検索キーワード： 著者 "C.J. Petit" すべてのカテゴリー

After he and Garth had built the A-G Connected, Al thought that he’d fulfilled his dream by owning a horse ranch. But when Garth announced that he was going to get married, Al knew that he would only be in the way, so he decided to find his own place. It was after he found his new ranch almost a hundred miles south of the A-G that things changed dramatically, and he realized that just starting a ranch and raising horses wasn’t a dream at all, and it would take a nightmare to discover what that dream truly was.

Eighteen-year-old Garrett Shaw and his father spotted the rustlers and pulled their Winchesters. They kept their muzzles pointed away from the three men who were stealing eight steers from their small ranch to give them a chance to leave peaceably. When they started throwing lead, Garrett and his father began returning fire. Garrett hit one of the rustlers just as his father’s horse went down. Hours later, as the doctor examined his father’s injury, Garrett knew that it was now his responsibility to provide for his crippled father, mother, and sisters.

Bethan listened as her father explained to her mother the mission that he was giving to her brother, Lynn, and her Uncle Bryn. After she’s heard all of the details, she left the big house and returned to her small house where she began to pack. She was frustrated at being unable to apply the skills that she’d been learning from her father since she was just a young girl, knowing that if she’d been born male, she would have been sworn in as a deputy marshal within a year.

Private Jake Elliott was apprehensive as he walked to the commander’s office. He couldn’t think of a single transgression that would have attracted the major’s attention. When he left the command building 10 minutes later, he was still numbed by the short visit. Tomorrow, he would no longer be a cavalryman, but would be returning to the family ranch outside of Fort Benton in Montana Territory. But it was the reason he was being discharged before his enlistment expired that had been the biggest shock.

Lynn glared at Ryan Mitchell and wanted to smack his smug face. Even though Ryan meant to insult him, Lynn knew that there was a very good chance that what he said was right. He’d suspected for years now that Dylan Evans wasn’t his real father. It didn’t take a math wizard to figure out that he’d been born nine months after his mother had been rescued from Fort Benton.

Doctor Turnbull had estimated that Kyle's mother had six months to live - that was three months ago. He felt guilty for playing a game as she suffered back at their small excuse for a house. She had insisted and knew that it was important to her that he spend time outside of the mechanized hell where he spent 60 hours a week earning his meager pay that kept food on the table and paid the rent. She had lost so much weight and was only able to tolerate a weak broth now, so he didn’t believe it would be that long.

The upcoming eclipse was anxiously awaited by Clay Jeffries as he prepared a private observatory on the plateau above his father's ranch near Rawlins in Wyoming territory. Then, he received a visitor with an unusual request. The stranger asked the ex-professor if he would tutor his frumpy but brilliant daughter in astronomy. Clay reluctantly agreed, but only if she proved to be an exceptional student. While the young girl surely proved to be both brilliant and frumpy, her arrival also brought with it many potentially deadly consequences that neither she nor her father realized.

Mark Jordan was in no hurry to finish the long ride across Texas to reach his first assignment in Dallas. He was ashamed of himself for not standing up to his father and choosing his own career. But now, he was an ordained minister and wished something would happen to change the course of his life, unaware that the two riders who were approaching him from the west would soon do that and much more.

Mac Jones had been searching for a refuge for seven years and had finally found it in the mountains of Colorado. Then, as soon as his cabin was built, he was presented with two fellow refugees who would turn his peaceful sanctuary into a killing ground.

The scheduled train from Granger was overdue by three hours. He’d suspected a mechanical breakdown or maybe even a derailment. But the engineer of the next train to use that track had just reported that he hadn’t found any signs of the train. He had no idea how an entire train could simply vanish, but as he pondered the mystery, the head telegrapher came to his office and showed him a telegram that had been sent to Union Pacific headquarters. It was a ransom demand for $100,000.

Bryn felt sickened as he felt the ground shake, knowing that one of the two shafts had collapsed. Now, he stood in the pump room and watched the two thrumming pumps as they pulled water out of the deep mines. He knew that one of them would strain when the water became fouled with coal dust and debris from the collapse, and if it was pump number two, it would mean that his father and older brothers were probably dead.

In his haste to escape a scalding death, the engine operator panicked and fell. Dylan lifted his heavy shovel as high as his 12-year-old arms could manage and swung at the thundering machine. It could've killed him, but he had to try. As the shovel’s steel head slammed into the machine, it set in motion a series of events that would shape his entire life.

As Carl sat astride his roan gelding and stared at Pine Bluffs, he knew that his days of punching cattle were over. The long drives across the West were dying now that the railroads had crisscrossed the Plains. Ironically, his last formal education had given him the skills and knowledge to help build those railroads, and now he’d finally put them to use. His short-term plan of spending a quiet night or two in Pine Bluffs would soon be altered by a simmering man-made volcano in the mountains of central Wyoming at a mine that provided the coal for the railroad’s locomotives.

They came out of the sun and through the dust cloud created by the herd, firing their Winchesters and killing the men who were moving the cattle to Abilene. Each man fell just minutes after the attack began, and the stampeding cattle finished the job that the rustlers’ .44s had started. Just hours later, the herd was already gone, the dust settled, and bodies were strewn along the ground. But one stirred and would never forget what he saw as his eyes opened.

Gabe Owens had been assigned to investigate a case of timber poaching near Missoula in Montana Territory that could have been handled by a less experienced agent of the railroad, but the case had changed dramatically after the apparent murder of the station manager. What made it difficult for Gabe was that the station manager may have been shot by his wife, a woman he’d proposed to years earlier.

Rhody Jones, the first mate of the schooner, Vivienne, walked from the docks into the streets of New Orleans. He’d been dismissed by the captain after the ship had barely survived the incredible battering from a powerful hurricane. He could have signed on to another ship returning to New England, but he wanted to try something different. He wanted to make a land voyage across the Southwestern United States to California and then maybe take a ship out of San Francisco.

When aging cowboy Gus Matthews gets fired from Rocking-C ranch for laying out the mean-spirited, know-nothing foreman, he heads north for Oklahoma, where he finds work with the Aronsons, an elderly couple whose ranch has seen better days. What should be easy work for kindly employers quickly turns sour when Gus discovers that the neighboring Slash-M ranch have been rustling the Aronsons’ cattle. Even worse, Gus becomes the corrupt sheriff’s main suspect in a string of violent crimes plaguing the county.

Lin Chase was aptly named as he’d chosen the profession of bounty hunter. This chase was to apprehend or kill the notorious Whitacre brothers, and he was getting close. They were just a few hours ahead of him now after more than a week and a half of tracking. He was the best at what he did and had never even felt the bite of a bullet and didn’t expect this to be any different. But it wasn’t the Whitacre brothers who would cause the enormous shift in his life. That would come two days later and would start at a peaceful family farm that held more promise than it did danger.

Keith watched his young cousin ride away and shook his head. He would be leading a party into the wilderness which was what they both did for a living. But Angus wasn’t escorting a typical hunting party. He was taking a newlywed couple into the deep forests of Washington Territory because they wanted to find a fabled sasquatch.

Kyle raced away from the work camp with the posse’s bullets whizzing past his head. He had no idea why he was being pursued, but he wasn’t about to ask. As he pushed his black gelding across the frozen ground of Wyoming Territory, Kyle knew hIs job as a scout and hunter for the Union Pacific was over. After he disappeared into a pine forest, he was finally able to slow down. But as he wound his way through the trees, Kyle knew he’d have to make a decision when the Green River curved to the east. Should he head to western Utah Teritory or east into Coloratdo Territory?