Showing results by author "Ben Bridges" in All Categories

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.

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

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.

After he saw his father set upon and stabbed, nothing was ever the same for the boy who would grow up to become Buffalo Bill Cody. The hatred and bigotry his family suffered in Kansas led him to kill his first man when he was just 10 years old. And in the years that followed, he would face one battle after another - against marauding Cheyenne, against the elements and against the Great Plains themselves.

It might have been 1895, but the country around Singletree, Montana, was still as wild as ever…The county had a problem with rustlers, and Cyrus McCall, who ran Big Sky, strung barbed wire between his land and that of his neighbor, Maggie Carter, to stop them. From then on, Maggie had to herd her cows an extra two miles before they could reach water, and that took time and manpower she couldn't spare.

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.

When you've got only five shots left, you have to make each one count. Like the outlaw whose quest for revenge didn't quite go according to plan. Or the cowboy who ended up using a most unusual weapon to defeat his Cheyenne enemy. Then there was the storekeeper who had to face his worst fear; the down-at-heel sheepherder who had to set past hatreds aside when a bunch of renegade Comanches went on the warpath; and the elderly couple who struggled to keep a secret that threatened to tear them apart.

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.

Almost before he knew it, Sam once a celebrated town-tamer whom Ned Buntline himself had called "The Pistol Prince" found himself embarking on a vengeance hunt. A boy Sam hadn't seen for fifteen years was connected with the killers, so that made it personal. But first and foremost, Sam was a peace-keeper. Convinced that the law would hang 'em all, he wanted the outlaws to have their day in court. The only thing he never reckoned on was the fact that they might very well kill him before he could find and catch them.

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?

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.

It started with a slaughter and ended with a massacre, and by the finish of it, Sam Judge and Matt Dury had seen enough bloodshed to last them a lifetime. But the gun-fast men from Texas had signed on to help an army officer get his little girl back from the Apache renegades who’d kidnapped her, and once they gave their word, nothing would stop them from seeing a job through.

It's the autumn of 1897, and men are flocking to the wild and woolly Yukon Territory in search of gold. But soldier-for-hire Tom Cannon had a different reason for making the hazardous trek north. The one-time cavalry officer has been hired to find Emmet Lawrence, a greenhorn who had gone to seek his fortune and then disappeared. Time and again, as Cannon searched the icy wastes and snow-capped mountains, he drew a blank. No one remembered Lawrence or knew where to find him.

Ben Crawford was one of the best lawmen in the business, and when a man named Kane offered him a hundred bucks a month to keep the peace in the fresh, raw town he'd just founded, it sounded exactly like the challenge he'd been looking for. So he took the job...and spent the next 12 years just waiting for something to happen. It never did. In fact, life in Kane's Crossing, New Mexico, grew so damn quiet that the townsfolk eventually decided they didn't really need a lawman at all. But fate had other ideas, because all hell was destined to break loose....

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.

Jake was trustworthy, he spoke Spanish and he knew how to get a tough job done. In next to no time, however, he and his young British partner in crime a would-be Hollywood movie writer were playing cat-and-mouse with the armies of two countries, trying to get even with the men who double-crossed them and, in a final terrifying showdown, pitting their wits against the Mexican Army's latest secret weapon!