Brodie 1: Home Front

By Tony Masero

Brodie is home to a world he left behind eighteen years ago.
He first joined the Confederacy and then post-war served as Special Marshal (see the ‘Stringer and Brodie’ series) and each position has taken its bitter toll.
He is barely back before Brodie encounters a shooting that is overture to a more than deadly confrontation. There is love in the offing with a sensible widow who is the sheriff’s sister but at each sunrise another vicious crime appears to darken their day. The greed of an arrogant rancher and his army of gunmen threatens to overwhelm the entire county and brings increasing danger to his family. Brodie may well have tired of such encounters but he is still inexorably drawn into the lethal conflict whether he likes it or not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Masero
• Release date: Dec 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215988367

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

BRODIE 1: Home Front

Tony Masero

Brodie is home to a world he left behind eighteen years ago.

He first joined the Confederacy and then post-war served as Special Marshal (see the ‘Stringer and Brodie’ series) and each position has taken its bitter toll.

He is barely back before Brodie encounters a shooting that is overture to a more than deadly confrontation. There is love in the offing with a sensible widow who is the sheriff’s sister but at each sunrise another vicious crime appears to darken their day. The greed of an arrogant rancher and his army of gunmen threatens to overwhelm the entire county and brings increasing danger to his family. Brodie may well have tired of such encounters but he is still inexorably drawn into the lethal conflict whether he likes it or not.

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 2024

Smashwords Edition

Prologue: Atlanta 1864

It was a hot and sultry July day in Georgia.

Gun smoke and dust thrown up by cavalry patrols hovering in the windless air formed a dull haze over the whole field of battle. The sun, like a white ball, burned through the mist with an oppressive persistence that left men rankled and sweating.

Northwest of the city in open countryside, at the end of a rough road called Orchard Street, Brodie Middenhoff, a Confederate private with the 1st Georgia Sharpshooter Battalion was positioned at a window on the upper floor of an old slave owner’s home, the Bond House. An isolated building on the hilltop, its walls already marked by shot and shell and considered a suitable target for sharp-eyed Union boys across the valley. But it was a good position for the sharpshooters giving them cover and being high and clear with a fine view across the battlefield.

Mister Bond, the owner, so the story went, was a buck old boy; this was as told to Brodie by Sergeant Lomax his troop leader. Ephraim Bond; ran sixty-five slaves with all of them good at the mechanicals and rented out for cash money to the locals giving him a tidy income. He built the house just three years earlier and then in that exact same year he had taken his young wife to task. She was a pretty little lady by all accounts and found the marriage was not to her liking and held no affection for the fusty older Ephraim who was well past his prime. Adultery with his foreman followed, so Bond claimed, then drunkenness and threatening to shoot him down with a pistol. How true the charges were there’s no telling but given the times and that Bond was a wealthy and respected man in those parts the lady had little say in the matter. Whatever the truth of the case it was a suggested provocation that left the old man filing for divorce. All that had been back in ’61 and now three years after the couple had parted and the house left empty even now with the divorce proceedings still hanging Ephraim was not rid of the feisty woman - who probably should have shot him in the first place anyway.

Having heard all this when he took up his post in the deserted house Brodie was sure that the sorry place was doomed from the start.

The view for the Confederates from these heights was down a sloping hillside where sappers had constructed palisades and defensive rows of sharp-toothed chevaux-de-frise ready to drive off any attempted cavalry attack. Timber and earth-filled sacks made up sheltered redoubts and the men in gray crouched in them and along the dusty track running laterally across the hillside. The cannonades onto the blasted ground of this hillside continued all through the day, the Union twelve pounders lobbing random artillery shells over at a regular rate.

This was a hilly and tangled, well-wooded country thereabouts and not the best for long-range sharpshooting with so many trees and scrub to block a clear view. Though it was tougher for the attacking force than the local Georgia boys, who knew their way through the barely discernable rough tracks and few creek crossings hidden in the undergrowth. Even so, given the opportunity and clear sight, these accurate and well-equipped Confederates snipers could clear an exposed gun crew in minutes.

Using his British-made percussion lock Whitworth rifle, Brodie slid the thirty-three-inch barrel over the shattered window frame and took aim. He knew the rifle was good for over a thousand yards, not many weeks before in May of this year hadn’t they shot General Sedgwick through the eye at Spotsylvania at that distance. All the time the mounted general had been chivvying his troops, calling them cowardly and to get up and fight as ‘they couldn’t hit an elephant at that range’. Boy! Was he proved wrong.

Brodie forewent the telescopic sight normally fixed to the left side of the rifle, good as it was, he figured it nearly took the shooter’s eye out, the recoil kick was that hard. He stuck with the simple fixed front sight and relied on his skill able as he was after all his hunting as a country boy back on the farm in West Virginia.

At the next window along from him, his fellow sharpshooter and partner, Sam Tender, a bearded ex-mountain man was priming his own muzzleloader. The ramrod was a slender wand in his mighty fist as he drove home another hexagonal bullet. Although large in size and not really suited to the agile life of a skirmishing sniper, Jacob Tender was like his name, a gentle giant. Twenty years before he had trapped the Oregon Territory for pelt and game and from that date had proved himself to be a superior shot.

Although their main mission as sharpshooters was to eliminate artillery gun crews it was generally accepted that anything with braid on its arm was fair game and right now Brodie had such a mark under his sights.

‘You ain’t gonna make it,’ chuckled Sam, who insisted on wearing a worn buckskin shirt and beaver skin hat in defiance of all military protocol.

‘You’re going to owe me a glass after this,’ smiled his companion, squinting down the sight.

‘You hit that target and I’ll buy you a whole danged bottle.’

Brodie allowed his breath to ease out. He watched for movement amongst the trees that would show even the slightest breeze that might deflect the shot. There was nothing, the air too hot and heavy. He lined up on the officer, a major, he could tell by the gold and blue epaulets and the way he strutted about waving his sword in an attempt to bring his men to order. A slight rise to allow for the fall of the lead and any sluggish movement from the heat and then Brodie pulled the trigger.

‘Blow me down!’ growled Sam, as the officer’s hat flew off and the major tumbled. ‘You got him.’

Hardly had he uttered the words when the piercing whistle of an incoming shell tore through the air. The shell slammed into the house wall, erupting in a blast of plaster and brick and leaving a head-sized rent down the hall from their position.

‘Whoa!’ coughed Sam, as a cloud of dust and smoke filled the room. ‘That was a close one.’

More shells followed and blasted the walls, tearing at the fabric of the house.

‘They’ve got us ranged,’ said Brodie, brushing the masonry powder from his red-haired beard. ‘We’d best move on.’

‘Where to?’

‘Let’s go down a mite to one of them lower buildings.’

There were two structures just below and in front of the Bond House, one a simple frame-built building that had probably been slave quarters and the other a low wooden barn both with canted roofs.

The shells were coming fast and regular now and the two men struggled to descend the stairway through falling debris as the house was pounded. With a shattering blast that knocked them both from their feet a whole section of outer wall gave way under the continued strikes. Everything was lost in the fog of shattered masonry dust.

Staggering a little under the concussive detonations both men struggled outside across the fall of the destroyed wall. They made their way at the run over the open ground of the front yard, now ripped and torn by shellfire. As they ran, to their left a great oak was struck by a ball at the base, the tree shivered and shed a downfall of leaves before cracking apart like a snapped stick of celery and falling to the ground with a resounding thud.

Sliding gratefully to a halt within the cover of the frame house both Brodie and Sam panted their relief.

Brodie glanced out of a window at the way they had come and saw the Bond House being pummeled out of all recognition by the bombardment.

‘Seems like them boys are set on blowing that place up. They sure didn’t like us potting at them from that house.’

Sam grinned across at him, ‘Reckon we ruffled a few feathers all right.’

Shells were striking all around them now, blowing great fountains of earth high in the air and the stink of cordite and freshly turned soil was ripe in their nostrils.

‘I ain’t sure if we’re any better in here,’ complained Brodie.

Hardly had he spoken when the frame house was struck and with a rending crash the whole building tilted.

‘Watch out!’ cried Sam as a wrenching scream came from the complaining supports. With a boom the roof and ceiling suddenly collapsed inwards and the two men were caught under a rain of broken timber and roofing shingles. Dust was everywhere and a dazed Brodie struggled to free himself. He found himself held secure by a long roof beam and pressed up against an old cast iron stove that had been shunted across the floor by the blast. Trapped, he tried to brush away loose material and free his hands to feel for any damage. His limbs felt unharmed and it was only his body that was buried under a heap of fallen trusses and rafters and held tightly squeezed between the massive beam and the stove.

He tried to call out but the pallid dust that filled the air choked his throat. At last coughing back the acid taint of the dust he called out.

‘Sam! You there, are you okay?’

There was an answering growl from somewhere outside his vision.

‘Talk to me, Sam.’

He heard Sam sneezing and spitting ‘Can’t see a damned thing,’ the mountain man complained.

‘Are you okay, partner?’

Sam who was not one prone to understatement replied, ‘Me? Sam Tender, who busted his way clear across the Snake River beating off a party of Cree with only a spoon for protection – course I’m okay, this ain’t nothing but a walk on a summer’s day for a man like me,’ bragged the old mountain man.

Brodie gave a relieved chuckle despite his predicament, ‘Then get your ass over here, I’m tied down tighter than a goat skin drum.’

Sam’s massive frame loomed through the dust cloud and stood over the trapped form of Brodie.

‘Hell, boy, you sure is in a pickle,’ he said studying the great beam. ‘How in damnation we going to move that?’

More shot was screaming in outside and the steady boom of falling shells rocked the ground beneath them and set the walls shaking. The sky showed through the massive hole in the shattered roof above and even now streams of dust filtered down in thin rivers. All around them were sliding creaks and the sounds of more falling sections as the unsteady building shivered readying itself for total collapse.

‘You’d best do something,’ said Brodie. ‘Before the whole danged place drops on our heads.’

Sam shook his head doubtfully, a cloud of dust flying out from his beard and hair. He leaned forward and tugged at a section of paneling and dragged it aside.

‘That sure is one heavy old beam, Brodie,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Can’t you move at all?’

Brodie was caustic, ‘Well don’t disturb me right now, will you? I’m just lying here enjoying the view at present.’

Sam took a turn at the iron stove but it was a huge monster of a thing on splayed feet and would not budge with all the rubbish stacked against it.

‘How’d you get in there, dinkum?’ complained Sam, tossing aside fragments of wreckage. He delved down clearing a better view of the great slab of wood that held Brodie in place. ‘Wonder you ain’t crushed like a bug.’

‘You gotta lift it,’ said Brodie. ‘It’s near squeezing the life out of me.’

‘I’ll try,’ answered Sam, moving along to where the beam still rested with one end higher that the other.

Brodie watched as the big man humped his shoulder under the wood and gritted his teeth as he attempted to raise it. Nothing moved, the hefty timber had been the original ridge beam of the roof and was festooned with snapped sections of purlins that sprouted from the sides. The timber was very old and roughly shaped as the cut marks of the adze that had formed it showed clearly along the length.

‘Get on it,’ growled Brodie. ‘Come on, man. You can do it.’

Crouching as low as he could get, Sam bowed his shoulders under the beam. With a great cry he heaved upwards and attempted to raise it and Brodie felt the beam shift a fraction. Brodie watched as the mighty man’s thighs quivered under the strain and his breath came in grunting bursts of effort.

In relief, Brodie felt a fraction of looseness develop about him and he wriggled desperately trying to slide himself out from under. Sam was wailing now, desperately attempting to stand taller as he took the full weight of the timber. Brodie scrabbled with his boots and shunted himself in urgent stages to finally free himself of the imprisonment.

‘I’m out!’ he cried. ‘Leave off, Sam.’

With a sob, Sam let the weight fall from his back as he dropped to his knees. ‘Hot damn,’ he groaned. ‘You can take me to heaven now Lord.’

With both their rifles lost in the rubble the two men struggled free of the decaying building just in time. With a massive twist as if built like a frail house of cards the swaying building collapsed in upon itself and flattened out with a great crash.

Free of the destruction, Brodie and Sam slid down the hillside making for the cover of the track below them. About a mile away a Union artillerist servicing a Napoleon cannon sent a twelve-pound cannon ball on its way with a loud discharge of orange flame. The heavy missile sailed in an arc through the bullet torn air at a seemingly slow and easy pace. Gravity took hold and it struck the level ground before the Confederate defenses