RANCHO BRAVO Series

He had been a horse thief once. Now his past was about to hang him!
His name was Shan Tyree, and sometimes it seemed that he'd known nothing but trouble all his life. Now he wanted to play it straight.
"You go straight?" Doc had grinned at him. "Yeah-until the first time you lay eyes on a horse with perfect conformation and somebody else's brand. Then your hands'll start to itchin', and your mouth to waterin', and next thing you know, you'll be on him with a necktie party right behind you. Face up to it, Shan. With some men it's booze and others it's women or cards. But with and me-other peoples' horses will be the death of us!"

His name was Elias Whitton. Once a slave, he was now a partner in the Rancho Bravo. A man respected, even feared. Part Comanche himself, Elias had pledged guns and supplies to the Indians to help them through the winter. But the Rancho Bravo wagon train loaded with the promised goods was a thousand miles away, perhaps lost or destroyed by looters. When Elias suggested they give the Comanches their guns the others said it was madness, that the Indians would kill them all; but Whitton swore it was their only chance - little knowing that two vicious killers in the territory, Plumb and Devlin, had the power to dash their last remaining shred of hope.

"Nobody does what they did to Rancho Bravo and gets away with it. Not while I'm alive." Killraine had killed men before. He had been a captain in the Union Army. But he had never had a passion for killing.
Then Jethro Lawrence and his band of thieving cutthroats ambushed the Rancho Bravo wagons and made off with over a hundred thousand hard-earned dollars. Worse, Lawrence had taken Killraine's girl, Jenny, and kept her prisoner. Killraine was filled with a hate that shocked him. Never before had he known such an overwhelming desire to kill. Now nothing could stop him from going after the Lawrence gang. Not even the fact that the odds were fifty-to-one, and their hideout was a fortress from which no stranger had ever returned... alive.

He charged among them, rifle empty now and thrown aside, Starr six-shooters drawn. A Lipan came at him, holding neither gun nor bow, but a long-bladed lance, putting his mount straight at Gannon's, his objective to slam his horse into the Steel Dust while he skewered Gannon with the spear. Gannon thumbed two shots-the first missed; the second caught the Lipan's horse and knocked it down. The Indian landed running, made for Gannon with lance out, ready to ram it in the Steel Dust's belly. Gannon fired again, blew the man's face apart, and rode over him as he went down.

"Ten seconds, thought Calhoon. Just ten little seconds. That's all it will take. Long enough for me to say my name. Long enough for him to remember. Because I want him to know me. And I want him to know, too, that he will die. Calhoon had ridden all the way from South Carolina to Texas looking for the man who had tortured him. Vengeance was his obsession. No one, nothing mattered to him- except to seek out and destroy his enemy. And a man driven by that kind of hate means trouble. Bad trouble. For everybody.