Warriors (Wells Fargo Trail Book #7)

James Walker

Description

In the Tradition of the Great American WesternCrafting another action-filled story in THE WELLS FARGO TRAIL series, Jim Walker brings to his growing circle of readers all the suspense and mystery they expect in this unique American writing category called Westerns. Writing from a setting in the 1870s, Walker has brought to life the men and women of the West who survived the Civil War and are seeking a new life on the frontier.In The Warriors, Zac Cobb and his brothers Joe and James are asked by the Secret Service to go into Mexico and rescue their bandit brother Julian, who is being held there as a prisoner, yet is also wanted by the federal government. Zac is suspicious of the government's motives in the matter, and having become engaged to Jenny Hays, he has no desire to risk his life or his murderer brother.But when Joe and James decide to go, on the way escorting an aristocratic Mexican woman and her daughter to near where Julian is being held, Zac shadows them across the desert and discovers they are not alone. In army patrol, scalphunters, a band of Apaches, and the Mexican army are all involved. Is the secret what Julian Cobb hold really worth dying for?

Sujets

• Westerns
• Western (genre)
• Western

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 mai 1997
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441261960
• Langue: English

Extrait

Books by Jim Walker
Husbands Who Won’t Lead and Wives Who Won’t Follow
T HE W ELLS F ARGO T RAIL
The Dreamgivers
The Nightriders
The Rail Kings
The Rawhiders
The Desert Hawks
The Oyster Pirates
The Warriors
The Ice Princess
The Wells Fargo Trail, Book 7
The Warriors
Jim Walker
© 1997 by Jim Walker
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Ebook edition created 2012
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Cover illustration by William Graf
eISBN 978-1-4412-6196-0
This book is dedicated to two intellectual warriors,
professors of mine in seminary,
who fanned the flames of my love for Scripture
and ignited the spark of my interest in western fiction:
Dr. Richard Rigsby
and
Dr. James Rosscup
JIM WALKER is a staff member with the Navigators and has written Husbands Who Won’t Lead and Wives Who Won’t Follow. He received an M. Div. from Talbot Theological Seminary and has been a pastor with an Evangelical Free Church. He was a survival training instructor in the United States Air Force and is a member of the Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association. Jim, his wife, Joyce, and their three children, Joel, Jennifer, and Julie, live in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Contents
Cover
Books by Jim Walker
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Part 1: The Jornada del Muerto
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
Part 2: The Hacienda
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part 3: The Green Black Gold
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
Part 1
The Jornada del Muerto
Chapter 1
The candlelight fluttered on the table, twisting like a dancer on a narrow stage. Its pale ooze of tallow trickled down the slender wax stick, forming a puddle around the square wooden block that held it upright. Julian lay in a corner of the adobe cell, watching the first gray hint of dawn splash gentle rays of light over the Animas Mountains. This was to be the promised day of his death. For what, he had no idea.
Turning on his back, he blinked his one eye at the ceiling. The blanched green paint peeled back from the surface in lazy curls. Refusing to fall, they hung like pea green icicles in the late spring. The cell was bare except for the blankets that had become his home in the corner of the dusty room, and the table and two chairs that had been brought in for his inquisition. The dew that formed a morning sweat on the walls and the position of the solitary window told him that much of the room was underground. Bars of iron ran from the ceiling to the floor, exposing his entire cell to the hallway beyond.
A fly crawled slowly on the wall beside him, lifting its emerald wings from time to time and meandering in what seemed to be a circle. Julian watched it. After crawling along the surface for a few minutes, it buzzed upward and out through the prison bars. Julian could only imagine why he was here, condemned to die. He could remember nothing. The side of his skull throbbed painfully from a near miss that had left him with what was now only a foggy recollection of what he was or who he had been. He knew his name only because the commandant had told him.
He heard the keys clang in the door that led to the hallway. They would be bringing him his last meal. Perhaps they would be merciful and include something that might appear as if he were the first to eat it. The sound of the boots on the floor was accompanied by the soft sound of a woman’s dress dragging over the straw and debris that littered the walkway. That would be the nun Sister Mary Perizza.
The burly, half-dressed guard stopped in front of his cell and, rattling his keys, turned the lock and swung the door open. “Señor, the sister is here with your meal. You get up and stand beside the wall.”
Julian wrestled himself to his knees, then slowly and shakily stumbled to his feet. He backed up, pressing against the damp, adobe wall. He watched the woman as she held the tray and plodded toward the table, dragging her lame and twisted foot. She set the tray down and motioned him forward. Backing up, she nodded to the guard. “Gracias, it will be enough. I will sit with him now.”
The man backed up, closed the iron door, turned the key in the lock, and plodded away.
“I fix your breakfast myself, Señor Cobb, and I bring you some hot coffee.”
Julian stepped toward the table, and dragging out a chair, he seated himself in front of the tin plate and cup. Several tortillas were spread with eggs, and a piece of fatty ham lay nestled on the side. He picked up the cup with both hands, allowing the warmth of the black liquid to radiate life into his fingers. He breathed in the steamy aroma of the coffee as it wafted past his black mustache. Holding it to his lips, he sipped slowly.
“I bring you a gift of mercy. It is all I can do.”
“Thank you, Sister, I appreciate it. It’s the first decent meal I’ve had … I can’t remember when.”
“Ahh, this memory of yours. It must return, señor.”
“It keeps coming back to me from time to time, but mostly memories of me as a boy. I can’t rightly remember anything of a recent nature.”
“Señor, you must tell the commandant what he wants to know. Otherwise, you will be shot today.”
“I wish I could. If he hadn’t told me who I was, I wouldn’t even know my own name.”
“I hate to see any man shot, not for who he is, but for who he was and something he can’t even remember, for something he has done that he can’t find the words to express. How can you even confess a sin when there is no recollection of what that sin is?”
Julian raked a pile of the eggs onto one of the cold tortillas and curled the flat bread into a tube. He bit off the end and chewed slowly.
“Sister, I suppose I’ve sinned plenty of times, more than I might care to remember. I suppose I could just confess to just about anything and it might be true, sure enough.”
“I cannot have you confess to what you cannot remember and why should you die for something that isn’t in your mind?”
“With all the things the commandant says I’ve done, maybe it’s a blessing that it isn’t in my mind. I don’t recollect as how I could have faced death with any sort of innocence on my soul” he reached up and felt the gash on the side of his head “and now maybe I might do just that.”
He stabbed a portion of the grisly ham with his fork and began to chew it. “‘Sides, from what I can remember about my brand of Christianity, I’ll be able to see with two eyes.”
She reached over and, with a light touch on his black eye patch, smiled. “You are a special man. It is not every man, señor, that God blesses with the ability to get by with less. I was born a beautiful girl of a wealthy family. With the refinement of the education my family sent me to obtain in France, I seemed destined to become a woman of hospitality, a butterfly among the gentlemen of Mexico City.”
“What happened to you? What made you become a nun? You’re a beautiful woman.”
Reaching down, she stroked her hand across her crippled leg. “The hand of God touched the horse I rode. He fell on me and crushed my leg. No gentleman desires to spend his life with a woman who skitters across the tile floor like a crab on the rocks at the edge of the ocean. Now I belong to God. He made me special. He made me His. You see, Señor Cobb, those of us who have endured some misfortune have been set apart from the rest. It is a gift, a special gift that very few can open. With it, we must make our way back into the sea of humankind, bearing the gift above our heads. To do so is to allow the world to know mercy, the mercy of the severe hand of God. To shrink back from this task is to allow our hearts to twist into a bitter and poisonous root, unfit to taste, unbearable to look upon.”
Julian put down his fork and massaged the stub of his missing left arm. “I guess all I can remember of this is the hatred I feel for the Yankees that did it.”
“But you are not a coward.”
“No, I’m not.”
“But you see, the coward abandons himself first of all. He recoils from the goodness he has been taught. He withdraws from hope. After that, all other acts of timidity and fear come to him in an easy manner.”
“And you think I’ve done that?”
“I don’t know what you’ve done, señor. All I know is what you are now. You remember very little, and perhaps that is good. You can begin once again.” She paused. “But you must remember some things or you will die.”
He picked up the tin cup and swished the remaining coffee around in a careful, circular motion. Holding it to his lips, he sipped it slowly, then put the cup down and pushed it back. “I suppose you’re right, Sister maybe it is good that I can’t remember everything I’ve done. But I ain’t got very long to be a new man with this clean slate you speak about.”
“Then you must find a way to remember. This treasure of the emperor is not yours to keep. It belongs here in my country, not in some hole in the United States. It is soaked with the blood of the martyrs of the revolution.”
The sound of the keys in the outer door brought both of their heads up. “That will be the priest and the men who will take you to the wall.”
Julian smiled. “Guess they give a body a last meal without the time to diges