Time of Wrath

By C Lowry

A stolen child. A scalped survivor. A trail of blood across the Devil's Anvil.

Eldridge Sample has hunted bandits, rustlers, and corrupt officers, but the Caprock Canyons hide a different kind of evil. Tracking a ruthless Comanche war party deep into the unforgiving badlands of the Llano Estacado, Sample finds a single pearl button pressed into the mud—a desperate sign from a captured girl.

But Sample isn't the only one hunting Chato, the war chief who leaves slaughter in his wake.

Amidst the ruins of a massacred Tonkawa camp, Sample finds Kano—a warrior scalped, blinded in one eye, and left for dead. Fueled by a hate that defies death itself, Kano rises from the grave with a single purpose: to peel the skin from the man who took his family.

Forging an uneasy alliance, the former lawman and the mutilated survivor embark on a brutal campaign of attrition. They don't just track the enemy; they dismantle them. From a sniper duel on a canyon rim to a blinding dust storm skirmish, they whittle the war party down, turning the hunters into the hunted.

As Chato retreats to the impregnable mesa known as the Devil's Anvil, Sample must decide how far he is willing to go to save the innocent. To defeat a devil, he has allied himself with a monster—and in the time of wrath, there is no shelter from the fire.

"We aren't partners," Sample said. "We just share a hate."

Visceral, elemental, and terrifyingly real, Time of Wrath is a survival Western that reads like The Revenant meets The Searchers. It is a story of endurance, savage vengeance, and the thin line between justice and slaughter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Lowry
• Release date: Dec 10, 2025
• ISBN: 9798232215088

Book preview

Chapter One

The Caprock didn’t invite you in; it dared you to cross it.

Eldridge Sample rode the bay horse along the rim of a canyon that dropped away into a jagged purple bruise of shadow. The sun was behind him now, pushing his shadow out long and thin across the red dirt, stretching it until it looked like a stain.

He wasn’t looking at the view. He was looking at the ground.

The bay was a good animal, U.S. Cavalry issue, stolen from a dead captain named Hatcher back at the Double V ranch. It had a long stride and a hard mouth, but it knew how to pick its way through a field of cholla without getting stuck. Eldridge sat loose in the saddle, the stolen Springfield carbine resting across his thighs, his thumb rubbing the oil-smooth wood of the stock.

They’re moving fast, Eldridge said.

He said it to the wind. The horse didn’t care about speed; it cared about water, and there hadn’t been any for ten miles.

The trail was a highway of unshod hoofprints cut into the caliche. Chato wasn’t hiding. The Comanche war chief had twenty riders, fresh mounts stolen from the Double V, and he was heading deep into the badlands where the Army wouldn’t follow. He drove the ponies hard, kicking up a dust cloud that had settled hours ago but left a grit on the sagebrush that tasted of iron.

Eldridge pulled his hat low. He checked the sun. Three hours of light left.

He had been tracking them for two days since the slaughter at the homestead. He hadn’t closed the gap. If anything, Chato was gaining. The Comanches rode relay, switching to fresh horses from the remuda they drove ahead of them. Eldridge had one horse. He had to rest it or walk, and walking in this country was just a slow way to die.

He stopped.

The trail dipped down into a dry wash, a scar in the earth where water ran once a year during the summer storms. The banks were steep, crumbling red clay.

Eldridge dismounted. He didn’t slide off; he stepped down, his knees protesting the impact. He was stiff. The mud he had plastered on his face and chest back at the homestead had flaked off, leaving his skin raw and burned, but the mindset hadn’t flaked off. He still felt cold inside, a kind of numb efficiency that scared him when he thought about it too hard.

He led the bay down the slope. The horse slid on its haunches, sending a cascade of shale rattling to the bottom.

The floor of the wash was flat, paved with dried mud that had cracked into geometric tiles like a church floor.

They stopped here, Eldridge said.

He walked to the center of the wash. He saw the sign.

The tracks milled around. Ponies had stood here, shifting weight. Men had dismounted. There were moccasin prints in the dust—high-topped, soft-soled.

Eldridge knelt. He touched a pile of horse droppings. Dry on the outside, barely damp in the middle.

Four hours, he estimated. Maybe five.

They had stopped to adjust packs. Or maybe just to laugh at the empty horizon behind them.

He looked for the children.

He found the prints of the pack pony—the one he had seen leaving the homestead with the double load. The tracks were deeper here. The animal was carrying weight.

But there were no small boot prints on the ground.

They didn’t let them down, Eldridge whispered.

The children—the boy and the girl—were still tied to the animal. In this heat. With the sun beating down on them and the dust clogging their noses.

He stood up. He walked a circle around the stopping point, widening his arc, looking for anything that didn’t belong to the desert. A scrap of cloth. A dropped canteen.

Nothing.

Chato was disciplined. His warriors didn’t drop gear. They didn’t leave trash. They moved through the land like smoke, taking everything and leaving only silence.

Eldridge walked back to the bay. He uncorked his canteen. He took a sip, swishing the warm water around his mouth to cut the dust before swallowing. He poured a little into his hat for the horse.

The bay drank greedily, licking the felt.

That’s it, Eldridge said. Until we find a tank.

He was about to mount up when he saw it.

It wasn’t on the main trail. It was off to the side, near a cluster of dead willows that marked where a seep used to be. The pack pony had drifted over there, maybe looking for a green leaf.

Eldridge walked over.

The mud near the willows wasn’t fully dry. It was tacky, holding the shape of the hoof perfectly.

And pressed into the edge of the print, half-buried in the red clay, was a white speck.

Eldridge crouched. He reached out with a finger, brushing the dirt away.

It was a button.

Small. Round. Made of mother-of-pearl. It caught the light, iridescent and clean against the ugly earth.

He picked it up. It was tiny, the size of a ladybug.

He looked at it in his palm.

It wasn’t a soldier’s button. It wasn’t a cowboy’s button. It was delicate. It belonged on a Sunday dress, or a child’s blouse.

He remembered the girl’s tracks at the homestead. The button boots. The white sock he had found in the cactus.

She’s alive, Eldridge said.

The button hadn’t fallen off. The thread holes were clean, torn. It had been pulled.

She had ripped it off.

Tied to a pony, exhausted, terrified, surrounded by men who had butchered her parents, the little girl had managed to work a button loose. And she had dropped it.

She had dropped it in the mud.

She’s leaving a trail, Eldridge said.

He closed his hand over the button. It felt like a hot coal.

It was a message. A shout in the silence. I am here. Come find me.

It was defiance.

Eldridge looked west, following the line of the wash as it curved toward the caprock. The land out there was a fortress of stone and heat, a place where people vanished.

But she hadn’t vanished. She was fighting.

He stood up. He put the button in his shirt pocket, buttoning the flap securely.

He walked back to the bay. He checked the cinch. He slid the Springfield into the scabbard, but he left the stock sticking out, ready to grab.

He mounted up.

The fatigue that had been riding on his shoulders for two days lifted, just a fraction. The coldness inside him shifted, finding a new focus.

He wasn’t just tracking a war party anymore. He was answering a call.

Hang on, little one, Eldridge whispered.

He turned the horse. He kicked it into a trot, riding out of the wash and onto the hardpan, following the tiny, white echo of a scream.

Chapter Two

The wind shifted in the middle of the afternoon, swinging around from the south and bringing a smell that Eldridge Sample knew better than the scent of his own sweat.

It wasn’t the smell of a dead cow bloated in the sun. It was sharper. It tasted of copper and opened bowels.

Eldridge pulled the bay horse up. The animal tossed its head, the bit jingling, and blew air through its nose, trying to clear the scent.

I know, Eldridge said. I smell it too.

He looked at the ground.

The trail of the war party had been running true west, a straight line toward the high mesas. But here, in a patch of soft sand between two ridges of red shale, the tracks veered.

They turned sharp left. South.

Eldridge leaned over the saddle horn. He read the story in the dust.

The ponies had been walking. Then, right here, they had stopped. The tracks deepened where the horses had shifted weight, waiting for a signal. Then they dug in. Deep gouges.

They spurred them, Eldridge said. They went from a walk to a gallop in ten feet.

He looked south. The terrain was broken, a tangle of cedar brakes and gullies that fed into the main canyon. He couldn’t see anything but rock and heat haze.

But he could hear the flies.

It was a low, steady hum, like a telegraph wire singing in the wind.

Eldridge checked the Springfield. He checked the Colt. He loosened the thong on the hammer.

He neck-reined the bay. He followed the tracks south.

He rode for a quarter mile. The brush got thicker, the mesquite tearing at his stirrups. The humming got louder.

He came over a rise and looked down into a shallow bowl of earth protected by a stand of cottonwoods.

It had been a camp.

It wasn’t a village. It was a hunting camp. Temporary. Five or six brush shelters—wickiups made of bent willow branches and covered with hides or blankets. A central fire pit. A rack for drying meat.

Now it was a butcher shop.

Eldridge didn’t ride in. He stopped on the rim of the bowl. He scanned the perimeter. He looked for the flash of a rifle barrel, the movement of a horse.

Nothing moved. Even the wind seemed to die at the edge of the clearing, afraid to go in.

Clear, Eldridge whispered.

He nudged the bay down the slope. The horse resisted, placing its hooves delicately, trembling. It didn’t want to step on the dead.

There were bodies everywhere.

They weren’t white settlers. They were Indians.

Tonkawa, Eldridge said.

He recognized the markings on a shield lying in the dirt—a turtle painted in red ochre. The Tonkawa were the outcasts of the plains. They scouted for the Army. They fought the Comanches.