The Confederate 3, page 20
With a sure, swift move, Griffin swung on one heel. He saw the frightened expression cross his enemy’s face at sight of the sword. Then steel struck sparks off steel as the blades met. Griff jumped to one side and the tip of his superbly balanced blade weaved a pattern of hypnotic danger in front of Trainer’s face. The burly outlaw gave ground. Inexorably, Griff followed him. A quick flick of the sword and a line of blood showed on Trainer’s left cheek.
The chief enforcer jerked his eyes from side to side, seeking his horse, some escape. None presented itself. He took another step backward and stumbled over the body of one of his men.
Instantly Griff leaped forward and thrust with a solid, straight line attack. Seven inches of hard steel slid into Morgan Trainer’s chest, pierced his heart and deflected off the inner surface of a rib, preventing it from protruding from his back. His mouth opened in a soundless scream and his eyes rolled upward.
Griff gave a sideways slash and pulled his sword free. Trainer uttered a broken sigh and fell into the dust.
Cheyenne warriors swarmed all around, attacking and killing one Snake brave after another. Billy Two-Face saw his men fall on all sides. Cavalrymen, blue-uniformed and filled with the lust for battle, surged in among the painted Cheyenne, firing to both sides and the front. Billy chanced to look toward the side wall of the stockade and saw Morgan Trainer go down to the sword thrust by Griff. At once, the Snake renegade started his mount in that direction. This fierce fighter had to be stopped.
As the Snake drew closer, the man turned and put one foot in the saddle of a tall, thick-necked stallion. He swung upright, the long knife still in his right hand. Billy Two-Face raised his rifle and sighted along it as his mount broke into a smooth, rocking horse gait. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Behind you, Griff!” the voice of Lieutenant Harding cried suddenly.
The man he had been trying to kill wheeled his horse and faced Billy Two-Face. The last minute warning had brought them almost into physical contact. The fighter changed his grip on the sword and threw it like a spear.
Billy Two-Face had no time nor space to duck. The tip entered his body an inch below his rib cage, angled downward. The keen edge cut smoothly and the long blade seemed to be swallowed by the pouting lips of the entry wound. He slid from his pony with the world swimming in gathering darkness.
“Bloody hell!” Lord Jonathan Chancellor exploded as he watched the attack on the stockade turn from success to ruin. Seemingly from nowhere, a company of cavalry and as many swarming Indians charged onto the field and engaged the assault force. The battle became obscured in clouds of dust and smoke. Gunshots crackled and bullets screeched off in ricochets. Then, gradually the tumult began to clear.
Several of Morgan Trainer’s men rode away in desperate flight. He saw a large welter of bodies on the ground, few of them blue-clothed soldiers or red-painted Cheyenne. Then he saw a tall, blond-haired man on a magnificent horse whirl about and throw some indistinguishable object at the Shoshone leader, Billy Two-Face. It went an amazingly long way into the Indian’s body and he fell from his horse. It took no military genius to know the battle had ended. The consortium’s official observer placed the field glasses in a case and gathered his few possessions. It was time, and more, he knew, to make a hasty withdrawal.
Troopers went among the fallen, checking for any Snake warriors playing possum. Occasional reports from Colt revolvers marked their progress. Lieutenant Harding, on foot and leading his horse, walked up to where Griffin Stark bent to retrieve his sword.
“That was the most outstanding exhibit of sword work I have ever seen, Mr. Stark.”
“Be assured I didn’t learn it at the Point, Lieutenant.” A rueful grin formed. “Perhaps you should come there and teach it. Uh, may I extend my formal apologies regarding my insufferably stuffy and wrongheaded attitudes in the past, sir?”
“Nothing to apologize for, Phil. If they would teach at the Point that no one knows anything about Indian fighting on the frontier unless they’ve been here, you new officers would not come out here with all the wrong ideas. It goes with the territory, so to speak. I owe you thanks for that warning.”
Harding actually blushed. “My pleasure, sir.”
“Call me Griff.”
“All right then, Griff. I … I think that fellow you speared is still alive. He moved slightly.”
Both men turned their attention toward Billy Two-Face.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, Major,” Sergeant Sean Mallory addressed Griff. “But would ye be takin’ a look at that fancy-pants cuttin’ off across the ridge? He looks like one o’ them bloody absentee English landlords we had to put up with in Ireland.”
A thought struck Griffin. This could be a connection to the consortium, he considered, as he studied the distant figure. None of this gang of cutthroats and thieves would dress in such finery. He lowered the pair of glasses handed him by the sergeant.
“Would you hand me that rifle, Sergeant?”
“Glad to, sir.”
Griff knelt and took careful aim. It was a decidedly long shot for the Springfield. Even so, he fined down his sight picture and gently squeezed the trigger. The sound of the shot had rolled away and the smoke cleared before the figure of Lord Chancellor did a backflip off of the horse he rode.
“B’God, ye did it, Major!” Mallory shouted in excitement.
When Griff swung into the saddle, Mallory tossed him his Colt with the admonition that there were only three rounds left. The elegant fugitive lay prostrate, blood seeping from a wound low in his back. Griff knelt at his side and put the muzzle of the borrowed Colt under the pale-faced man’s chin.
“Who are you?”
“Lord Jonathan Chancellor. I demand to see the nearest British Counsel.”
“He’s a long ways from here. You’d do better to answer my questions before I blow your brains out.”
“I am a personage of some importance. Your government will hear of this, I assure you.”
“Perhaps. Right now I’m here and so are you.” Griff cocked the Colt. “If you want to live to complain about your treatment, talk.”
“About what?”
“Are you connected with the consortium?”
“What do you know of that?”
“You are part of it, then?” Griff growled. “Your boy Braithwaite bragged about the power you have, the influence. Said that Jennifer and Damien Carmichael and I are to be killed on your orders.”
“Not mine, old boy. The consortium. You are dead and so are they to die. You got in our way.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know the details and I mus … ugh … this hurts awfully.”
“I have reason to believe now that this consortium was responsible, at least in part, for my son being taken captive by the Indians.”
“Sorry, don’t know about that. Only remember, you are a dead man.”
All of the anger, grief, frustration, and bitterness boiled up in Griffin Stark and his finger tightened on the Colt’s trigger as he spoke to Lord Jonathan Chancellor. “I’m not so sure about my own demise, but I can promise that you are for certain sure, a dead man.”
Jonathan Chancellor’s double chin muffled the report of the shot that blew off the back of his head. Without a further look, Griffin mounted and rode back to the small stockade.
“This here Billy Two-Face has come around, Griff,” Temple Ames told him. “He wants to talk to you.”
“What about?” Griff asked, and the Shoshone rose slightly, winced at the pain and coughed a smear of blood.
“You are the one asking about the white-haired boy with the Cheyenne, is that right?” the renegade inquired.
“Yes, I am.”
“We took him in a raid. Sold him to horse traders.”
“What horse traders?” Griff demanded, suddenly caught up again in the need to find his son.
“Nez Percé. Not know what they want with him, what they will do. Long gone now. The boy is your son?”
“Yes.”
“I die happy knowing I have caused you hurt.” Billy Two-Face tried to make a wad of spit to expel at Griffin’s feet. He choked on the effort, vomited up a spew of blackish blood and fell back dead.
A week sped by rapidly on the ride back to the outpost. There, Griff related the events of the expedition to Jennifer and told her what he had learned about Jeremy. She tried to console him, reminding him of how large a place the West was. He heard none of it.
“Will you be coming back to Maryland now?” she asked him late one evening after they had walked around the compound.
“No.”
“To Georgia, then? To rebuild Riversend?”
“Jenny, I … I have to stay here. Jeremy is out there … somewhere and I’m going to find him. First, though, I am going to continue the search, and I want to find Braithwaite and whoever is behind him more than ever. I want them to pay. In the process, if God grants me one small break, I may come across Jeremy. If not, the day I destroy Braithwaite and this consortium, I begin a concentrated search for Jeremy, and I won’t quit if it takes the rest of my life.”
Tears spilled from Jennifer’s eyes, though in her heart she knew he was right. It had to be that way. She felt glad she had refrained from telling him that one of the men he killed had saved her from a shameful fate. Now she never would. He bore enough of a burden; this one she could manage herself. Neither would know peace until he succeeded. She loved him and would follow him anywhere. All she needed were the right words to persuade him.
The epic adventure continues in
THE CONFEDERATE 4
SABER CHARGE
A Tribute to the Author
by Patrick E. Andrews
Forrest A Randolph, author of The Confederate series, was in reality my friend Mark K. Roberts.
I first met Mark when we were schoolboys in Wichita, Kansas right after World War II. My family had moved from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to live in that city after my dad transferred from active duty to the Army Reserves. Mark and I hit it off right away. We both liked to read adventure books and go to the movies on Saturday afternoons to watch the western films of Bob Steele, Sunset Carson, Charles Starrett and others.
Later, as we grew older, our interest in literature turned to typing up adventure stories and passing them back and forth to each other. Most of these were westerns, since my family had pioneered in Oklahoma and his in Kansas. All this came to an end as teenagers when Mark's widowed mother remarried and her new husband took her and Mark to live in San Diego, California.
Meanwhile, our devotion to writing grew stronger as we exchanged occasional letters and went about growing into manhood. I enlisted in the Army and volunteered to be a paratrooper, while Mark joined the California National Guard. When I was discharged from the service, Mark invited me out to San Diego to share an apartment and start some serious writing. A few years passed and he made some sales to Pinnacle Books, then I scored with four westerns bought by Manor Books.
Now the good times started as more sales and improvement in our story telling skills developed. After that we saw each other only occasionally. However, we got together in one of our old watering holes for some drinking and jawing. Mark brought up the subject of us writing a western together. Great idea and it would be fun! We decided to make it a cavalry novel since we both had military service experience and our family lore supplied us with a lot of knowledge about cattle ranches and homesteads. The result was Apache Gold, and we had no trouble selling it to Kensington Publishers.
Little did we know that decades later our novel would be picked up as an e-book by Piccadilly Books in the United Kingdom. My primary contact at PP was a savvy Brit by the name of Ben Bridges, who is not only a resourceful publisher but writes damn fine westerns of his own.
In the 1990s Mark inherited some property back in Kansas where his great-grandparents homesteaded, and he moved back to the prairie country. At the same time I followed my wife Julie from California to Florida, and Colorado in her aerospace job. Since I was a writer, it was easy for us to pack up and go elsewhere. When she retired, we moved back to California to be with our son and grandchildren.
Then, thanks to e-mail, Mark and I got back in touch. But it was not a happy occasion. One of the first things he wrote was, “Well, Patrick, I'm afraid I’m not the healthiest man in Dodge.” As the weeks passed, his e-mail activity slowed then stopped. I called the local sheriff and asked him to check on Mark. The next day the lawman called back and said he’d gone to his house and found that he had passed away. Mark was buried homesteader style in a corner section of land that had been used as the Roberts family cemetery for several generations.
Rest in peace, old pardner. I’m in my 80s now, so maybe pretty soon, if you're in a celestial saloon, you’ll see me amble in to join you at the bar We’ll knock back some good bourbon like we did in the good ol’ days.
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Forrest A. Randolph, The Confederate 3
