Spanish Posse: Episode 4; Heroes and Villains

By Purple Hazel

 

The final installment in the epic Spanish Posse Wild West erotic romance serial, by author Purple Hazel.

In Heroes and Villains, we experience the exciting climax of the story, as Caroline has been returned to the evil Carl Sunday, for him to finally exact his terrible revenge. Helpless, and despairing of ever seeing her true love once again, she is reduced to the status of a lowly servant in Carl’s filthy brothel back in Fort Worth.

That is only the beginning of her nightmare, however.

Meanwhile, Rex Middlefield struggles to recover from his injuries; and with the aid of a new-found ally in the person of his brother’s burly but loyal blacksmith, he seeks to return to Fort Worth and rescue Caroline from this most inauspicious fate. He is resolute. He is determined!

But is he too late?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrid Books
• Release date: Aug 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781682992401

Purple Hazel

Purple Hazel is... King and Caroline Medlin from Denver, Colorado. Purple is Caroline's favorite color. Hazel is the color of her eyes. We fell in love and King started writing short stories to Caroline while we were dating. Eventually the stories got better and better, so we started writing full length novels. Starting with Star Kitten in the fall of 2015, we have written five books that will be launched over the next year or so including Wild Fields (launched November 21, 2015), Morgana's Handmaid (Valentine's Day 2016), Spanish Posse (spring 2016), and Free Company (summer 2016). These are all historical romances using fictional characters in real-life situations amidst the backdrop of actual events that shaped world history. People and places may very well color our notion of history and the moral principles that people follow or ignore; yet we feel only true love truly endures all things. It's all that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Therefore LOVE is all that we write about. Love, true devotion, and the desire to find a companion to accompany us through life's many trials, tribulation, and best of all those moments of profound joy that give life real meaning; that's what it's all about.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Slowly

1872, The Chihuahuan Desert just outside San Antonio, Texas

Rex struggled through that first awful morning, lying in a ditch in the south Texas desert, heat rising as he suffered. He had waited for Paulo to pull away in his wagon and leave the scene completely; not wanting to give away any indication that he was even conscious, hoping the bandito would just drive off and leave him. Then he let out a deep, moaning sigh of relief. Apparently, his nemesis had departed now, leaving him to this barren wasteland to die in the choking heat. Rex’s ordeal however was only just beginning…

Paulo had basically pulled him out the back of the wagon bed and onto the dirt road like he was nothing more than a bale of alfalfa hay being dumped into a cow pasture for cattle to graze upon. He hit the ground so hard in fact he almost feared it was going to kill him. He was about right, too. Just the wrong angle and it very well could have been fatal. He had cracked ribs and if one of them had punctured his lung he could easily have died.

However he didn’t, and despite the rough treatment he’d endured being rolled down the embankment he managed to lie prone in the sand, face to the side, looking away from his tormentor until he was sure the man had gotten into his wagon and ridden away. In fact, he rested for about an hour pretty much in that same position until he’d gotten over the pain from being dragged out of the wagon bed and plunging several feet to the hard ground. It was even worse than the night before when they’d drug him out to beat him; then thrown him back into the wagon when they were sure he’d never survive the night. That was six or seven hours earlier, inside a warehouse in the middle of the night. Now he was on the sandy floor of the Chihuahuan Desert and this was a place where only rattlesnakes and scorpions made a living. Vegetation sparse. Water practically nonexistent. To survive this would be a rather tall order indeed.

He took an inventory of himself: Sure enough, practically every damn thing on him hurt … everything but his penis and his testicles; and he had little use for either at the moment. They’d pretty much kicked the shit out of everything else. What’s more they’d been selective, focusing on snapping his ribs so he couldn’t breathe, and fingers and wrists so he’d be crippled. One ankle seemed to be broken from them stomping on it. He was bruised on his back, too, from curling up to protect his privates while they stomped and gouged with their boots into his back to try and rupture his kidneys. Lucky that they hadn’t. If they’d done that he might have perished during the night.

But his face was in extremely bad shape. His eyes were still puffy and swollen. Lips gashed and swelled up as well. With this they’d been especially vicious. Teeth cracked or missing. He’d bitten his own tongue during the assault and it felt like a chunk of it was absent from the right side as if he’d gotten it caught between his molars while being kicked in the jaw. Plus there was an almost constant hissing sound in his head from the effects of so many blows. Even as the sun rose in the sky, he could barely see through his one good eye; and when dried blood and sweat mixed with the dust he was choking on, he knew he couldn’t rely on eyesight for very long. He only knew he needed to get back to that road if he was ever going to be found alive.

He crawled slowly from the ditch, using his elbows for leverage and gritting through the horrific, shooting pain in his ribcage; finally holding in his ribs with one battered hand while he pushed off with his bruised knee caps and balanced with an elbow. Like a rattlesnake he squirmed and writhed through the sand then up the embankment of the little gulley he’d been tossed into; inching along ever so determinedly until he reached the ruts of the wagon trail. After that he was quite exhausted and gasping from the burning pain. Spent completely; he passed out again from the agony, face down in the road with his head to the side, his mouth already parched and throat burning with thirst.

After half an hour or so he came to, realizing that the searing heat was rapidly draining the life right out of him. He was sunburned and dehydrated; almost welcoming death now in his personal misery, although not completely ready to give up the ghost just yet. Basically, it hurt so badly to move—and breathe for that matter—that it quickly revived him; and besides, he knew he had to start crawling toward the town immediately. If there was to be any chance of survival—and he certainly couldn’t last much longer out there—then he needed to get close enough to the outskirts of the city so someone might see him. He didn’t even know how far it was either and that only served to make things more daunting.

Rex squinted in the sunlight to see which way he should go. He could see buildings in the distance, but not much in the way of detail. Was it the town? The railway station? If he crawled back to the same warehouse where he’d been held captive, those smugglers might still be there. If he made it to the outskirts of the town however, there would be hundreds of people who could see him and he’d be more likely to get immediate help. He decided this was the most crucial decision he needed to make, because once he started crawling, he’d have to keep his head down to breathe well. If he crawled the wrong way, he might die of exposure before he was found. And also, he had to make sure he made it before dusk, or else the coyotes would surely get him. He could hear buzzards squawking and circling around overhead already.

Benefiting from the flat surface, Rex gradually made progress, crawling for about fifty yards at a time, then having to rest a while and recover. He’d crawl further, and then gasp in pain for a few minutes until he regained his composure. At first, he tried humoring himself, remembering old jokes and tall tales. This worked for a while, then he moved on to remembering his lovely bride and all the beautiful experiences they’d had the past few days. But when those more pleasant thoughts finally became quite impossible to conjure in his tormented mind; given the agony he was in, he turned to planning and plotting about how he was going to save her. This worked for another several hundred yards more, before even that, too, failed him.

Basically, he just couldn’t bear the suffering anymore. The heat was choking him and the dust was stifling. He knew he couldn’t stop or the elements would kill him; and if he didn’t make it during the day to find help, he’d certainly never survive the night. Again, the thought of being devoured by a pack of coyotes didn’t appeal to him much, and he knew he couldn’t fight them off with all his broken bones. Therefore he kept on crawling. Yet he could only endure so much. His pace would increase for a while, then he’d slow down with exhaustion until he had to stop for a little while more. It went on and on like that for several harrowing hours.

No shade, of course—just a hot dry breeze to make him even more miserable—he eventually resorted to counting his movements, then gradually even developed a morbidly comical song to go along with them to keep him moving rhythmically. He made up bizarre lyrics for it, too, which he muttered and sang to the recently popular tune, Dixie:

Put my right knee forward as I hold my ribs in,

Cracked and broken, head is achin’,

Crawling through, Crawling through,

Crawling through, The desert sand.

Oh, I wish I was with Caroline,

Right now, right now,

With Caroline, I’d have the time, to find out where my teeth are.

Today. Today. In San Antonio de Bexar.

Even the gallows humor which he mustered to devise the lyrics couldn’t sustain him for long, though. A few hundred yards more, he couldn’t manage to think up even one more macabre verse. Thus he crawled and dragged and pulled and drove himself through the desert sands of that dusty road for hours like that, slithering like a big snake, until slowly his will began to fade and give out. Finally, not even gallows humor or cruelly berating himself over his own cowardice could drive him much further. With every yard he gained, the agony continued to twist and gnarl his thoughts. Doubts and self-recrimination soon wormed their way into his conscience.

Maybe I deserve to die out here like this, he began thinking. Maybe God in heaven has chosen this very setting for me to face up to what I’ve done with my life … and where I’ve failed as a Christian and as a man.

This horrible end—maybe this was to be his penance before God would accept him into His heavenly kingdom. Rex’s mind became slowly maddened with the pain and the heat and the thirst. Indeed, he eventually resigned himself to the realization that he was likely going to die—out here in this choking, hellish desert—and that he’d have to wait and meet his lovely Caroline again someday in the hereafter.

It was inevitable now: all the tortuous ordeal going on both with his body and inside his mind. It was all going to come to an end soon, he could sense it. With every yard he completed, he just knew his body was going to come to a stop and he’d slip into unconsciousness and die right there in the sand. Little could he have known that rescue and salvation were less than an hour away…

* * * *

Back in Austin the evening before, Daniel Middlefield had finally succumbed to his own worries about his brother Rex and his new wife. He eventually decided to go into town and have the Austin Sheriff wire the police station in San Antonio about whether Rex and Caroline had ever made it onto the train connecting to Houston that evening. He had taken Duggy with him too—thinking that if the news was sketchy or inconclusive; he’d just send his giant ranch hand off to San Antonio to look for them. Sensing danger, Daniel had become paranoid that his brother might actually be in harm’s way.

Unfortunately, initial reports coming back from the telegraph operator in San Antonio did not look very good. No one fitting Rex’s and Caroline’s description had boarded the train again for Houston. And sheriff’s deputies in the town even reported that a couple of drunks had seen a scuffle in the street earlier and a woman was heard screaming. Daniel’s blood ran cold. Duggy became downright infuriated. Once again, Daniel’s suspicions had been well-founded. Major Zimpelman mused about it too in his fading German accent.

Alwayz viss yoah hunches Daniel…it vood appeah zat zay vore well-founded once moah, he said, rising up from the operator’s desk to stand. "So then! Tell me Jünger, vutt else can I do to help?" Daniel nodded grimly. As always he knew exactly what needed to be done. Thoughts and plans formed in his mind instantaneously.

Well, Major, he began, as a matter of fact there is a way you can help us, and Zimpelman raised up straight, inhaling and nodding resolutely – his military background quite apparent in his manner. Duggy’s eyes widened with interest as well.

You think you could get my friend Duggy here onto the next train down there? asked Daniel. Duggy was already nodding excitedly, his eyes burning intensely. Zimpleman blinked patiently and nodded confidently. Jah, I believe so. Daniel put his hands on his hips and told the two men what he had in mind. Thank you kindly, Major…then Gentlemen, here’s what we’re gonna do.

Soon thereafter, Daniel sent a very angry and determined Big Doug on to San Antonio, early the very next morning in fact, riding in the mail car of a long freight train loaded with goods from up north. George Zimpelman loyally assisted by calling in a little favor with the train engineer and got Duggy a seat on board. Of course, this wasn’t normal protocol having a passenger in the same car as the Wells Fargo strongbox, but then again who was going to argue with the beefy, barrel-chested Austin Sheriff? That old train engineer knew full well, one day or another, that he or his crew would get into trouble in Austin somehow.

Cathouses, saloons, gambling dens—oh yes, one of these nights that