The Long, Long Trail

Tom Derry owed Buck Rainey his life—twice over.

When Rainey saved him from an angry bull, Tom thought that here was a good and brave man. When Rainey helped him fight some men who wanted his blood, Tome knew that if there was ever anything he could do for Buck, he’d do it gladly.

Rainey knew this too. So he asked Tom to help get his friend Barry Christian out of jail—and out of a hanging. Tom figured that if Christian was Buck’s friend, he couldn’t be a murderer. And when Buck said the Jim Silver, the man who’d put Christian behind bars, was a lying, scheming killer, Tom had no reason to doubt him.

So Tom helped Christian escape—and was repaid by being sent on a ride on Christian’s horse, the horse whose trail Silver was tracking. When Silver caught up with him, Tom though that he was finished. But Jim Silver knew a decent man when he saw one, and let Derry go. It was then that Tom realized the truth: Christian was a killer, and if he had the chance, he would kill Silver. Tom knew he had to stop him somehow—even if it meant doublecrossing the man who had twice saved his life.

Once again we ride in company with "Whistlin' Dan," the fearless, silent, mysterious chap who shares the instincts of wild things, and once again we engage with him in his desperate adventures, hair-breadth escapes, and whirlwind triumphs. A novel thrilling in its reality, which will not be put down by lovers of exciting fiction.

Wild horses … evil men!

Parade—a magnificent stallion worth twice his weight in cold cash. And many men had set out to capture this legendary prize. Some never returned. Some came back stony-broke. Others were ruined by desert heat and mountain winters.

But Silvertip was not an ordinary man. He was a dangerous cowboy who could rip out the heart of a mountain lion with his bare hands and shoot quarters out of the air.

When Silvertip hunted Parade he took only a rope and raw courage. But trailing him, guns at their sides, were two killers—who wanted Silvertip as badly as they wanted Parade!

His name was Jim Silver, but they called him Silvertip. His only companions were his stallion, Parade, and a wolf, Frosty, who obeyed nothing but the wild instincts of his breed and the soft commands of his master. Together they were part of the legend of the West.

Silvertip was a man who hungered for action the way most men hungered for food. And he found plenty when bank robber Jim Lovell sought his protection. Because, unknown to Silvertip, Lovell was packing a half-million dollars in stolen cash along with his Winchester. And the men he’d double-crossed had shot their way out of jail and were riding hard on the trail of their desperate partner.

Steven Yount's debut novel, Death on the Trail, is the first novel in a projected four-book series set in the New Mexico Territory in the years following the Civil War. It features the exploits of Turner Brown, a former Union cavalry officer and Deputy U.S. Marshal.

Turner Brown is loosely based on the author's own great-grandfather who turned away from working summers on his father's Missouri farm and winters working on his father's river freighting business to join the union Army. Both Brown and the author's great-grandfather fought for Ulysses S. Grant in Grant's campaign through Mississippi. After the War both were transferred to the Powder River Country in the Dakota Territory to fight Indians.

The author's great-grandfather returned to Missouri where he died in poverty, crippled by his wartime wounds while Brown stayed in the West and fared much better as a Deputy U.S. Marshal, first in Cheyenne and then in New Mexico.

Yount, a life-long broadcast journalist, joined the Wall Street Journal Radio Network in 2000 as a reporter/anchor after more than twenty years as an anchorman at the most prestigious all-news radio stations in Philadelphia (KYW Newsradio), Chicago (WMAQ Newsradio) and New York City (1010 WINS All-News Radio).

Garet Havelock, Vulture City's marshal, attempts to stop the theft of $100,000 in bullion from the Vulture Mine headquarters. An old nemesis, Barnabas Donovan, is responsible and leaves a trail of dead behind him. A kidnapping, gunfights with Indians, and chasing the gold bring the marshal to meet the one woman he can't forget and forces choices on him no man should have to make.

Now, Havelock must survive the Apache “run of death,” and face Donovan's gunslingers to get back the gold.

Chapter One

The stench of death clung to the dry earth of Vulture City, a patch of hell on the Mojave Desert. The town's burgeoning jumble of dugouts, tarpaper shacks, and batten-on-plank houses fanned out from a plaza bordered by Garth's Mercantile and Vulture Mine headquarters, the Carrion Saloon, the Vulture Hotel, and the marshal's office and jail. One street leading from the plaza ended at the Vulture Mine.

Gold sweetened the smell of death; pretty, plentiful gold from the Vulture Mine – the richest in Arizona, maybe the richest in the West.

The stamp-mill crushed the ore sweated from the mother lode and separated the precious metal from the quartz. Men with greed etched on their faces melted down the gold and poured it into forms for ingots—an inch thick, three inches wide, and ten long. Each weighed about twenty-two ounces at fineness of just over nine hundred.