Pale Horse, Robert L. Ross [beach read book .TXT] 📗

A Letter From The Author

I would like to thank this very special person in my life who made my first book
possible. This book is dedicated to you....


To My Darling Shelly,
… who, from the day I started writing my books, encouraged me to push
further, and further, and refused to let me go a day without writing something.
For all those days when she would come home tired from work,
and the first thing she would ask me was “How many pages did you write
today?” For sitting on the bed every night as soon as she got home, very tired,
listening closely with all of her heart as I read the latest thing I had written,
and telling me how wonderful it was.
For telling all her friends about what an “awesome writer he is”
and secretly mailing what I'd written so far to each of them to keep them up
to date on the story as it unfolded in my head and was being typed on the
computer, For listening to me as I got excited and acted out the scenes I had
written earlier in the day as she sat on the bed, smiling as she watched !
For your understanding of my artistic temperament, and mood swings..,
for all the late night hours while you were trying to sleep, and my reading lamp
was on as I was trying to type quietly, my pecking away on the keyboard that
would wake you, and you would just whine “Robby”, and you would go back to
sleep.
For more than anything else Darling, for standing up strong and defiant
beside me when the winds blew strong against us, and for that soft loving tone
in your voice, and that look in your eyes when you say to me what I'm saying
to you now...,
I Love You....
Robby
EPILOGUE
Snake Head Walters had been terrorizing the town of Rifle Stock. He and his gang had been robbing, stealing, raping, and killing for a little over a month when Sheriff Ben Turner sent word for a couple of his friends, who were retired bounty hunters, to “Please come and handle the situation in any way you see fit”.
John Mills, ex-Texas Ranger turned bounty hunter, after 40 years of serving the people, had settled down with his wife, and put the business of law and killing behind him. John had come out of retirement after the passing of his wife. To help him with this decision, was the sheer boredom of inactivity, and the $10,000 offered for a job soon to be well done.
Colt Mathews, studied the business of bounty hunting under his mentor John Mills from the young age of 20, then rode with him for a little more than 5 years before he also retired to settle down with a woman. She eventually left, due to economic strife and a mutual parting between them. He decided to come out of retirement and once more ride with his good friend John, rejoining him when their mutual friend, Sheriff Ben Turner asked them for help in ridding his town of Rifle Stock of the outlaws that were terrorizing it, where upon he also received $10,000 for said job upon it's completion.
After the death of his brother, Thomas “Snake Head” Walters, slain by the lightning quick hands of Colt Mathews, Shane Walters, his younger brother, had seen fit to kidnap Sheriff Ben Turners daughter, Temperance July Merriweather, and just for good measure, her friend, Winter Crow, who had been visiting for the summer, holding them both for a $100,000 ransom, out of sheer revenge for the death of his older brother, and for the fact that Sheriff Turner had been the one that commissioned the bounty hunters to pursue him.

So the story begins....


1872

The morning mist, in pastel shades of bluish gray, crept slowly thru the Valley of Divine Shadows, and lay heavy with dew on the homestead of Pale-Horse Rankin. The rising sun, painted the landscape with elegant splashes of pale yellow and faint orange, and slowly began warming the valley with its morning glow. Swirling wisps of ashen smoke drift randomly from the old cobble-stone chimney, while the welcomed aroma of fresh brewed coffee fills the old cabin. Savory bacon strips begin to sizzle in the frying pan on the old cast-iron stove, and a dozen or so home-made biscuits began to rise in the hot-box beside it. Not the typical morning, this one had a special purpose to it, and the extra rations he was preparing were for the trek to Big Bear, where he was going to pick up supplies, visit with an old friend or two, and then head into the Nations, to visit his family that he hadn't seen in a little over a year. Outside, just yards away, “Spirit”, his loyal and trusted Appaloosa begins to