Strongheart

Table of Contents

 

 

“You're barely able ta stand, partner,” Westbrook said. “Drop the hogleg, an I'll let ya live.”

“Mister, you'll never touch that woman while there is breath in my body,” Joshua said. “You gonna start the ball or are you gonna talk me to death?”

He saw the ears on Westbrook's magnificent paint horse shoot forward, alert to something coming down the stagecoach road behind him. He figured the gang had come back and was slowly moving up behind him.

Joshua made a decision. He fired, fanned the hammer back, and fired again, and saw a large stain of crimson in the center of Long Leg's chest as he fell back, dropping his gun. Joshua immediately went to the ground, rolling to his right, toward the bloody corpse of Chancy, but on his way down he felt a bullet slam into the back of his left shoulder . . .

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DETACHMENT
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DETACHMENT: BROKEN BORDERS
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DETACHMENT:
BAMBOO BATTLEGROUND
STRONGHEART

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

STRONGHEART

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / September 2010

Copyright © 2010 by Don Bendell Inc.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-44305-7

 

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I have six children and love all of them equally and dearly, but this particular book is about heroes, and one of my children is one of my biggest heroes, so I dedicated this book to her. My oldest daughter was born July 16, 1970, and I came up with her name, Jennifer Brooke Bendell, although now it is Brooke Bendell Stark.

As a child, she was very athletic, loved dancing, all kinds, was very artistic, was an outstanding student, and got headaches anytime she rode in a car. A type-A personality, she was and is a perfectionist. Her mother and I divorced when she was nine years old, and sadly we spent many years apart. Brooke became the substitute mom to her younger sister and brother because her mother worked so hard.

The two biggest things about her that always impressed me the most were her sense of adventure and her love for God. She still possesses both.

After graduating from North Carolina State University with a degree in textile design, Brooke ended up as a Christian missionary serving in Central and South America, converting Muslims into Christians in India and Africa. In Africa, she got very ill and almost died. She had already almost died as a girl, when her appendix burst.

Brooke married a wonderful youth minister and missionary himself, Burwell Stark, and they had two daughters. The first, Lindy, is a joy. Avery was in Brooke's womb and at nine months when Brooke had a driver hit her head-on. Protectively clutching her swollen belly, Brooke slammed her face on the steering wheel. Also, she crushed her heel, and Brooke had been a dancing instructor for years. They had to pry her out of the car with the Jaws of Life and airlift her by Flight for Life to Duke University Medical Center, where Avery was delivered by cesarean section, blind and brain-damaged. Brooke was in ICU for days, and after many prayers, blood transfusions, and several surgeries, she pulled through. Avery was an angel and was given very special care by Burwell, Brooke, and Lindy for four years, but sadly she died one day during a seizure. She just did not come out of it.

After that, Brooke lost another daughter at birth.

Then, after dealing with her younger sister, my other daughter, coming down with multiple sclerosis unexpectedly, Brooke mysteriously came down with MS, too, just when she and Burwell were preparing to leave again for the mission field in Africa.

She turned to God, as she has done so often in her life, and now, despite her setbacks, she has her own business near Raleigh, North Carolina, decorating homes and painting modern murals for homes and businesses. She has even rehabbed so she can now do some dancing. To her, MS is an inconvenience but not a reason to slow down.

The life God gives each of us is a gift to us, but what we do with our lives is the gift we give back to God. Brooke has certainly been preparing a wonderful gift for her Creator. She is truly a survivor, and I cannot put into words the respect, admiration, pride, and love I have for her. Since it is entitled
Strongheart
, I dedicate this book to you, Brooke.

Love, Dad

Sam Houston

FOREWORD

Previously, I wrote ten westerns, the
Colt Family
series, for NAL, a subsidiary of Berkley's parent company, Penguin Group (USA). Lately I have been writing military thrillers because the western market was down for some time, but I am still a real cowboy with a real horse and live in southern Colorado. On my wife's birthday, March 20, 2009, my editor and friend, Tom Colgan, informed me that westerns are starting to make a comeback and asked me to switch to writing them again.
Strongheart
is my first new western for Berkley Books, and I am happy to be back in the saddle again. I hope you will escape with me back to a time when a man's word was his bond, women were ladies and men were men, and you survived only if you were hardy. These were the people who made America.

Like one of my writing heroes, the late Louis L'Amour, I ride my horse, Eagle, on just about every piece of ground I write about. In that way you get a better feel, a vision of the country, the smell of the sagebrush and the feel the sun's heat baking a rocky canyon, while hearing the click of a horse's hooves on rocks. I hope you like Joshua Strongheart as much as I do and come with me on an escape from computers, television, news stories, traffic, and our fast-paced society, to a time when our country was simpler, tougher, and more natural. Let's take a journey back to the Old West, to the real America.

Don Bendell

1

Warrior

The warrior moved so slowly through the dense forest, he was barely noticeable. Up close, though, he was a marvelous specimen. He could look down and see the top of the head of almost any fellow Lakota Sioux he had ever been with. In fact, he had to look down at most people.

Most items that he grabbed ahold of would move. They had no choice if he wanted to move them. His long black hair was braided this day, and beneath the red and black war paint, which obscured most of his face, his cheekbones were high, his jaw firm and strong, his lips thin, and his eyes special. Deep, dark brown, they looked very intelligent and, at the same time, like he was always ready to smile.

They scoured the ground in front of him, sweeping left to right, right to left in ten-foot arcs, and every few seconds he would look to both sides and up in the trees. About once a minute, he would slowly turn his head and look behind to also watch his back trail.

At the top of each bicep and the base of each bulging deltoid, he wore a tight leather band that made the cantaloupe-sized biceps look even larger.

The bow looked tiny in his left hand as he knelt down to look closely at a track, which, like the others, looked like an upside-down letter V. As he examined the crispness of its edges, a slight movement caught his eye. A grain of sand had fallen from the edge of the V and down into the track. This deer was less than a minute ahead of him. There was also a small pile of round pellets. He picked up one piece of manure in his fingers and examined it closely. It was round like a tiny brown marble, but on one side there was a small groove. Although most people could not tell the difference between a buck and a doe by looking at their tracks, he knew that the trick was to examine their scat. Bucks have a tiny anal protrusion in their bowel tract that makes a faint groove in each piece of feces. He knew this was a very large, heavy deer just by the size and depth of the tracks, but now he knew it was a buck, which is what he wanted.

The warrior turned and looked back into the deep green morass to his rear. Finally, she was noticeable. The young Lakota woman had been shadowing him at a distance and was very well camouflaged herself. But even at that distance, her great beauty was obvious, the long, shiny black hair, olive complexion, and dark eyes. He held his hands up to the side of his head, extended fingers sticking up in the air, the sign for buck deer or bull elk. She smiled and remained motionless. This warrior was helping her and her mother so much. He was tall, handsome, and, unlike so many braves, he truly cared.

He moved forward slowly on hands and knees, his bow in his left hand. Every few seconds now he paused and looked. He spotted movement, as a large twelve-point buck grazed on buck-brush and tufts of grass a short distance to his front. It took him five minutes, but he rose to his feet and inched forward, the bottom of his bow now almost touching his hip. He moved with his left side forward, his right hand on the bowstring. The nock of the arrow rested between his index and middle finger, and his ring finger also curled around the string. He would not look directly at the grazing deer, as he knew that deer and most prey animals, as well as some learned and experienced warriors, had a sixth sense, a sense of knowing when a predator was staring at them. He watched a spot a few feet behind the deer, but from the corner of his dark eye he was looking for one movement. There is a nerve in deer that causes a slight twitch in their tail, a millisecond before they raise their head up. By experience alone, this brave knew that deer had a different type of vision than humans, one which allowed them to see only the graze beneath their head when their head was down grazing. He knew from experience and his childhood teachings that the deer, no matter how close he was, could not see him as a person even when its head was up, as long as he did not move at all. Each time the warrior saw the little warning flick in the buck's tail, even if one foot was raised, he froze.