Showing results by author "Ben Bridges" in All Categories

It's the scorching summer of 1878, and a bitter range war is threatening to blow Montana Territory sky-high. On one side there's the all-powerful Stock Grower's Association and its 50-strong army of hired guns. On the other, there's just a handful of families who'll fight to the death to keep the land they've settled on. Trouble is, the Association is slowly but surely winning the struggle.

The choice was simple. Professional fighting man Carter O'Brien could stick around Scot's Post, California, and risk taking a bullet in the back from a bully-boy with a score to settle... or he could ride up into the treacherous, winter-locked mountains on an impossible mission of mercy. They both came down to the same thing - almost certain death. But because O'Brien had never been one to pass up a challenge, he chose the mountains.

Luke Heller was looking forward to spending some time with his beautiful Oriental partner high in the Colorado Rockies. His job - to handle security at a luxury mountain hotel - should have been a nice, peaceful little assignment. After all, what could possibly happen in a resort full of wealthy Easterners? But Luke didn't know the half of it. Death was stalking the timbered slopes, and it came first in the shape of a grisly murder, then as a violent robbery.

O'Brien was hunting bounty up in Utah when the deal blew up in his face. Now he was hurting bad and the doctor told him that he'd have to rest up for at least a couple of months before he could even think about strapping his Colt back on. Still, a feller's got to earn a living, and he was grateful when the doctor gave him a job which promised to be nice and quiet. Hardly any more than an easy little trip across the territory.

Right across the West, lawmen were losing their fight against crime. Something had to be done fast. But what? It was a retired judge named Wilde who came up with the answer-to pit one outlaw against another. From that point on, his "law-enforcers" became six of the meanest misfits ever to see the inside of a jail-cell; a murderous albino, a black gunfighter, an Apache half-breed, a one-time Pinkerton detective, a Missouri-born conman and a giant whose hands were deadlier than a Gatling gun

Carter O'Brien was greased lightning with a gun and the best freelance fighting man in the business. That's why the greenhorn wanted to hire him. The only trouble was, he'd been sworn to secrecy about his own mysterious mission.

Jake was trustworthy, he spoke Spanish and he knew how to get a tough job done. In next to no time, however, he and his young British partner in crime a would-be Hollywood movie writer were playing cat-and-mouse with the armies of two countries, trying to get even with the men who double-crossed them and, in a final terrifying showdown, pitting their wits against the Mexican Army's latest secret weapon!

The choice was simple. Sam Lockwood and his fellow Confederate prisoners of war could spend the rest of their days in a Union prison camp, or they could go west to bring law and order back to the wilds of Arizona as "Galvanized Yankees". They chose to ride west, and sure enough, what they found when they got there was a land turned lawless. Apaches were on the warpath and a gang of marauding Mexican bandidos was cutting up rough.

The Portuguese slavers called him Sam because they couldn't pronounce his real name. They tore him away from his homeland and put him to work picking cotton in the Tennessee Valley. But the big, fleet-footed Zulu was nobody's slave, and to prove it he escaped and headed west. Throwing in with a medicine show conman named Doc Jonah, Sam started entering county footraces to earn enough money to go back to Africa

Arch Bowman raped and murdered his way across the West to become the stuff of legend. But when he survived a near-fatal shooting in Colfax, Colorado, he decided to make the most of his new lease of life and finally settle a long-standing piece of unfinished business... But that didn't mean Bowman was about to go soft. Before he was through, innocent men would die in legendary numbers, and Bowman would make sure that life was hell for a mild-mannered farmer named Walt Canaday.

After graduating from West Point Military Academy, Mississippi-born Sam Lockwood was posted to far-away Arizona Territory, where he soon grew to love the hostile desert known as Apacheria. But the Civil War dragged him back to Mississippi, where he experienced all the horrors of a savage conflict, including the hell-on-earth that was the Union prison-camp known as the Rat Hole.

Ash Colter's speed with a gun had turned him into the man they called "The Gunsmoke Legend". But it was a reputation he didn't want. So he put his gun away and rode south, figuring to buy some land and raise horses. To do that he needed money, and to earn that money he agreed to undertake one last, dangerous assignment – to track down the notorious outlaw John Kidd. Backed by an oddly-assorted posse, Colter was soon riding the high lines in his pursuit of the outlaw and his gang. One bloody confrontation piled atop another.

A damsel in distress, Wyatt Earp called her. And he was right, too. Because as soon as soon as Luke Heller got involved with the beautiful Irene Lawrence, he found himself up to his neck in murder, intrigue and a mysterious deal so big that it could only end - explosively - seven hundred miles away, on the notorious Barbary Coast. En route, Heller found himself battling thick-armed bullies and bloodthirsty Chinese hatchet-men determined to give him a double profile.

Arizona Territory, 1882. The Apaches were riding rings around the army, raiding, robbing and killing pretty much wherever they liked. To beat them, Captain Nathan Kelso knew he had to fight them on their own terms, hitting fast and hitting hard. But who was going to listen to a washed-up, borderline drunk? As it turned out, he received support from a surprising quarter, and was ordered to form Company C, a light, mobile unit dedicated to bracing the Apaches wherever they found them.

Tension was rising fast in the hell-bent-for-leather town of Little Cody, Wyoming. A young girl had been murdered, and the killer was locked up in the local jail, awaiting trial. But the rough-and-ready miners weren’t prepared to let justice take its course. The only law they craved was lynch law. And to make things worse, the killer’s family was trying every dirty trick they could think of to make sure the case never reached the courts.

Tim Dennison died a slow, agonizing death, but because he was a sheep man in a valley that was controlled by two powerful cattle barons, no one cared if his killers got away with murder.

It stood to be the biggest oil well in the territory...provided wildcatter Bud Bishop could bring it in before his lease ran out. But the Irishman wanted to make sure he didn't. Then he figured to move in, take ownership, and keep all the spoils of Bishop's hard labor for himself. So Bishop's backers hired freelance fighting man Carter O'Brien to keep Hugh Quillan's bullyboys off his back long enough to get the job done. But the closer it came to the deadline, the harder Quillan started to play.

Professor Andrew Murray and his fellow scientists were not to go up into the Texas hill country to carry out weather tests unless they had someone trail-wise along to watch them. So the government sent in its unofficial six-man team of trouble-busters, the Wilde Boys, to play nursemaid.For once it looked as if the west's most reluctant lawmen had been handed a nice, quiet little assignment. But then the bullets started flying ... and in next to no time they were fighting off bushwhackers and nightriders alike.

A case of mistaken identity marked O’Brien out for death the minute he rode into Nebraska. A feud had erupted between the local farmers and a scheming loan agent who figured to sell them out. Both sides pegged O’Brien as a vicious gunman named Wes Dexter, who had been hired to settle the matter with violence. That made him a hero to some.... and a target for others.

The Texas Rangers sent Carter O'Brien south of the border with orders to kill a madman. It was said that his target - a murderous bandit named Salazar - had the face of an angel and the heart of a demon. Certainly, judging by all he'd heard, O'Brien sure figured he needed killing. Given the choice, though, he'd sooner have faced Salazar in a head-on gunfight than turn back shooter and kill him from hiding.