Warriors

By Tony Masero

Holt Sangey, retired ex-US cavalry captain has settled back east with his loving wife, Grace. Holt finds he despairs of holding down a tedious job in the claustrophobic life of the overcrowded city. He determines to make one last trip to the open spaces of Arizona with his adopted son before it is lost. There he meets the beautiful neighbor Isabella. Now there are two women in his life, miles apart and separated from him by a bloodthirsty war chief and his army of ravaging Apaches. Holt Sangey faces a personal dilemma yet despite fighting for his life he must also protect the safety of his friends and his son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Masero
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005745394

Tony Masero

It’s not such a big step from pictures to writing.And that’s how it started out for me. I’ve illustrated more Western book covers than I care to mention and been doing it for a long time. No hardship, I hasten to add, I love the genre and have since a kid, although originally I made my name painting the cover art for other people, now at least, I manage to create covers for my own books.A long-term closet writer, only comparatively recently, with a family grown and the availability of self-publishing have I managed to be able to write and get my stories out there.As I did when illustrating, research counts a lot and has inspired many of my Westerns and Thrillers to have a basis in historical fact or at least weave their tale around the seeds of factual content.Having such a visual background, mostly it’s a matter of describing the pictures I see in my head and translating them to the written page. I guess that’s why one of my early four-star reviewers described the book like a ‘Western movie, fast paced and full of action.’I enjoy writing them; I hope folks enjoy reading the results.

Book preview

WARRIORS

Tony Masero

Ex-cavalry captain Holt Sangey has retired from the Indian Wars and gone back east with his loving wife. Holt finds he despairs of holding down a tedious job in the claustrophobic life of the overcrowded city. He determines to make one last trip to the wide-open spaces of Arizona with his adopted son and there he rescues the beautiful Isabella. There are two women in his life now, miles apart and separated from him by a bloodthirsty war chief and his army of ravaging Apaches. Holt Sangey faces a personal dilemma yet despite fighting for his life he must also protect the safety of his friends and his son.

Cover Illustration: Tony Masero

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.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the

written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Copyright © Tony Masero 2021

Smashwords Edition

Chapter One

Daybreak.

Grace turned from the stove, coffee pot in hand, ‘Morning, Holt.’

She studied her husband who did not meet her gaze but sighed heavily and looked out of the window as an early trolley car heading for the railroad depot rattled by on the street below.

‘Breakfast?’ she asked.

‘Huh?’ grunted Holt, jolted from his despondency. ‘Oh, no thanks, just the coffee.’

Grace cocked her head to one side and frowned, ‘What’s the matter, honey? Was it that dream again?’

Chasing off the dawn chill, Holt cradled the hot mug in both hands and breathed in the steam rising from the brew. Milk churns clashed noisily outside the corner store across the street.

‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘Have to move.’

Grace laid a hand gently on his arm, ‘It’s early yet, drink your coffee.’

He was a tall man, rangy and wide shouldered, with hooded dark eyes and brooding thick whiskers running down each side of his mouth. The shadowed gray eyes were darker now with the lack of sleep and they switched over to study her.

Grace curved before him pensively, her slender and well-proportioned body undisguised by the long nightgown. She still looked good to his eye.

‘I have to open up,’ he pressed, with a smile twitching the edge of his lips. ‘Those ladies will be waiting in line in the street and you know how they bitch if I don’t open on time.’

‘Hey, you’re the boss. Let them wait.’

Holt sipped his coffee and stared out of the window again at the city skyline shining under the streams of dawn light. Silhouettes of gray brick buildings stood black and shadowed against the sunlight like card cutouts, smoke rose from the tannery down by the river and stained the clear cloudless sky with its oily smudge. The constant insidious background noise came through the partly opened window; it was the sound of a restless city rising to meet the challenge of another day.

God! How he missed the quiet of the desert.

‘Elan up yet?’ he asked.

Grace shook her head, ‘He’s still sleeping, I think he was out late.’

‘At his age about time he found some work, don’t you think?’

‘It’s hard, Holt, he’s still adapting.’

Holt breathed heavily and whispered, ‘Ain’t we all?’

‘I know,’ she said, enclosing him in her arms. ‘It’s not easy for any of us.’

He smelt the freshness of her fair hair as she buried her chin into his chest and he mellowed at the comfortable warmth of her, ‘Just so danged hard after twenty years of giving orders and having them obeyed. Suddenly you have to go do battle with a bunch of twenty awkward females.’

‘What a job,’ she teased, raising her chin and kissing him lightly on the lips.

‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he complained. ‘Those women can be the very devil.’

‘Sol Isaaks chose you because you had command at your fingertips, he knew that.’

‘Hell, honey, it was a darned sight easier back then. I’d rather fight off a party of hostiles drunk on tiswin that face down this bunch of difficult dollies.’

‘Sshh!’ she whispered, glancing towards the door. ‘He’ll hear you.’

Holt cocked an eyebrow, ‘I’m sure he gets enough of that already.’

‘I doubt that, with every nation under the sun coming here.’

‘Maybe.’

She turned away and picked up his lunch pail and handed it to him, ‘You’re a grumpy old thing this morning, go on, get along and take it out on your women friends.’

‘They ain’t no friends of mine.’

‘Keep them busy, Holt. Step up production that’ll keep them quiet.’

‘I doubt it, they natter on louder than every sewing machine in whole damned place.’

She patted him playfully on the arm, ‘Come on, you know Isaak’s Millinery Emporium makes the best darned shirts this side of New York, you should be pleased.’

He set down the empty coffee mug on the kitchen table with an air of fatality, ‘Okay, time to go face the vixens.’

‘I love you, Holt,’ she whispered as he turned for the door.

For a moment his eyes softened, ‘Sure you do. I’ll see you later.’

Holt clumped down the narrow stairs of their apartment and stood at the street door a moment as he eased the restriction of his celluloid collar and took down his Derby hat from the peg. He wished he were back to a loose bandana and broad brimmed felt hat instead of this ill-fitting tailored suit that seemed to hem him in like the rest of the crowded city.

Then he opened the door and stepped out onto the stoop.

Already the street was busy with loaded delivery wagons and early workmen hurrying off to their labor. Jocular street traders called to each other and wheeled their metal-rimmed carts noisily towards the street market. A hundred chimneys pumped coal-smoke that spread like a miasma through the streets and cobbled alleyways. Storeowners were pulling up blinds and sending their lads scurrying to sweep the steps out front as they opened up.

‘Morning, Mister Sangey,’ called the aproned figure from across the road. He leaned against the doorjamb of his corner grocery store; shirtsleeves rolled up on his broad arms and his reddened cheeks covered with a burst of hair from his side-whiskers. ‘Nice day.’

‘It sure is,’ answered Holt, politely tilting his hat brim in reply.

As he strode on, Holt wondered if he would ever adjust. It was 1889 and he was in his thirty-ninth year, a man hampered by the disciplines of an army life that had been his bedfellow since his twentieth year.

Now here he was in the city, tainted with smoke and noise. Where polite ladies walked fearlessly in the streets, dressed in the latest nip-waisted, puff-shouldered fashions under their parasols and extravagant wide hats garlanded with fake flowers. Dapper men in straw boaters snapped smartly along the tidy streets, their hair pomaded with scented oils and sporting silver topped canes instead of holstered pistols. Shining buggy’s vied with Hansom cabs and carters wagons on the wide tarred roads and the skyline was lost amongst towering brick edifices that spoke solemnly of advancement and progress. The country was on the cusp of change and nowhere was it more marked than here in the city.

It was all a world away from what he had been used to on the Arizona frontier where death still came easy and fear rode in on every wind out of the desert.

If he were ever to allow himself to accept it, he would admit that dangerous as it had been, in the deepest recesses of his mind he still hankered for that past life. But Grace and he had both chosen to leave all that behind and bring their adopted son Elan away with them so the lad might have better prospects.

Three years they had been in the city and Elan was now approaching his sixteenth year. He had grown into a fine looking young man from the rumpled orphan Holt had first seen at Grace’s elbow. She had been a missionary schoolteacher then with a small house in Blackwater, not far from the agency on the Gila where she taught the Pinal Apache children and tried to bring them to Christianity.

He had been Captain Holt Sangey, stationed with the 10th Cavalry and commanding the black troops out of Fort McDowell, the so-called ‘Buffalo’ soldiers, languid they may have appeared but he knew them as bold and brave fighters. For a moment it nudged his memory of the unsettling dream, the damned recurring nightmare that haunted his nights and brought him sweating from sleep.

But that had all come later.

The first time he had met Grace was as he led his troop to a crossing over the Gila, they were heading north of Phoenix to where the railroad tracks down from Prescott had been cut and a locomotive derailed. Renegades were suspected to have ridden out from hiding in the mountains and Holt had been ordered to patrol the area and bring in the reprobates alive if he could.

Holt had taken to her at first glance, wind blown and surrounded by ragged agency children with her arms around the shoulders of two of them. She had raised a hand and shielded her eyes against the sun’s glare as he had ridden by at the head of his men. Holt had wished her good day and tipped a finger to his hat in salute. The Apache children, he remembered, had burrowed fearfully into her skirts at sight of the soldiers but she had smiled at him. An open faced smile with white teeth and sparkling eyes, a sight that had stopped his heart for an instant, for up until that moment Holt had not been an easy man to deal with.

Years of battling with a foe more at home in the wastelands than any wild animal and composed of ferocious fighters unwilling to surrender any of their liberty to the restrictions and limitations of the white invaders had taken their toll. A vicious and cruel people it seemed, whose pride was hard to determine or understand amongst the white community, who anyway left that side of things pretty much ignored. It had ground him down. From first posting as a valiant and determined young leader fresh from West Point he had hardened as the years passed and become a bitter creature, atrophied and full of animosity. Friends lost to him along the way had turned the incoming troops into a parade of faceless men who came and went without consideration. His only true friends had been the very few survivors of the early days who stayed the course and proved their worth at his side. But that had been small mercy and finally liquor had been the only recourse for his jaded mind in the lonely nights spent in the officer’s quarters up until he met Grace.

Holt had learnt new and kinder ways under her tutelage and as he gradually courted her, his demeanor had softened. With a greater understanding of the enemy, Holt had come to some kind of equanimity with the Indians of the Apache nation. He no longer hated them with any of his earlier ingrained bitterness but carried out his duty solely as a soldier and with more of an objective outlook that kept the vengeful violence out of his orders.

Until, that is, the reservation breakout of 1886.

Chapter Two

Three of them were already waiting for him as Holt approached the great double-door wooden gateway of Isaak’s Emporium. The fiery Scot, Jenny Roe was in the forefront, a gaunt-faced middle-aged woman with flaming red hair and a temperament to match.

‘Kind of late today, are you not, Mister Sangey?’

She stood with fists bunched on her waist over grubby and voluminous aproned skirts. Always ready to fight as if it were second nature to her she confronted him with deeply dipped frowning eyebrows and her two constant companions, both equally hostile, the twin sisters Emily and Agatha, stood watchfully alongside.

Holt pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket and flipped the lid open, ‘Precisely three minutes and thirty seconds to be exact, Mrs. Roe.’

‘Won’t do, sir,’ she said. ‘We’re all here on time, why are you not?’

Holt gave her a steady withering look and said quietly, ‘Not this morning, Jenny. Not today, just let it lie.’

Jenny Roe saw some devil gleam glitter malevolently in the darkness of his deeply sunken eyes and allowed the matter to drop, ‘Just saying, that’s all.’

Ignoring her, Holt took out the keys and unlocked the gates. ‘Ladies,’ he said, allowing them first passage. A crowd of the other female staff came running down the street, they laughed together and panted hastily as Holt ushered them all into the workshop. Bonnets and overcoats were discarded to the loud sounds of their gossiping chatter.

A scurrilous bunch of women mostly from the lower boroughs, they worked hard when pressed to it but their general attitude was one of an aggression that scratched at Holt’s nerves. Beaten by brutish husbands and worn out by repeated childbirth they were vengeful of the world and it took all of Holt’s strength to handle them with some degree of diplomacy.

As they fussed at their machines and prepared bolts of cotton Holt walked the length of the long workshop to his glass windowed office at the far end. He looked to right and left as he made his way down the central corridor checking all was well. He felt the claustrophobic funky atmosphere of unwashed bodies and lint-laden atmosphere close over him in a wave.

‘Open those lights,’ he called, indicating the glass windows in the roof. ‘Let’s get some fresh air in here.’

‘That ain’t part of our duty, Mister Sangey,’ he heard Jenny call out.

‘Just get it done,’ snapped Holt.

‘No, sir,’ said Jenny, striding down the corridor towards him. ‘We’re here to make shirts not open windows.’

Her immigrant broad Glaswegian brogue was still strong and sometimes when they had suffered past confrontations Holt had been hard put to understand her angry accent.

‘You know,’ he said coldly, his