Coldiron

F.M. Parker

Description

Luke Coldiron is shot and robbed of his gold by Clason, a Union Army deserter, and Ghost Walker, an outcast Arapaho. Luke, pursuing the robbers, comes upon Susan Penfold whose husband has been killed by the robbers. Luke and Susan join together to wreak vengeance upon Clason and Ghost Walker.

Sujets

• Westerns
• Western (genre)
• Western

Informations

• Publié par: Fearl M. Parker
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908400406
• Langue: English

Extrait

COLDIRON SHADOW OF THE WOLF
by F. M. Parker
Luke Coldiron was a hard man - but not as hard as the bullets tearing through his flesh. At least that s what the brutal army deserter and the renegade Indian warrior thought when they left his riddled body at the bottom of a ravine. They stole his gold and rode off back into the jagged mountains, where they thought they would be safe.
They were wrong. Wrong about Coldiron being dead. And wrong about being safe. United in revenge with a woman whose husband they had killed, Coldiron was coming after them; ready to ride through the jaws of hell if he could blast them into it...
About the Author

F. M. PARKER has worked as a sheepherder, lumberman, sailor, geologist, and as a manager of wild horses, buffalo, and livestock grazing. For several years he was the manager of five million acres of public domain land in eastern Oregon.
His highly acclaimed novels include Skinner, Coldiron, The Searcher, Shadow of the Wolf, The Shanghaiers, The Highbinders, The Far Battleground, The Shadow Man, and The Slavers.
SUPERBLY WRITTEN AND DETAILED PARKER BRINGS THE WEST TO LIFE. Publishers Weekly
ABSORBING SWIFTLY PACED, FILLED WITH ACTION! Library Journal
PARKER ALWAYS PRESENTS A LIVELY, CLOSELY PLOTTED STORY. Bookmarks
REFRESHING, COMBINES A GOOD STORY WITH FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE. University of Arizona Library
RICH, REWARDING DESERVES A WIDE GENERAL READERSHIP. Booklist
Also by F.M. Parker
Novels
The Highwayman Wife Stealer Winter Woman The Assassins Girl in Falling Snow The Predators The Far Battleground Coldiron - Judge and Executioner Coldiron - Shadow of the Wolf Coldiron - The Shanghaiers Coldiron - To Kill an Enemy The Searcher The Seeker The Highbinders The Shadow Man The Slavers Nighthawk Skinner Soldiers of Conquest
Screenplays
Women for Zion Firefly Catcher
SHADOW OF THE WOLF
Damn good shooting for a beginner and in weak light, too, Jubal Clason told Ghost Walker. You hit him dead center. I saw the dust fly from his shirt.
Too bad he had to die, for he was a brave fighter, responded the Indian. Even wounded he killed those three thieves.
Yeah, I figured we d have to do that. But because he was tough, that s why he had to be shot. Now it s done and the gold is ours. Let s go get it.
Jubal and Ghost Walker came out of the juniper not two hundred feet from where Ferron and his cohorts had lain in ambush. Dropping into the bottom of the ravine, they crossed the sandy bottom to the crumpled and motionless body of the rancher.
They stared down at the slack figure. Blood was thick and crusted on Coldiron s head. A large quantity of fresh blood soaked his shirt. His mouth hung open, half full of sand. His chest did not move.
He s not breathing. He s dead, said Clason. He stopped and ran his hands over Luke s waist. No money belt here. All of his gold must be on one of the horses. I ll take his pistol, for he ll not be needing it anymore.
THE MOUNTAINS - A PROLOGUE
The unnamed mountains were ancient beyond imagination. They had been formed during an era tens of millions of years before man came into being. An immense force had compressed and arched the rock mantle of the earth, bending and thrusting the thick layers of stone miles upward. Crumpled and broken, the jagged spires pierced deeply into the blue sky.
Along fractured and shattered zones in the folded rocks, mineral-rich fluids percolated upward. As the solutions migrated through different temperatures and pressures, various elements precipitated out. One was a malleable, yellow metal. It was deposited in pods and stringers and formed hidden lodes that contained thousands of pounds of the substance.
Rivulets, creeks and rivers relentlessly scoured and wore away the mountains. A few cut into some of the rich concentrations of the heavy metal. The water tumbled the golden crystals downstream, pounding and deforming them into irregular, rounded nuggets, to finally drop them in gravel bars and crevices in the bedrock.
In a span of time that was only one tick in the life clock of the mountains, the world turned cold and glaciers grew on the high, frigid crowns and coves and flowed down to fill the valleys, A great continental glacier more than a mile thick crunched a devastating swath in from the northeast, to halt only a short distance from the mountains.
Mighty animals, the woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger and the giant condor thrived in this land of violent arctic storms. Then time whispered once again and in only a few thousand years the glaciers retreated like the surf of a white, viscous ocean and vanished. So too, gone forever, were the magnificent giant animals of that epoch.
The soft tread of moccasined feet soon sounded upon the mountain as a race of copper-skinned men pushed their dauntless way from the northwest. And the herds of buffalo that had fled before the killer glaciers, now returned, winding their course, following the appearance of the grass upon a land that had not known its greenness for millennia.
The humans divided into clans and drifted apart, spreading across the high country and the plains that lay to the east. The expanse of land was so broad that the tribes were separated for generations, so long a time that the language they spoke became unalike and they could not converse. Thus, they became strangers, and therefore enemies, who fought and slew each other and stole each other s women.
For the very first time the mountains received a name. The brown men called them the Shining Mountains, for in the evening when the falling sun settled upon the tall peaks, they began to glow with a brilliant light as if consuming themselves to hold back the black night just a little longer.
The copper-colored man found the golden nuggets in the creek bottoms and crystals of it in stringers slicing through the quartz rocks of the steep mountain slopes. Sometimes he would hammer the strange rock that would bend and change shape under hard blows, but not break like other rocks. Then, his curiosity satisfied, he selected the truly hard stone, the quartz which would fracture in a skilled hand into long, thin cutting blades.
Sharp points and edges killed game and enemies. Who could have use for a soft rock?
A few thousand years passed and a strange new species of animal appeared. It was a stalwart brute, long legged and wiry, and could run like the spring wind. This new beast, called mustano or cayuse and a dozen other names, increased prodigiously and quickly spread throughout the mountain valleys and the plains. Upon the whole land, only one other species of animal, the buffalo, could compete with him for the life-sustaining grass.
A second race of man arrived, crossing the wide eastern plains and climbing up into the mountains. It was a white breed, warlike and possessive. Looking about, he saw not the mountains shining; instead, he saw sky-high stone ramparts impossible to cross, loose talus slopes perched dangerously steep against them, and the valleys choked with boulders.
He renamed the mountains. The Rockies.
The white man found the golden stones. His numbers multiplied prodigiously as thousands of his kind swarmed to the discovery, forcing their way up the canyons, scaling the perilous ramparts and tearing the metal from its resting place.
This white breed drove the brown man from the mountains. The brown man retreated onto the great flat plains that contained no gold. Where one of his villages once sat upon the banks of a stream at the foot of the mountains, a new and different town sprang up.
A town of white men. Called Denver.
CHAPTER 1
Gachupin Basin, Colorado Territory, March 5, 1864.
In the rimrocked mountain valley, the bony roan stallion stood on trembling legs and rested his weary head upon the top of the ice and snow wall. He looked with starving eyes at the tufts of grass sticking up above the snow only a scant few yards outside his reach.
Seventeen mares lay dying upon the hard-packed snow behind the stallion. The ribs and backbones of their famished bodies showed painfully sharp through their hides. Nothing about them moved except the shallow expansion of their lungs as they breathed.
Beyond the giant snowdrift that penned in the stallion and his mares, other bands of horses pawed in the snow and then lowered their heads to feed upon the life-giving grass they had uncovered. The roan stud remembered how sweet the wild mountain grass was. He pushed feebly at the white barrier, trying to go join the free ones.
For the thousandth time, the stallion surrendered to the impassable barricade. Then, still gazing off across the basin, he slowly started to lick the ice with his parched tongue.
At the extreme limits of his vision, where the rimrocks of the valley had been cut apart by the creek, three dark forms came into sight.
The two riders hurried their long-legged horses through the knee-deep snow blanketing the bottom of the narrow canyon. Clifford Yerrington led, impatiently casting anxious glances ahead into Gachupin Basin. Luke Coldiron trailed close behind, towing a packhorse.
Overhead, low dark clouds, their snow-swollen bottoms brushing the tops of the canyon rims, scudded to the southeast on the bite of the freezing wind. Four ravens, seeking shelter in the brushy crown of a large pine tree, took alarm at the passage of the men. Cawing loudly to each other and pumping powerfully with broad black wings, they launched themselves from their perch and kited away, riding the turbulence of the invisible river of air.
Luke looked ahead at his gray-headed old comrade hunched up in a sheepskin coat with a felt hat pulled down low to rest on the tops of his ears. Ease up, Cliff. We re almost there, Luke called.
Cliff turned, and the wind wrenched loose a strand of his long white hair, and it flicked and danced about his face. His dark brown eyes examined Coldiron.
You re right. We have reached the valley. I hope we are in time to correct wh