Ralph Compton Terror Trail (The Trail Drive Series) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Compton stood six foot eight without his boots. He worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist. His first novel, The Goodnight Trail, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was the USA Today bestselling author of the Trail of the Gunfighter series, the Border Empire series, the Sundown Rider series, and the Trail Drive series, among others.

Lyle Brandt is a pen name of writer Michael Newton, author of 252 novels (54 of them Westerns, 21 as "Brandt"), 98 nonfiction books, and 91 nonfiction articles published since 1977. Writing as "Brandt," Newton won the Western Fictioneers' first Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel in 2010, for Manhunt. Another "Brandt" novel, Avenging Angels, was a Peacemaker Best Novel finalist in 2011, as well as being a Best Paperback Original finalist for the Western Writers of America's Spur Award. In 2017 Newton received a Lifetime Achievement Peacemaker Award from Western Fictioneers. Terror Trail is his third novel in Ralph Compton's Trail Drive Series, preceded by The Badlands Trail and Drive for Independence.

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Chapter One

Do–a Ana County, New Mexico Territory

The first gunshot-a rifle by its sound, no less than .30 caliber, fired at perhaps one hundred yards-woke Alejandro Aguirre from a fitful sleep precisely on the stroke of four a.m. He knew the time because an heirloom clock was chiming in the parlor of his ranch house, a familiar sound that rarely woke him even when his sleep was troubled as on most nights.

Lying wide awake and staring into darkness, Alejandro wondered if the shot had come from one of his vaqueros, taking out a stray coyote before it could raid the ranch's livestock, but that possibility evaporated with a sudden stuttering of gunfire, sounding as if someone had touched off a string of firecrackers.

Trouble! It could be nothing else.

Aguirre scrambled out of bed, the polished hardwood floor cool underneath his bare feet as he hastened to the window, drew back its curtains, and peered outside. Bright muzzle flashes winked at him like out-of-season fireflies, visible before the rattle of successive shots caught up, sound lagging for a split second behind the speed of light.

A seasoned rancher in this corner of the territory went to bed each night expecting danger, woke relieved at sunrise if the threat had passed him by, and then labored through his days prepared to do it all again. Aguirre knew what must be done now, only hoping that he would not be too late.

Returning to his large four-poster bed, he stepped into a pair of hand-tooled boots, not bothering with socks. Next, he retrieved the gun belt dangling from the nearest bedpost, buckling it around his waist, over the knee-length linen nightshirt that he wore. The pistol in its holster was a Colt New Service Model 1909, double-action revolver, chambered for the .45 Long Colt cartridge lately adopted by the U.S. Army.

Alejandro did not have to check the Colt. He always kept it fully loaded, ready to respond in an emergency. But with a raid in progress on his property, he also needed further firepower.

Rounding the bed, toward what had been his wife's side before typhus claimed her life, Aguirre reached a gun case mounted on the wall of knotty pine. Inside, their muzzles pointed toward the bedroom ceiling, were two Winchesters-a lever-action Model 1895 rifle, standing beside a Model 1897 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. He chose the rifle for its greater range, loaded with .30-06 Springfield cartridges that fired 220-grain projectiles at 2,500 feet per second, lethal well beyond three thousand yards in skillful hands.

And Alejandro rarely missed a man-sized target, never mind the time of day or night.

Aguirre cleared his bedroom as a brass bell started clanging on the covered porch outside. Its warning was superfluous, given the shooting still in progress, but his houseman, Manuelito Obreg—n, would stand his post-and join the fight himself, if necessary-until any danger had been quelled by force.

Passing the darkened dining room where he took three meals daily with his son and daughters, barring the rare trip away from home on business, Alejandro reached the front door of his casa grande, opened it, and stepped outside into the early-morning chill. New Mexico baked under a relentless desert sun by day, but after sunset, temperatures dropped twenty degrees or more, forcing vaqueros on the night shift into fleece-lined coats.

Aguirre scarcely felt that as he reached the broad porch of the home he'd built from scratch, expanding over three decades as he acquired more land, more stock, more money in a bank vault at the county seat, Las Cruces. He had built a reputation from the ground up, paying dearly for it, and was ready to defend it now at any cost.

"ÀQuŽ pasa?" he asked Manuelito.

Barely glancing back at his employer, Obreg—n stated the obvious. "Bandidos, jefe."

While he rang the warning bell with his right hand, the slender houseman clutched a double-barreled shotgun under his left arm, prepared to fire if any of the trespassers came into range. Aguirre knew it would be loaded with ball bearings, stainless steel, which Obreg—n preferred to leaden buckshot. Tucked beneath his belt, as if he'd risen fully dressed from bed, a Smith & Wesson Model 3 top-break revolver dragged the waistline of his baggy trousers down.

"How many?" Alejandro queried.

"Cuarenta, m‡s o menos, jefe."

Forty, maybe more, increased the danger to Aguirre's property beyond the petty skirmishes his night shift sometimes fought with drifters hoping for an easy score, perhaps escaping with a horse or two for sale across the borderline.

This was an act of war and must be treated with the rigor it deserved.

Descending from the covered porch, Aguirre moved across the yard with long, swift strides, calling his men on duty and their fellows scrambling from bunkhouses in a daze.

"To me, vaqueros! Rally here to me!"

Make haste,Ó Francisco Villa ordered his subordinate, Òbefore they rally and we have a full-scale battle on our hands.Ó

"ÁS’, general!" his aide replied. "Just as you say!"

In fact, Villa-called "Pancho" by his friends-was not a general. He held no military rank at all below the Rio Grande. Even the name by which most knew him was a lie.

He had been born Doroteo Arango, to rural peasant parents in San Juan del R’o, QuerŽtaro, Mexico, and raised in abject poverty around Durango until he had learned to steal and specialized in rustling livestock. As a bandit, he had used multiple pseudonyms over the past thirty-two years, eluding prison or a firing squad by guts and guile until he turned sixteen.

That year, his sister had been ravished, brutally defiled, by either the employees of a wealthy rancher or a squad of federales serving President Porfirio D’az. While rumors varied on that point, they all agreed that Villa-called "Arango" in those days-had hunted down the rapists, slaying each in turn before escaping on a stolen horse into the wild Sierra Madre Occidental. There, he joined a gang led by Durango's infamous Ignacio Parra, then organized his own pandilla of young rowdies like himself, supplying stolen animals and other goods to wealthy backer Pablo Valenzuela, adopting the surname of his maternal grandfather, Jesœs Villa.

In 1902, when the federales captured him at last, they spared his life but drafted him into the military service of D’az. Villa waited a year, then murdered his commanding officer and fled to Coahuila on the victim's stallion, forming a new gang under the nickname of la Cucaracha-the cockroach-and raiding as he pleased throughout the state he had belatedly adopted as his own. Only in recent months had Villa turned his thoughts to politics, a brooding hatred for el presidente's ruthless policies, and ways to profit from that loathing of his homeland's government.

The first answer that came to mind: horses.

Villa had known of the Aguirre ranch by reputation for some time, and finally decided it was ripe for picking. With his cadre of bandidos, he could steal its prized herd, spoken for under a pending contract with the U.S. Cavalry, whose troops had stolen so much land from Mexico during the war of 1846-48. Over the course of barely two years, the United States had claimed 530,000 square miles of Old Mexico, adding insult to injury with the pathetic "compensation" of five cents per...