Thunder of Eagles

BLOOD BOND: RIDE FOR VENGEANCE

by William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

Coming in June 2008

Wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

Chapter One

The school in Sweet Apple, Texas, not far from the Rio Grande, wasn’t serving its usual function tonight. The benches and desks had been moved to create a large open space in the middle of the floor, and dancing couples filled that space, swirling around in time to the tunes played by several fiddlers and a trio of Mexicans with guitars. The music was loud and raucous, and so were the stomping feet and the laughter of those attending the dance.

Folks in Sweet Apple were having a high old time.

Matt Bodine leaned against one of the walls of the schoolroom and sighed. “All these pretty gals,” he said, “and not one of them wants to dance with me.”

“Stop complaining,” said Matt’s blood brother, Sam August Webster Two Wolves. “We’re working, remember?”

In truth, probably all of the young, eligible women in Sweet Apple and the vicinity—because everybody within riding distance came to town for a get-together like this—would have been glad to dance with either Matt or Sam, because the blood brothers were both tall, muscular, and handsome. They could have almost passed for real brothers. Matt’s hair was dark brown, while Sam’s was black as a raven’s wing. Matt’s eyes were blue, Sam’s such a dark gray as to be almost black. Sam also had the high cheekbones and slightly reddish cast to his tanned skin that he had inherited from his father, Medicine Horse, a Cheyenne warrior who had been killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Unlike nearly all the other members of his tribe, Medicine Horse had been educated in the East, at a white man’s university. It was there he had met and married Sam’s mother, who when Sam was a young man had insisted that he receive a college education, too.

Matt hadn’t gotten the benefits of such advanced schooling, but he possessed a keen natural intelligence. The son of a pioneer Montana ranching family, he had been Sam Two Wolves’ best friend since both of them were very young men, no more than kids really. Matt had been accepted into the Cheyenne tribe because of his bond with Sam. They were Onihomahan—Brothers of the Wolf.

Although they both owned sizable cattle spreads in Montana, both young men were too fiddle-footed to stay in one place for too long, so for the past few years they had been drifting around the West, usually landing smack-dab in the middle of trouble even though that wasn’t their intention. But they couldn’t turn their backs on folks in trouble, nor pass up the chance for an adventure.

Which was how they’d come to wind up in the rough-and-tumble border town of Sweet Apple, working as unofficial deputies for the town’s lawman, Marshal Seymour Standish. It was a long story involving owlhoots, Mexican revolutionaries (a fancy name for bandidos), and a train car full of U.S. Army rifles. Much powder had been burned. The air in Sweet Apple’s main street had been full of gun smoke and hot lead. Blood had been spilled, including a mite that belonged to Matt Bodine. But in the weeks since that big ruckus, things had been fairly peaceful in town.

Matt and Sam knew that wouldn’t last. It never did.

Tonight they were dressed a little fancier than usual for the dance, Matt in a brown tweed suit instead of his usual jeans and blue bib-front shirt, Sam in dark gray wool instead of his buckskins. They both wore boiled white shirts and string ties. Matt pulled at his collar and grimaced in discomfort and distaste.

“Damn thing feels like a noose,” he muttered. “This must be what it’s like to get strung up.”

“Are you going to complain about everything tonight?” Sam asked.

“I might.” Matt’s eyes followed the slender, graceful, redheaded form of Jessie Colton as she danced with one of the men from Sweet Apple.

“Oh,” Sam said. “I understand now. You’re mad because you haven’t gotten to dance with Jessie yet.”

“I saw you eyein’ Sandy Paxton,” Matt shot back. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t rather be out there with her instead of standin’ here holdin’ up this damned wall.”

“We’re doing more than that. We’re keeping an eye on the men from the Double C and Pax.”

Matt had to admit that those cowboys did need to be kept an eye on. Like the men who rode for all the other spreads in the area, the hands from the Double C and Pax ranches had come into Sweet Apple for the dance. They all knew that hostilities had to be put aside at the door. That was the plan anyway. Whether or not it worked might be another story entirely.

Once Pax and Double C had been one vast ranch, owned by cousins Esau Paxton and Shadrach Colton. Matt and Sam knew that much, but they had no idea why, somewhere along the way, the spread had been broken in two and Paxton and Colton had become bitter enemies. That was the case, though, and the feud was still going on.

Since Western men rode for the brand, the enemies of a cowboy’s boss became the cowboy’s enemies, too. That feeling had led to more than one brawl between riders from the two ranches. Here lately, as sort-of deputies, Matt and Sam had been forced to break up some of those ruckuses.

So far tonight, the men from Pax and Double C hadn’t done any more than eye each other suspiciously. Matt and Sam hoped it stayed that way.

Marshal Standish went by them, dancing with Magdalena Elena Louisa O’Ryan, the pretty little half-Mexican, half-Irish schoolmarm. Maggie O’Ryan had a big smile on her face. She was sweet on Seymour, and the feeling was returned.

Seymour glanced over Maggie’s shoulder at Matt and Sam, who each gave him a curt nod signifying that everything was all right so far. Seymour looked both relieved and happy. His face was flushed from the exertion of dancing, but it wasn’t as noticeable as it would have been a month or so earlier when he’d first arrived in Sweet