Blood-Stock! (A Breed Western #09)

By James A. Muir

Jody Taggart didn’t have a friend in the world. Until the tall blond man called Breed found Taggart’s horse shot dead and Taggart with a bullet in his mangled guts. Then the horse-breeder found the kind of friend he needed—the kind who dealt in death. Breed had his own code. An instinct for justice. He couldn’t stand to see a horses of the quality that Taggart bred go to waste. He owed Taggart nothing but offered his help.
Dan Fogarty ran the township of Comstock and the surrounding lands—apart from Taggart’s place—and that didn’t sit well with the land baron. But he soon found that you just don’t mess with Breed. Not if you want to stay alive. And Fogarty’s hired gunmen learned that the hard way as the land suddenly took on a whole new complexion—blood red!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215817230

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Western Fiction

Jody Taggart didn’t have a friend in the world. Until the tall blond man called Breed found Taggart’s horse shot dead and Taggart with a bullet in his mangled guts. Then the horse-breeder found the kind of friend he needed—the kind who dealt in death. Breed had his own code. An instinct for justice. He couldn’t stand to see a horses of the quality that Taggart bred go to waste. He owed Taggart nothing but offered his help.

Dan Fogarty ran the township of Comstock and the surrounding lands—apart from Taggart’s place—and that didn’t sit well with the land baron. But he soon found that you just don’t mess with Breed. Not if you want to stay alive. And Fogarty’s hired gunmen learned that the hard way as the land suddenly took on a whole new complexion—blood red!

BREED 9: BLOOD-STOCK!

First published by Sphere Books in 1979

Copyright © 1979, 2023 by James A. Muir

This electronic edition published October 2023

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Series Editor: Mike Stotter

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

For a lady with a capital L,

and the style to match:

Phyl Liston

Chapter One

UP HIGH, WHERE the first snow would fall come winter, the air was thick with the heat of late summer. There was a stillness, a cloying, almost palpable heaviness that made breathing an effort and shirts uncomfortable against sweat-salty skin. No wind disturbed the tired limbs of the pine trees, and only the lazy buzzing of the insects made any sound in the afternoon quiet.

The man who broke through the trees facing the last steep climb up to the crest of the ridge added little noise to the heat-stifled silence.

He paused on the edge of the tree line and stared nervously up the slope. He was a man of medium height and size, wearing patched and faded denim pants and a shirt that had been white when he put it on, and was now dark with sweat. He wore a .44 caliber Remington Army model holstered on his waist and carried a Winchester carbine in both hands. His hair was brown, cut long enough that sticky strands were plastered across his forehead, falling from under a battered grey Stetson.

He leant against a tree, keeping inside the pool of shadow spread by the branches, and wiped a hand over his mouth. There was nothing unusual about his face, nothing to mark it out in a crowd. Except, perhaps, the staring blue eyes: they were very wide and darted around as though seeking to check every direction at once. They were frightened eyes.

The man decided that the path up to the crest was clear and ducked back under the pines.

A few moments later he emerged, leading a horse. It was a big horse, long-legged and deep-chested, everything about it suggesting speed and strength. Sweat had served only to add a glossy sheen to its roan coat, and its dark eyes studied the man with docile intelligence. Its head was short and fine-boned, indicating a strain of Arab blood that was emphasized by its high-stepping gait. The man stroked its neck affectionately, and the horse blowed softly through its nose, butting a velvety nose against his face.

He sighed, licked his lips, and led the animal out from the trees towards the steep, rocky path.

The first shot sounded very loud in the stillness. It was rapidly followed by two more, from different guns.

The man mouthed a curse and swung his Winchester round to bear on the source of the explosions. The horse screamed and reared up, hindlegs stumbling on the loose shale covering the downward section of the path. Blood showed on the glossy coat. The horse screamed a gain and went down on its knees. More shots echoed and the animal fell on its side. There were three bullets in its ribs, and a fourth had broken a forelimb.

The man’s eyes narrowed out as anger replaced the fear, and he began to fire back.

The horse tried to stand up, but was unable to get on its feet. Blood started to froth from its nostrils and lips. Its eyes clouded over. Like a baby hurting and afraid, it set up a shrill screaming. Then a rifle bullet ended the sound. It hit the animal on the side of the skull, shattering the temple and blasting through the brain pan to emerge bloodily on the left side of the head. The impact snapped the skull back and over, the horse’s legs kicked and went still. It fell on its side, the one visible eye gradually hidden behind a steady pulsing of blood.

‘Lesson for you Taggart!’ The voice came from amongst the trees, hoarse and amused. ‘There ain’t no way you can win. Be better to give up now.’

The only reply was the sharp crack of the man’s Winchester.

‘You called it, Taggart.’ The voice sounded pleased. ‘You want a shootin’ match, you got one.’

The three hidden guns opened up, dancing shards of stone from the boulders flanking the trail. The man crouched down there realized the hopelessness of his position and began to crawl higher.

The path up to the crest lay at the center of a spill of broken rock. At the lower level, it was mostly shale, but higher up it became firm, sandy earth, the fallen stone providing high walls on both sides. At the upper limit of the path, the rock flattened out to a kind of small plateau with the trees starting again about one hundred feet from the last of the cover.

The man called Taggart crawled and ran and stumbled until he had reached the last of the boulders. Then he fired his Winchester three times and launched himself in a desperate rush across the open ground.

He covered thirty feet before a rifle bullet clipped through his right calf and dropped him on his face. He began to crawl, using his elbows and his good leg, dragging the wounded limb behind. He left a glistening red trail on the grass.

He got hit twice more before he reached the trees. Once in the shoulder and once low down on his side. The shoulder wound hurt the most, drenching his shirt with blood, but he could still use that arm. The other wound hurt hardly at all, and when he looked at it all he saw was a small dark hole in his shirt, just above his hip. He got in amongst the trees and began to haul himself upright to get a clearer view down the slope. The pain hit as he straightened. It was like a hot knife blade rammed into his belly and twisted. He doubled over, screaming without hearing the sound he made as agony blocked off his senses.

How long he was doubled over, he couldn’t tell. But when he looked up again there were tears in his eyes and the foul taste of vomit in his mouth. He spat and wiped his lips. His hand came away bloody.

It was slippery on the carbine as he fired down the ridge; to let them know he was still alive.

‘It’s no good, Taggart.’ The voice sounded closer now. ‘You’re finished.’

‘I ain’t dead yet.’ He hoped his shout sounded more convincing than lie felt. ‘I’ll see you off

‘Yeah?’ The voice had moved around a bit, coming from higher up the slope to his left. ‘You got one in the leg that’s bleedin’ you like a goddam stuck pig, so you ain’t runnin’ nowhere. I saw another go in yore gut. I don’t know how many others we put in you, but that should be enough. Saw a man gut shot in El Paso once: he took thirty hours before he died. We can wait, Taggart! You can’t.’

Taggart spat more blood and decided that was the truth. He tugged his bandanna from his neck and got it fixed up tight on his leg. There was nothing he could do about his shoulder or stomach, but at least he might be able to hold them off long enough for help to come by.

No: he realized he was fooling himself as he thought it. The reason he had picked this trail was because no one else used it. Dancer and his men had picked him up on the lower slopes and the only way he had managed to stay ahead of them was because his dead horse had the speed.

The thought of the horse angered him afresh and he gritted his teeth against the pain and re-ordered his thinking.

No: he wasn’t going anywhere. There was no rider coming along to help, and there was no way he could make it down the far side of the ridge to the ranch.

No: no way. He was going to die here. High up in the Sierra Mogollon, on a hot, dirty day with the air too sticky to breathe and blood in his mouth. He wasn’t going to see Mary again, nor the horses. He wasn’t going to see anything except the Dancer and his men coming up the slope.

But, if he could see them, he could maybe kill them. The Dancer at least: that would be some kind of satisfaction.

He dragged himself awkwardly round the bole of the big pine and levered the Winchester to pump a fresh cartridge into the breech.

Then he waited.

Half a mile down the slope a man on a pinto mustang listened to gun fire and wondered what was happening.

He recognized the pattern of the shooting with the instinctive ease of long experience: three long guns against one, the three spacing their fire so that the single gun was always covered. It was no concern of his, but he decided to take a look out of pure curiosity.

He was a tall man, close on six feet, with a mane of blond hair tumbling from under a low-crowned, black Sonoran Stetson. His eyes were very blue in a tanned face that was wide at the cheeks and lips, with a somewhat flattened nose. The bone structure was Apache; the sun-bleached hair and the blue eyes suggested northern European parentage.

He wore a faded linen shirt and buckskin pants tucked inside of knee-high Apache moccasins. The slim haft of a throwing knife protruded from the right moccasin, and around his narrow waist there was a gunbelt holding a Colt’s .45 Frontier model and a wide-bladed Bowie knife. He sat an American saddle with a side-scabbard containing a Winchester rifle in .44-40 caliber.

Like his appearance, his descent was mixed. His father had been a white man, Kieron Gunn, who had married his mother, Rainbow Hair of the Chiricahua Apache, and given her the son who now lived under three names.

He had been christened in the cathedral at Santa Fe, Matthew Gunn. In the Chiricahua rancheria where he grew up and passed the manhood tests that established an Apache warrior, he was known as Azul, for his blue eyes. Around the border country he was known as Breed.

It was said, in Mexico and Arizona and Texas and New Mexico, that Breed meant violent death. The reputation was built largely on his pursuit of the scalp hunters who had killed his parents and his people.

In Mexico there was a hundred dollar bounty offered on Apache scalps: a hunting gang had ambushed his rancheria and claimed that bounty. He had hunted the hunters; and killed them, one by one, claiming the bloody vengeance demanded by his Apache upbringing. Now he was wanted in several towns, and drifting with no more thought than to live through the next day.

The rifle fire interested him. He turned his pinto up the long line of the Mogollons and eased it closer to the sound.

Nearer in he halted the pony and dropped from the saddle. He hitched the single rein he favored to the low-hung limb of a juniper, and slid the Winchester clear of the boot. Then he moved upwards on foot.

At the edge of the trees, he halted.

There was a meadow breaking up the thick covering of firs, lush grass spreading for a thousand yards to right and left. Out from the grass there was a wide fan of shale leading up to a narrow path that crested the ridge above. At the bottom of the path he could see a horse. It was dead: shot several times in the body and legs and head.

Like any Apache, Azul had a natural respect for horses. They were useful, and a useful thing was not wasted. This one was more than useful: it was beautiful. And like any Apache, he respected beauty. To kill a horse like that was a crime, one that went deeper than written laws; went right down into the gut and demanded a response.

His was to seek the killers.

He drifted round through the trees, his moccasins silent on the grass and dry pine needles, looking for the attackers.

They were partway up the slope, confirming Ids original estimate of the situation. From the upper level of the ridge there was a solitary gun firing. Lower down, spaced out through the pines, there were two more riflemen. The third was working his way up under cover of the fire.

Azul moved closer to the nearest man.

He got to within ten feet and paused. The man was down on his belly, resting his Winchester on the thick spread of a root. He looked like a cowboy: old broadcloth pants tucked inside scuffed boots; a dark blue shirt with a gunbelt wrinkling the cloth. His hat was