All Blood is Red (An Apache Western #10)

By William M James

In the timber country of Oregon, an exhausted Cuchillo Oro stumbles across Faith Magruder, a mail-order bride about to be raped by her drunken husband. Thinking he is doing the right thing, Cuchillo intervenes but somehow the woman kills her husband and knocks out the weakened Apache. When Cuchillo comes to he knows that the word of a red man is worth nothing against that of a white man. And very soon he is being hunted by an avowed Apache hater and his gang. Cuchillo is blamed for the husband’s murder and the armed and ruthless mob want him dead. And the bloodbath, once it starts, will be relentless, for nothing can stop Cuchillo Oro—the Golden Knife—merciless and hell-bent on revenge!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: May 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215383056

William M James

William M. James was the pseudonym of John Harvey, Terry Harknett and Laurence James.

Book preview

Chapter One

AS FAITH JOHNSTONE sat on the edge of the foul-smelling bed and clutched the flimsy nightgown to her throat, she tried to form the words of a prayer in her mind. But it had been too long since she had last prayed to the God her parents insisted was always watching over her. And her mind refused to encompass anything but the terror that grew larger with each new sound she heard in the next room.

The neck of a bottle rattled against the rim of a mug. Liquor slurped from one vessel into the other. The thud of a falling chair. The thump of footfalls on floorboards. Slurred oaths. Snatches of off-key singing.

She shivered—as much from the bitter cold of the Oregon night as from fear—and the movement acted to clear her head for a few short moments.

‘Help me, dear God!’ she managed to whisper huskily, her voice betraying an Irish heritage.

She shook her head, her long, dark red hair swinging across her back. And sadness showed through the fear in her green eyes for a tiny slice of time. If God really did watch over a sinner such as she, He would surely have come to her aid before now—on the long and arduous journey across the country; in the small church of Creekville; or during the madcap ride from town to this crude cabin in the forest.

But why should He?

‘You are making your own bed, my fine girl. And you are going to have to lie in it.’

These were the words of her mother when Faith had left the neat and comfortable Pennsylvania farmstead seven years ago.

‘God be with you, child,’ her father had added.

‘I am no longer a child,’ the eighteen-year-old girl on the verge of womanhood had flung back at her weeping parents. ‘And what has this God you talk of ever done for me … or you?’

The door of the spartan bedroom creaked open and crashed back against the wall with a sound like a single clap of menacing thunder.

‘Are you ready for your husband, woman?’

Faith was jerked from her bitter past into the cruel present and vented a low gasp of shock.

Jefferson Johnstone was a tall man, so tall he had to stoop his head to move under the doorway lintel. And his shoulders almost touched the frame at either side. He would have been an enormous silhouette against the red glow of the stove in the other room had not the full moon streamed blue light through the bedroom window.

Not that Faith needed to see him to know the appearance of this monster of a man she had met and married today.

‘You will not be ...’ she began, and dropped her hands from her throat to dig her fingers into the rough material of the blanket at either side of her thighs.

‘You will not speak unless you are spoken to, woman!’ Johnstone snarled, advancing into the room, his hands going to the buttons of his shirt. ‘Next time, I will not tell you that. Next time I will beat you so hard you will never forget the lesson.’

She shivered again, this time entirely from fear, for the warmth of the stove had come into the room with her husband. Then she became as something petrified as she stared up at the man towering above her.

Once he had been a handsome man. She had seen that when he greeted her with uneasy politeness as she disembarked from the stage at the Creekville depot. He was about fifty, which was the age he had claimed to be, and he matched the six-foot four-inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of which he had also written.

On first meeting him in the bright and chill sunlight of morning before the overtly curious citizens of the small town, Faith had been pleasantly surprised because, quite frankly, she had expected something less than the man who helped her down from the stage and carried her baggage to the boarding house.

Johnstone had done what he could to make himself presentable—sufficient, at least, to show the imagination what could be achieved if a woman’s touch were employed.

It was obvious he was unaccustomed to bearing a suit and necktie, and equally obvious that he had gained a considerable amount of weight since he last donned the city-tailored pants and jacket and the stiff-collared shirt. His gray hair and beard had been trimmed and the heavy-lined flesh of his face, neck and hands had been scrubbed.

Much more could be done, though, Faith decided, as she bathed, brushed her hair and donned her wedding gown in a room of the boarding house. Proper food would slim Jefferson Johnstone down to a fine figure of a man. His hair could be cut much shorter and his beard could be completely removed so that just a mustache would be left. There were signs of dissipation in and around his pale blue eyes. These could not be eradicated quite so easily, but a change in his life-style would eventually get rid of them.

So, as Faith descended the stairway of the boarding house, she announced to herself that she was reasonably content with the outcome of her long correspondence with the man she was about to marry. And she smiled at her image in the gilt-framed mirror at the foot of the stairs. The headdress of artificial flowers and the bridal gown of white lace added to the beauty of her face and the sexuality of her full body. Ever since leaving her parents’ farmstead she had known how to make the best of herself. Even when she stepped down from the stage at the end of the grueling trip from Chicago, her face had been perfectly made up and her dress was at once modest and alluring in the way it displayed the curves and angles of her figure.

The women of Creekville had eyed her with envy. Many of the men had failed to conceal their lust, until Jefferson Johnstone glowered his displeasure at them. Then he had returned his eyes to Faith, gazing at her with a childlike wonder.

This was what had finally convinced Faith to go through with the marriage: the way in which a single angry glance from the giant of a man had established his authority over all others, and how he had then looked upon her, seemingly surrendering everything he was to the superiority of her beauty and his need to possess it.

‘No, woman!’ he roared at her in the stove-warmed and moonlit bedroom of the crude cabin. ‘That’s for me to do!’

He was naked in the way an animal is naked, for his long hair and beard were representative of his hirsute body. From broad shoulders to thick ankles, his flesh was matted with tangled hair, jet black for the most part, streaked only here and there with the grayness that helped to age his face.

The face was now sheened with the sweat of lust as he bent down toward her, his big hands forming into talons that clawed her hands aside and hooked over the neckline of the nightgown. His teeth were too darkly stained to gleam as his lips parted in a vicious smile. But his liquor-glazed eyes became brighter as they widened, ready to drink in the sight of her nakedness. His features looked even more animalistic than his bear-like body.

‘Please!’ she begged, her wrists stinging from the blows as she once more gripped the bed blanket.

The renting of silk masked the plea.

In the timber-built church of Creekville, before a congregation composed of the entire town, she had witnessed the first portent that her plan was doomed to failure. But it had been too late then. Her husband-to-be and most of the other men were drunk. They had spent three hours, from the time the stage reached town until noon, getting that way in the saloon across the street. Meanwhile she had sat alone in the boarding-house room attired in her bridal gown as she tried to calm her anxiety.

‘It’s a kind a’ tradition around here, Miss Magruder,’ Virginia Tiptree had told Faith. ‘Ain’t never been a sober weddin’ in Creekville long as I been here. And my boardin’ house was the second buildin’ went up in town. Saloon was the first. So best you go back up to your room and wait. When Reverend Spinnet starts ringin’ the church bell, that’s when you’ll know your man’s drunk his fill and be waitin’ for you.’

Faith’s anger had shown on her face and was not diminished by the lightness the ruddy-complexioned and rotund Mrs. Tiptree had injected into her tone. So the boarding-housekeeper had abandoned her false mood.

‘Be warned by this, young lady,’ the older woman continued. ‘There’s some men can be changed by females. And a lot that can’t. Maybe that there Jeff Johnstone coulda been altered a considerable number of years ago. But any female that takes him on now has gotta have more than a pretty face and a fine body if she figures to make him see the error of his ways.’

Johnstone had had plenty of time to look at Faith’s beautiful face. On the walk from the stage to the boarding house, during the wedding ceremony and on the wagon ride to his cabin five miles west of Creekville. But, even at these times, Faith had been aware he was having difficulty in keeping his eyes from dropping to feast the blatant womanliness of her body.

Now, as he ripped her nightgown from neckline to hem and threw his arms wide to stare at her displayed nakedness, a growl of relief trickled up from his throat and flowed out between his parted, trembling lips.

‘You are not disappointed, Jefferson?’ Faith asked, attempting to smile gently in the same way she tried to extract the fear from her tone.

She was twenty-five years old and the bloom and firmness of youth had begun to fade. Even so, the shape of her body when she was fully dressed owed only a small debt to the cut of her top clothes and the boning in her underwear.

‘It’s like I dreamed it would be every night for a year,’ the man rasped, straightening up and stepping back in wide-eyed admiration.

His eyes remained still in their sockets and his head moved in a slow, nodding motion as he appraised the woman it was his right to possess.

Faith was encouraged by his stance, his expression and his tone of voice. It was his drunkenness that had terrified her. Three hours of drinking before the wedding, and another two afterward, this time while she was present at the reception in the saloon. A full bottle of whiskey on the wagon ride home. How much liquor spilled and how much was imbibed after he had sent her into the bedroom to prepare for him?

The effect of all this drinking was suddenly lost after his single glance at her nude body.

‘I’m so glad,’ she told him, forcing the final remnants of fear from her voice as she wet her lips to add