Showing results by author "L. P. Holmes" in All Categories

Marriage between sinners has its inevitable messes. If you’ve been married longer than a week or two, you know how the hard realities of life in a fallen age can come crashing in. Perhaps you had a season of “once upon a time,” but soon enough you realized that this marriage, in this world, is not yet your “happily ever after.”

Bruce Martell is a man of principle. Riding into Indio Basin in search of his kid brother, he immediately feels uneasy. Before he can encounter even a single settler, he happens upon the corpses of four poached cows. After a brief encounter with the angry owner of the slaughtered cattle, he makes his way into the town of Starlight. Here he finds a climate of hostility, the farmers and settlers pitted against the cowboys and cattlemen. He feels the settlers' hostility keenly, and after an altercation with a drunkard, he finds himself in need of rescue from the angry mob.

Over the years rancher Luke Lilavelt built his Window Sash brand from a podunk operation into a full-fledged cattle empire. But he didn't do it through hard work. He added to his holdings through bloody methods only marginally within the law. And most of those methods were carried out by Dave Wall, Lilavelt's troubleshooter. The work hurt Wall's reputation considerably. But Wall knew it wouldn't hurt as much as Lilavelt revealing the secrets he's holding about his brother-in-law's checkered past.

Reece Canby, owner of the Diamond RC, spent years as a youngster on the nearby Mescalero Apache reservation. By treaty Chief Antone's Mescalero tribe owns the Sentinel Basin. Now this grazing land is desired by Sax Starke and Chelso DeLacca of the Teepee spread in order for them to expand their cattle herd. The first step in their plan is to stir up trouble with the Mescaleros so that the federal government will have to intervene.

In Black Rock Desert, when Lee Cone is hired by Braz Boland to chouse a herd of horses from Carbide Junction into Maacama Basin through Black Rock Desert, he has no idea that it will reignite the old enmity between himself and Tasker Scott. Cone had left the basin two years earlier, when the girl he loved married Scott. Also: Buck English in the title story has been a hard and bitter loner willing to step outside the law ever since his father Martin, former sheriff of the county, had been killed by outlaws.