infamously known as “hell on wheels”—the crew faces a new threat beyond the elements and back-breaking work.

Rancher Clint McNally was looking for someone to deliver $20,000 to the men who’d kidnapped his young son. Whoever took the job had to be as hard as nails, so professional fighting man Carter O’Brien was the natural choice. Still, McNally knew better than to trust that kind of money to one man, so he gave O’Brien a partner - a one-eyed, cigar-chewing soldier of fortune called Logan Tyree.

They were all elements in a bizarre mystery the likes of which professional adventurer Carter O’Brien had never encountered before. Up until a hidden sniper damn near killed him, all he’d wanted was to ride on to his next job in nearby Jackson’s Peak, but it looked like somebody else had other ideas. Suddenly he was up to his neck in something deadly. Why had people started dying all around him? Who was the bushwhacker and his sinister Oriental sidekick? And why had they picked on him?

O'Brien was hunting bounty up in Utah when the deal blew up in his face. Now he was hurting bad and the doctor told him that he'd have to rest up for at least a couple of months before he could even think about strapping his Colt back on. Still, a feller's got to earn a living, and he was grateful when the doctor gave him a job which promised to be nice and quiet. Hardly any more than an easy little trip across the territory.

Tension was rising fast in the hell-bent-for-leather town of Little Cody, Wyoming. A young girl had been murdered, and the killer was locked up in the local jail, awaiting trial. But the rough-and-ready miners weren’t prepared to let justice take its course. The only law they craved was lynch law. And to make things worse, the killer’s family was trying every dirty trick they could think of to make sure the case never reached the courts.

The Portuguese slavers called him Sam because they couldn't pronounce his real name. They tore him away from his homeland and put him to work picking cotton in the Tennessee Valley. But the big, fleet-footed Zulu was nobody's slave, and to prove it he escaped and headed west. Throwing in with a medicine show conman named Doc Jonah, Sam started entering county footraces to earn enough money to go back to Africa

Surveyors working for the Truman Copper Consortium had found what promised to be the biggest copper strike in history. There was just one problem. That vast fortune in red metal sat smack in the middle of land considered sacred to the Apaches. When the surveyors were attacked and slaughtered, it looked as if a full-scale Indian war was about to explode.

The choice was simple. Sam Lockwood and his fellow Confederate prisoners of war could spend the rest of their days in a Union prison camp, or they could go west to bring law and order back to the wilds of Arizona as "Galvanized Yankees". They chose to ride west, and sure enough, what they found when they got there was a land turned lawless. Apaches were on the warpath and a gang of marauding Mexican bandidos was cutting up rough.

The Texas Rangers sent Carter O'Brien south of the border with orders to kill a madman. It was said that his target - a murderous bandit named Salazar - had the face of an angel and the heart of a demon. Certainly, judging by all he'd heard, O'Brien sure figured he needed killing. Given the choice, though, he'd sooner have faced Salazar in a head-on gunfight than turn back shooter and kill him from hiding.

Ash Colter's speed with a gun had turned him into the man they called "The Gunsmoke Legend". But it was a reputation he didn't want. So he put his gun away and rode south, figuring to buy some land and raise horses. To do that he needed money, and to earn that money he agreed to undertake one last, dangerous assignment – to track down the notorious outlaw John Kidd. Backed by an oddly-assorted posse, Colter was soon riding the high lines in his pursuit of the outlaw and his gang. One bloody confrontation piled atop another.

Hunter took his Colt from leather and checked it over one last time. He should have guessed his vengeance-quest would end in gunplay. Guns had played such a large part in it already; why shouldn't they have the last word? He stepped outside. The street was deserted save for the man who'd called him out, who stood 20 yards away - the most dangerous gunfighter in the whole south-west. Hunter saw faces watching him through dusty windows, and wondered whose side they were on.

Will Hooper was a sodbuster. Lee Early was a cowboy. They'd spent their entire lives on different sides of the fence. But then something terrible happened to make each man look beyond his own petty hatreds...like the outrage that occurred one stormy night at Will's farm.

It's the scorching summer of 1878, and a bitter range war is threatening to blow Montana Territory sky-high. On one side there's the all-powerful Stock Grower's Association and its 50-strong army of hired guns. On the other, there's just a handful of families who'll fight to the death to keep the land they've settled on. Trouble is, the Association is slowly but surely winning the struggle.

It was the kind of sleepy little Texas town where nothing ever happened. Then eight masked men robbed the train from Sterling City and left a handful of bodies behind them, and pretty soon the marshal was up to his badge in problems. First of all there was the murder of one of Coffin Creek's most respected citizens to solve. Then there was the sudden, unwelcome appearance of a federal lawman who figured Marshal Baker was too old for his job.

Coyote was a renegade Apache who’d been spilling blood along the border for months. But now, he’d had enough of killing and was ready to disappear up into the mountains - provided the army agreed to deliver his wife safely to him inside two weeks. If anything happened to that squaw before she was reunited with her man, all hell would break loose; Coyote personally guaranteed it.

Freelance fighting man Carter O’Brien had 5,000 reasons to go after the notorious Timberlake brothers. Each was a dollar bill. But there was more to it that just the reward money. Isaac Parker, the "Hanging Judge" himself, had asked O’Brien to track down the murderous outlaws. If he didn’t get them before they got the judge, Parker would wind up handing from his own gallows.