Benedict and Brazos Series

If ever a man was born to hang, it was Dusty Lane. But Lane never figured he would hang for a crime he didn’t commit ... in this case, a cold-blooded double murder. Luckily for Dusty, his old friend Hank Brazos got to hear about his plight and decided to do something about it—with the reluctant help of his gun-swift partner Duke Benedict. They rode for the town of Spearhead with no set plan in mind, but quickly started to put all the pieces together ... a witness who wasn’t as reliable as he seemed ... a sheriff who would sooner look the other way ... an undertaker with big ambitions ... and a whisper-voiced killer named Raven, who was happy to kill anyone who got in his way—and even those who didn’t. Someone was out to break the Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association by any means ... and by hang rope or bullet, it didn’t matter to them who had to die in the process.

Back East, Duke Benedict’s wealthy family believed he was a prominent lawyer who moved among the wild west’s rich and the famous. So when his father proposed to pay him a visit in the rough-and-ready town of Rawhide, Duke had to think fast. It would kill his old man to discover that Duke was in reality a footloose gambler, womanizer and slick-as-lightning gunfighter. And so the pretence began. Duke Benedict took over the practice of his lawyer friend Otto Lanning, and his partner, Hank Brazos, took Lanning up into the hills to enjoy a little hunting. Too bad all hell chose exactly that moment to break loose. A mysterious preacher came to town with a whispering albino gunman in tow, their plan to set the good folks of Rawhide against each other until the town tore itself apart. Only then would the preacher have his revenge for something that had happened in the recent past. With Duke’s hands tied as he pretended to be little more than an attorney, and Brazos off in the high country playing nursemaid to his friend, it looked as if Rawhide was wide open ... for destruction!

Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos were finally closing in on the man they’d sworn to kill; the same man whose gang of cutthroats had massacred innocent men by the hundreds throughout the late Civil War. And Bo Rangle knew it. So he figured to dig up the fortune in Confederate gold he’d stolen at the Battle of Pea Ridge and then high-tail it to Mexico. If anyone got in his way ... well, that was going to be their hard fortune. But still Benedict and Brazos kept coming. They survived ambushes, shootouts, a terrifying white-water ride through the Lizard River and still kept after their quarry. And yet there was something in them that almost hoped they wouldn’t catch up to him. Because when they did, when Rangle lay stone-cold dead at their feet, there was another battle each man would have to face. They were going to have to gunfight each other!

Trouble was brewing between the Shotgun Ranch and its rivals, the Golden Hoof – and though they wanted no part of a range war, Benedict and Brazos eventually had to choose sides. There was just one problem. As the bodies piled up, and the gunsmoke grew ever thicker, Benedict started to wonder if they’d thrown in with the right side. Brazos had no such doubts ... but by then, he’d fallen head-over-heels for the Golden Hoof owner’s beautiful daughter Tracy. And Tracy could do no wrong in his eyes ... It was then that the unthinkable happened, and Benedict and Brazos found themselves on opposing sides. In the final showdown, they’d have to go against each other, toe to toe, gun to gun ...

During the War Between the States, landowner Stanton Claiborne had served the Confederacy with distinction. And though the South had lost that conflict, Claiborne moved his family smack into the heart of Union country at war’s end. The Northerners there – supposedly the victors – were living a hand-to-mouth existence. They didn’t take kindly to a rich Southerner coming into their domain and lording it over them. So the stage was set for war ... a war that Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos unwittingly rode straight into. But the trouble wasn’t all Claiborne’s doing. There were unseen forces at work in the town of Resurrection who were determined to make the Southerner and his family suffer for their own gain. And before peace was declared again, men would die ... and one in particular would die a death that was both shocking and tragic.

It was a case of mistaken identity when Galloway’s two lawmen arrested Hank Brazos on a charge of rustling. Brazos went quietly, sure that his saddle pard, Duke Benedict, would soon arrive to help him clear everything up. But the law had other ideas. No ifs, no buts ... Hank Brazos was going to stay behind bars until the circuit judge could find him guilty and sentence him to hang! Benedict could always help the big Texan escape ... but if things went wrong, it might come to gunplay and innocent parties could die. So he decided to take a different route – to ride solo and find and arrest the real culprits himself. Trouble was, to stand any chance of success, he had to swap one partner for another ... in this case, Brazos’ irascible hound, Bullpup!

A war was raging between the Anvil Ranch and its bitter rival, the Fifty-four. Men were being cut down from ambush, cattle rustled, and each side constantly blamed the other. And when Joe Tucker, boss of the Fifty-four, hired Flint and Ram Brand, two of the toughest gunfighters money could buy, Burk Kincaid decided to do likewise for the Anvil. The two men he got were Benedict and Brazos. But the urbane gambler and his tough-as-nails partner weren’t interested in fighting a war—they wanted only to keep the peace. That, however, was easier said than done. The ranchers shared a dark secret that was at the heart of their feud. And even when a climactic gunfight on Sheridan’s Main Street seemed to settle matters, there was still one more gunman who wanted to buy into the fracas ... a sinister, one-eyed shootist known as Kid Silk!

Old Justin Wardlaw was dying, but before he cashed in he wanted to see his four sons together again one last time. Cleve and David had never strayed far. Cleve ran a saloon in town, David ran his father’s mining operation. But what of Race and Corey? Following an argument, Race had left home and eventually become a gun-for-hire. Corey, the dreamer, had taken off to read poetry and see the country first-hand. If and when the missing sons showed up, they would automatically be taken back into Justin’s will. And if that happened, Cleve and David—who between then expected to inherit Justin’s entire fortune—would lose out big-time. Which meant that Race and Corey had to die ... Somehow Benedict and Brazos got caught up in the vicious plot to kill off the competition. Along the way Benedict sold Brazos’ beloved dog Bullpup, fell victim to a blackmailer and then found himself fighting right alongside a man he thought he hated!

Accused of stagecoach robbery, Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos had no choice but to run for their lives. It was just plain bad fortune that in so doing they ran smack into a wagon train heading across the desert for a mining town called Tarbuck. The wagon train was no ordinary outfit. It was made up of forty women, all bound for Tarbuck to meet the men they’d agreed by mail to marry. Big Rosie Moriarty immediately took a shine to Brazos ... but Benedict’s attention was taken by the beautiful Libby Blue. There was just one problem. A kill-crazy outlaw called Kain Ketchell had broken out of prison with one goal in mind – to kill Libby, the woman he blamed for his arrest and incarceration. And nobody killed like Ketchell!

Brazos and Benedict had fallen out ... again. But this time it looked as if their long partnership really had been damaged for good. Now Benedict was the marshal of a town called Archangel, where tensions were running high following a series of audacious cattle-thefts. And Brazos ... well, he’d been hired by the ranchers to find out just who the thieves were—and dispense some good, old-fashioned Colt .45 justice when he found them. Which put the two former friends on opposite sides of the fence. To make matters worse, Benedict had woman trouble, as well as a challenge from a gunfighter called Shane. As for Brazos, well, the rustling seemed to be coming from a spread run by a dangerous former Civil War general whose sanity was slowly but surely fading by the day. It was a power keg of a situation, and if they were to survive it, Benedict and Brazos would have to work together, one more time. That’s if they didn’t end up killing each other first!

There was trouble in Fortitude Valley. Someone had set up a lumber camp smack in the middle of cattle country. And to make matters worse, the lumbermen drafted in to work the axes and saws, and float the timber down to the sawmill, were paroled convicts! If they made a go of the chance they’d been given, they could win their freedom. But the Fortitude Valley Cattlemen’s Association had other ideas about that. Hank Brazos and Duke Benedict were hired to keep the peace between the two opposing factions, but that was easier said than done. Unwittingly, they landed themselves right in the middle of an all-out war in which neither side intended to go down without a fight ... and their weapons ranged from red-hot lead to sweaty, unstable dynamite!

Benedict and Brazos had seen it all before—a supposedly genuine treasure map pointing to a priceless, solid gold statuette down in Old Mexico. According to legend, the Golden Virgin of Santo Sabinas had been hidden away in a spooky, disused monastery deep in the Sierra Espantosa, a vast range of almost impenetrable mountains that were said to be ... haunted! It was all hogwash, of course. But there was something about the map that looked genuine. And for a half-share in whatever treasure they managed to find, Benedict and Brazos decided to team up with two hard-luck brothers and a small boy who quickly began to idolize gun-swift Benedict. There was just one problem. Other greedier, crueler men also had their eyes on the Golden Virgin, as did a merciless colonel of Federales. And one way or another, he was going to have it ... even if it meant torturing Brazos half to death ... and then threatening to execute the child!

The two strangers rode into town on the trail of a gun-fast killer named Stark. When they left, however, they’d stolen $15,000 in gold dust from the Ophir Mine. The local marshal had one other piece of information to help him track them down. They’d given their names as Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos. And that’s how Benedict and Brazos came to be wanted—dead or alive. Determined to prove their innocence and bring the real outlaws to book, they rode into a town that had more than its fair share of intrigue. Nothing in Larrabee was as it seemed. And before the mystery was finally cracked, there would be heartbreak for some, and cold lead for others ...

Trouble was brewing in the town of Harmony, between the gun-toughs who manned the Two-Bar ranch, the hardcases who hung around the Rawhide Saloon and the beleaguered miners out at Whipple Creek. Into this explosive situation rode Hank Brazos and Duke Benedict. With a thin bankroll, they were looking to earn some fast money to continue their hunt for a Civil War guerilla who'd killed their comrades and stolen a fortune in Confederate gold ... a fortune they themselves planned to get their hands on. So Brazos pinned on the sheriff's badge in return for a hundred dollars a month, and soon found himself taking his responsibilities more seriously than he'd thought possible! Across a poker table, meanwhile, Benedict ran into an old acquaintance named Doc Christian. They were rivals, these two gambler-gunmen. And frankly, Benedict had no idea where Doc fitting into the various warring factions. When the chips were down, however, Benedict and Brazos found themselves in the thick of a fiery showdown, with just about every gun-filled hand turned against them!

Spargo was a mining town ... but there hadn’t been any mining there for a while. The mines were in a dangerous condition, and their owner, Foley Kingston, refused to make improvements. So the miners—those who’d survived the numerous cave-ins and accidents—went on strike, and Kingston called on his old friend, Duke Benedict, to help him break it. Benedict’s partner, big Hank Brazos, immediately sided with the miners. And even though Benedict knew Kingston was at fault, he had to stand by him. Back in the War, Kingston had saved his life, so he owed the man. But there were darker forces at work in Spargo—from Kingston’s cheating wife Rhea to saloon owner Ace Beauford, who wanted to run the entire outfit all by himself. And then there was a man-mountain named Paddy Clancy, who figured to double-cross all of them!

Tom Fallon of the Southwest Militia needed a man he could trust to get into an outlaw stronghold called Drum and rescue the beautiful wife of the state governor, so he called for an old friend, Duke Benedict. But Benedict showed up with a friend of his own, big Hank Brazos ... so Fallon found himself with two good men. That alone wasn’t enough to guarantee success, though. First they had to get into Drum, and for this they needed the help of a sinister gunman called Holly, who wore a silver mask to hide the ruin of a face that had been chewed-up by a bullet many years before ... and they weren’t at all sure they could trust Holly. Then there was the matter of a wild gun known as Caleb Flint, Killer. With the life of the woman at stake, they had no choice but to go ahead and see what they could do. So they loaded up their guns and set out in full expectation of the war to come. And war was exactly what they got.

To fill their empty pockets, Benedict and Brazos turned bounty hunter, their mission to bring in a kill-crazy maniac called Billy Quinn, dead or alive. All the signs suggested that Quinn had taken up residence in a dead-end town called Babylon. But there was more to Babylon than met the eye. The law was administered by Bourne Murdock and his three brothers, and some said they enforced it a mite too heavily. There was also a rumor that Bourne had framed a man named Tom Sudden five years earlier, and had him packed off to the State Penitentiary ... leaving Bourne himself free to romance Sudden’s girl and eventually marry her. Few people knew the real truth. All the townsfolk knew right now was that Sudden’s sentence had run its course, he was free again, and heading back to Babylon for a final showdown ... and he was bringing four of the toughest gunmen right along with him ... If Benedict and Brazos got in his way well, they'll just have to die!

It looked like the end of the trail for Benedict and Brazos, when Brazos got mighty mysterious all of a sudden and just took off on his own. Benedict, the urbane gambler, reckoned he should be glad to be free of the lumbering Texas cowboy at last. Instead he missed having him around. So he followed him, to find out just what his little secret was. That was when the whole affair grew even more mysterious. Why did Brazos go all the back home to Wildhorse County, start throwing his weight around and bad-mouthing damn’ Yankees at every opportunity? It was all part of an elaborate cross and double-cross that would eventually see both men fighting for their lives against a bunch of fanatics who called themselves the Second Army of the Confederate States!

Down on their luck, Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos were forced to take jobs herding cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. It was no hardship for Brazos—he’d more or less been born in the saddle and was cowboy all the way through. But Benedict ... well, Benedict appreciated the finer things in life. So on impulse he quit the drive and headed for Abilene by himself, hoping to find himself a high-stakes poker game and a willing woman or two. What he found instead was a town under siege by the hell-raising Texas cowboys who wanted to let of steam at trail’s end and didn’t care who got injured along the way. Many men had worn the marshal’s star in Abilene ... and many had failed to bring law and order to the town. Now it was Duke Benedict’s turn. And plenty of blood would be spilled before the wild men of Texas learned that when Benedict wore a star, he meant business.

Duke Benedict had killed Jory Archer in a gunfight six months earlier. Now Jory’s brother, Teal, was itching to even the score. But to hedge his bets he took along a bunch of the toughest cutthroats ever to rob a stage or blow a bank safe. So Duke Benedict decided to get them before they could get him. What he didn’t bank on was the Outlaw Queen Clementine Jones. Clementine had developed a soft spot for Teal. When he ran out on her, and took some of her best men with him, that affection turned to hate, and a burning desire for revenge. Suddenly the odds against Benedict went sky-high ... but luckily he had big Hank Brazos to back him, and together they were a veritable two-man army. War was declared in the desert ghost town called Hardluck. Before it was over, Boot Hill was going to get awful crowded ... and Clementine Jones was going to be dreadful sorry they’d ever tangled!

The sheriff of Tumbleweed took an instant dislike to Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos. The dude and the giant in the garish purple shirt looked like trouble to him. So he gave them one-way tickets for the next stage out to Flintlock ... and that's when the trouble really began. The minute it left town, the stagecoach became a target. Among the other passengers was a federal marshal delivering his prisoner, notorious outlaw Jack Savage, to Flintlock for trial. But Savage's gang had other ideas. They planned to stop the stage and rescue him, even if they had to kill everyone else on board. They reckoned without Benedict and Brazos, and when the stranded passengers took refuge in a deserted town called Buckaroo, they found themselves up against hot lead, and stone-cold ghosts from the past!

The plan was simple. Duke Benedict would stay in Nogales and build up a stake from his poker winnings, while Hank Brazos ran a string of horses south into Mexico. When they were financially solvent again, they’d reward themselves with a long, restful vacation. But they didn’t count on Brazos getting himself arrested and sentenced to hang on a trumped-up murder charge. From that moment forward, Benedict had only one priority—to save his partner from a necktie social. To do just that, he agreed to throw in with a fearsome bounty hunter named Branch Lucas, who was in Mexico on business of his own. That business concerned a man called Diablo—a man of the people, who intended to free Toltepec Province from the yoke of slavery and had an entire army of renegades at his disposal. When Benedict and Brazos threw in with that army, the flame was lit, and the powder keg that was Toltepec Province was ready to explode!

After witnessing the cold-blooded killing of a man named Boyd Larsen, Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos found themselves up to their gunbelts in mystery, murder and mayhem. Someone was rustling cattle from Nate Kendrick's Rancho Antigua, and while that in itself wasn't Benedict and Brazos' business, rumor had it that the man doing all the rustling was Bo Rangle, the cut-throat outlaw they've been tracking ever since he massacred their men in the closing days of the Civil War. Signing on as range detective and wrangler respectively, Benedict and Brazos set out to run the rustlers to ground and exact their revenge on Rangle. But before they can find the man, they need to find the cattle ... and somehow or other, those cattle have vanished right off the face of the earth!

They called her Little Miss Pretty. Her real name was Dixie Talon, and she was the newborn daughter of railroad magnate Conrad Talon. Which meant that the tiny baby was worth big money to the gang that kidnapped and held her to ransom. The gang was led by Scarlett Considine and Jesse Mansfield, the so-called Sweetheart Killers, and they had not a single ounce of compassion for the vulnerable infant in their care. But once Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos took a look into Dixie’s little shoe-button eyes, they decided that the Sweetheart Killers and their cut-throat followers were going to pay for their crime. The trouble was, when it came to a showdown, could Benedict or Brazos kill a woman, especially a woman like Scarlett? That was when Fate stepped in and blew the whole deal to shreds.

A ghost-town at midnight ... a hearse driven by a dead man ... and a coffin full of gold coins ... For Benedict and Brazos, it was the start of another bullet-fast adventure. Benedict felt they were entitled to keep the loot. Brazos wanted to do the decent thing and return it to its rightful owner. But what about Doc Sullivan, the ruthless killer who’d originally stolen and then lost it? He certainly wasn’t about to lose out on a quarter-million dollars. Comes to that, neither was U S Marshal Cleve Elliott, who was determined to reclaim it and send it back where it rightly belonged. And then there was Milt Hinkle, and he was the one threat Benedict and Brazos didn’t allow for ... because Milt Hinkle just happened to be Brazos’s wayward cousin!

He was a dead man walking. He staggered into the hotel lobby with a knife sticking out of one ear, and when he hit the floor the blade finally penetrated his brain and finished him off once and for all. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of suspects. A lot of men had reason to hate Harvey Yardigan. But then a witness came forward to say that the murder had been committed by none other than Duke Benedict. Benedict and his partner, Hank Brazos, were in the town of Mirage on secret business. Midwest Territory was a hotbed of crime, murder and rustling. Things were so bad that folks had started calling it “The Killing Ground” instead. The fancy gambler and his big cowboy friend were sent in to clean the territory up ... but it seemed that someone else was already onto them – and would stop at nothing to make sure they failed in their mission!

As usual, Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos were low on funds ... until they ran into a drunken miner by the name of Arnie Woodcock. Arnie bore such an uncanny resemblance to a wanted outlaw called Turk Jory that it gave Benedict an idea. Suppose they were to turn Arnie in and claim the reward on Jory’s head? They could then bust Arnie out of jail, quit the territory and split the money three ways. What could possibly go wrong? In short – everything. Nobody figured on the real Turk Jory showing up to take a look at the man who was to hang in his place. Nobody figured that he would use the hanging as a diversion while he hit the local bank. And nobody figured that Benedict and Brazos could still come out of the whole sorry mess as heroes!

The town of Glory was anything but glorious. It was actually a town filled with fear—fear of the wild Yellow House River bunch, and an outlaw gang led by Ben Hollister, a bad man they called the Living Legend for his gun-speed. Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos had no intention of buying into Glory’s troubles. All they wanted was a lead on Bo Rangle, the man they were hunting. But then a good man was shot dead by the Yellow House boys. That’s when Benedict pinned on the town marshal’s badge and together he and Brazos set about restoring law and order. With the Yellow House gang dealt with, there was still the matter of Ben Hollister, and a schemer in the shadows saw to it that he and Benedict would eventually clash. It was a showdown Benedict would have done anything to avoid. Because he and Holliday had once been friends. And it was the Living Legend who’d taught him everything he knew about guns, and how to use them.

Mack Halligan and Kid Chaney were rivals in more ways than one. They both loved the same woman, and she loved them, too ... though she could never decide which one to marry. But the two men also ran rival outlaw gangs. The difference was that Halligan’s was hopeless, the men in it harmless and amateur, while Kid Chaney’s was slick, efficient and always successful. When Chaney stole Duke Benedict’s new horse, the gambling man made it his mission to track Chaney down and take the animal back. His big partner, Hank Brazos, agreed to side him on his quest. But Brazos had an ulterior motive. If they could put Kid Chaney behind bars, it would leave the way open for Mack Halligan to marry the girl of his dreams and return to the straight and narrow. But that was a big if. The Tiger twins, both notorious assassins, were after them on a separate matter... and a lot of men would die before they all reached trail’s end!

Crossing the Red Man River when it was in full flood wasn’t the wisest thing gambler Duke Benedict and his cowboy sidekick Hank Brazos had ever done. And when the ferry they riding tore free of its ropes, they found themselves driven downstream until their wild ride ended on the banks of Peaceful Valley. Here, a religious order had built itself a town ... but the Devil had settled in those parts, too, for one of the townsfolk had just been murdered, and the two newcomers quickly found themselves accused of the killing! As if that wasn’t bad enough, Peaceful Valley was about to get a visit from bad man Chad Irons and his gang of cutthroats. Before he’d been sent to prison, the valley had been Irons’ hideaway. Now he intended to take it back – and kill everyone who stood in his way! One way or another, it was time for Benedict and Brazos to start fighting back ...