back to the Books page Yaqui Gold by Clint Walker and Kirby Jonas
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- About the authors
- Clint Walker, born in Hartford, Illinois, is best known for his 1950's and 60's Western series, Cheyenne, where he portrayed wandering gunman Cheyenne Bodie. During filming of Cheyenne, Walker also made Westerns for the big screen, with such memorable tales as Yellowstone Kelly, Fort Dobbs, and Gold of the Seven Saints. Probably his best known films are Night of the Grizzly, which still gets regular air play, and The Dirty Dozen, with Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson. Clint, standing six feet six inches tall, weighing two hundred fifty-five pounds, with a chest measurement of forty-eight inches and a waist of thirty-eight in his prime, dwarfed his fans and co-stars alike, in more ways that one. Forty years after production, to his hundreds of thousands of fans Clint Walker is still known as "Cheyenne."
- Kirby Jonas, of Bozeman, Montana, now makes his home in Pocatello, Idaho, with his wife Debbie and four children, Cheyenne, Jacob, Clay and Matthew. Jonas has eight books in print, including the number one best seller Death of an Eagle. Growing up, Jonas's heroes were James Drury, on NBC television's The Virginian, Peter Breck (Nick Barkley), on ABC's The Big Valley, and, of course, Clint Walker, who inspired the main character in three of Jonas's published novels. It seemed a natural progression of things when Walker approached Jonas with the idea of writing Yaqui Gold together, but Jonas's head remains firmly planted in the clouds. Jonas, a former police officer, now makes his living as a fulltime firefighter for the city of Pocatello.
~ Yaqui Gold ~ (Preview: First two chapters) Chapter One
The big yellow bull was looking for something to kill. But it was the crazy one-eyed cow that got the job done.
The Texas playa was choked with mesquite and cactus. The vaqueros called this brush country "the brasada." Sam Coffey struggled to see ten yards in any direction through the brasada. The narrow-faced cowboy wore leather chaparejos and rode a saddle with tapaderos for his feet-leather coverings hanging down the front of the stirrups that kept the brush from knocking his feet out of the stirrups and kept thorns out of his boots. Besides the chaparejos-chaps-he wore leather gauntlets and a thick beaver hat, light gray with a stiff flat brim. But none of this kept the wicked brasada from ripping him to pieces.
Already, Sam Coffey's shirt was torn in four places, and his right arm was full of spines from one clump of prickly pear as tall as his buckskin gelding, Gringo. He just had not been able to veer away from that one without running headlong into a blackjack oak. Blood ran down one large scratch beneath his right eye, and dark brown lines of scab marked numerous older wounds on his face.
Tom Vanse, Sam's partner, was somewhere in this same brasada. Sam was not too worried about him. He could handle himself. But Chet Sward, the ranch owner, had sent along his sixteen-year-old daughter, Trina, with them that morning. She had begged to go, and because Tom Vanse, the ranch foreman, was going to be there, and Sward trusted Vanse completely, he had allowed the girl along. Tom's safety did not worry Sam. Trina's did.
Somewhere in the brush Sam heard a cow bawl, answered momentarily by her calf. The two cries came from some distance apart. That was not good. These were wild Texas longhorns, at least as wild as the whitetail deer that ghosted through this brush. They were as fast as the deer, too, and could go through a wall of stone-which they would, if separated from their offspring. He waited, sure he would soon hear bawling again as the pair made their way back together. Gringo's neck muscles quivered. He wanted to be after the cattle.
Sam Coffey remembered the huge yellow bull they were hunting from other trips into this brush. They had tried in vain to catch him, and always he took a small number of cows and calves with him when he escaped into the brasada. He had done the same today. But today Chet Sward wanted that bull. He had talked about him all day the day before, after discovering another of his imported bulls dead down by a water hole, and he had spoken of him once again that morning on their way out. He wanted him either brought back alive to sell…or left lying dead. This bull had killed two of his imported sires now. It was two too many.
And so now Sam, Tom, Trina Sward, and five other Texas cowboys, one a wizened old Mexican named Reale, who must have been around this country when the first wild cattle came in, were separated in the brasada.
Again came the bawl of the cow, answered by the calf. Gringo stood perfectly still, aside from the quivering of his skin when a fly would alight. Sweat ran into Sam eyes, and he swiped at it angrily and swore. Where was Tom? Where was the girl? Where were all the rest of them? The brasada was thick as beaver hair, but still he should have heard some sign of human or horse life. Instead, he heard nothing but the buzzing of the flies, the creaking of saddle leather whenever Gringo took a breath and that occasional calling of the cow and calf.
Putting his spurs gently to the horse's ribs, Sam started through the brush toward the sound of the calf. It had not moved since the first time it bawled out, and the strained sound of its mawing was a sure sign someone had a string on it. Maybe Tom.
Coming up against a solid wall of brush and thorn, Gringo hesitated, his eyes flashing back and forth as he looked for an opening. But he was a caballo de la brasada, as old Reale called them: a brush horse. When he found no hole through which to pass, he made his own.
The horse stepped gingerly into the interwoven branches of a mesquite tree, where limb and thorn reached out in eagerness to grasp Sam's clothes. Making sure there were no big branches that could brain him, he closed his eyes and put his forearm up across his face to let the horse find his way through. They brushed up against a prickly pear, but the horse was careful to stay as far from it as he could, so the thorns tickled teasingly at Sam's shirt but did not tear any new holes. Miraculously, neither did the mesquite, and Gringo was so careful making his passage that the nasty thorns did not even draw any new blood.
Again, the calf called. Sam guessed it to be thirty to fifty yards off to his right, and when the cow answered she sounded as if she was getting close enough that her baby should be coming into her view within moments. He hustled up the horse, certain now by the sound of the calf's voice that someone had it tied to a tree.
Ahead, Sam glimpsed a clearing. He and the cow reached it at the same time, but so intent was the cow on the other side of the clearing she did not even notice the rider. The cow was a lanky white thing with blue-black shoulders and black splattered all over the top of her back and face like ink spots. Her right eye was missing, but both smooth horns curled forward from her head in wicked perfection, made to chase and kill wolves and bears, and whatever else got between her and her babies.
Right now what was between her and her baby was Trina Sward. The blond sixteen-year-old knelt with clenched teeth across the neck and shoulders of a five-week-old brindle calf.
Sam swore when his eyes lit on the girl. He swore again, but that time with relief when he caught a glance of Tom sequestered back in the shadowy brush, on top of his big dark bay gelding and with a loop shook out in his forty-foot rawhide reata.
Sam felt Gringo's muscles bunch as he holstered his pistol and took his grass rope, shaking out a wide loop. The cow horse was preparing himself to bolt across the clearing. The cow's muscles bunched, too, and with a furious bellow she leaped into the clearing and started her charge toward Trina Sward and the calf.
Gringo flew through the air like a Pegasus, and had Sam not been ready he would have been left lying back at the edge of the trees. With his loop whirling overhead, he cut the horse at the cow's path, all his attention riveted on the cow.
To Sam's right, Tom's horse bolted in. Sam smiled grimly. Tom Vanse was in the fray now, and Tom never missed a throw.
The calf bawled frantically, but its mother was only halfway across the clearing when Sam's loop settled over her head. A tie-fast man, his rope was already tied to the saddle horn, and he sank all his weight into the left stirrup before the cow hit the end of his rope. In Texas, they said of the tie-fast man, when you rope a cow, you have got her…or she has you. The cow hit with the energy of a freight train, and even that ribby little longhorn felt like she would completely topple Sam and Gringo, just for a moment. He thought, She has me, all right. Then the cow was bawling and kicking, wheeling around the clearing with her head toward Sam. No slat-sided old one-eyed cow was going to beat Sam Coffey and Gringo.
Tom Vanse's rope whirred over his head, but every time he would get set to throw the reata, the cow, seeming to have miraculous instincts and timing, would throw her rear end one way or the other. Tom would have to hold off and make another approach.
But Sam was not worried. Not, at least, until the big yellow bull made his bellow.
In all his years as a cowboy, Sam Coffey had never seen a bull come back, once it had made its escape. He had chased mossyhorns, or mossbacks, whatever a man wanted to call them, for many years. He had tried to rope some pretty angry huge old monsters with wrinkles forming at the base of their horns and scars as thick as flies on their hides. And never, in all his years, had one of them returned to take its medicine-or take out its revenge.
But there was the yellow bull, blood streaming out his nostrils…and blood in his eyes. What was left of a four-strand rawhide reata encircled his neck, five or ten feet of it dragging the ground behind him like a whip snake.
Sam's eyes darted across the clearing at the furious bawl of the calf. Trina had been enjoying the spectacle. But now her eyes were riveted on the bull. She was frozen.
The bull shook his head. Blood splattered the brush. He pawed the ground and let out a furious bellow. The first time Tom Vanse knew the bull was there was as the yellow monster bellowed and leaped into the clearing toward Trina.
Chapter Two
A number of thoughts flashed across Sam Coffey's mind when the bull charged. But there was no time to sort those thoughts. He knew he should tell Trina to let go of the calf and run. He knew he should charge the yellow bull with Gringo and try to knock it off its feet. Looking back, those were the two things he remembered most. In fact, he did not have any sure recollection of other thoughts. He only knew his mind was clouded by more than those two things. Whatever else he had thought, it would never matter.
The cow fought furiously at the end of his rope. He had no hope of getting that string back until the cow was heeled. The bull was halfway across the clearing, intent on the only person on the ground…Trina.
The calf bawled like it was being murdered. The cow fought harder. Swearing he would become a dally man before he ever chased another cow, Sam cursed and grabbed for his belt knife. He shucked it, and one good slash severed the rope from his saddle horn.
Without a rope, and knowing he did not want to rope this yellow monster anyway, Sam turned Gringo and gigged him with the spurs. The bull was closing quickly on Trina. Without any hesitation, as game as a horse could be, Gringo threw his chest full force into the bull's hip. They had aimed for the shoulder, but he was moving too fast.
Thrown off balance, the bull veered sideways, nearly going down. His back feet tangled with each other, and his hindquarters buckled. Sam dropped his knife. There was no time to sheath it. His hand closed over the butt of his gun.
Sam Coffey would never know how the bull recovered so quickly. He only had time to crack off one shot before the bull was up and coming back around. He saw dust lift off the bull's shoulder when the bullet made its slap into the scarred hide. The reata around his neck flipped about, slapping his side like a whip. But the big old mossyhorn probably did not even feel it. His fury was too all-consuming.
He came at Sam Coffey and Gringo with a lunge.
Before Tom Vanse could react to the new situation and aim his loop for the mad cow's head, the piebald dame was headed for his horse, her head lowered and black horn tips shining. He tried to rein his horse away, but there was no time. The cow's head slammed hard into Tom's foot, both her wicked horns sinking into the horse's side. She ripped upward, surprisingly strong for such a ribby-looking old cow. Her thrust gutted Tom's poor cowhorse, which screamed in pain and lunged sideways, going down.
Confused for a moment by the downed bay's flailing hooves, the cow, with her head still down, sought an opening to Tom Vanse. One of the horse's hooves struck her in a shoulder as he fought to regain his feet. This made the cow back up and curl her tail higher above her back. She bunched her legs as if to jump right on top of the horse.
But then her calf bawled again.
The big yellow bull meant to eviscerate Sam Coffey's horse the way the cow had done to Tom's. But Gringo, savvy as a horse can be, lunged upward at just the last moment. To keep from being unseated, Sam grabbed for the saddle horn as they went up. In the process, his gun went flying from his hand, trampled under the dust by the bull's rear hooves.
The skyward jump would have been a good move for Gringo but for one thing. When he came back down, the bull was underneath him. The bull, gone insane, flexed his massive legs and shoved to full height, sending Sam Coffey up to the highest seat he had ever taken on top of a horse. He had tied his reins together when they first ran into the brush to keep from losing them, but somehow in jumping up Gringo tossed them over his head, and now Sam had lost both reins. His only hold was the saddle horn, and he clutched it like a rank greenhorn.
The cow heard her calf's bawl, and there is no power on earth greater than the bond between a cow and her calf. She whirled away from the downed man and horse as the horse was rolling off Tom Vanse's leg. She saw the calf come to its feet at last, just as she turned. But even as the calf ran toward her, tail raised, all the cow seemed to be able to see was the human who had held her baby down, putting him through so much pain.
Trina Sward.
Her eyes nearly as wide-open as her mouth, the girl stared at the cow. When the cow took her first lunging step, the girl turned and bolted for the nearest tree. The tree was ten yards from Trina…the cow was only five.
When the cow's head hit the girl it was with such force it would have knocked her twenty feet into the brush. But one of those wicked, black-pointed horns pierced the girl underneath the ribs, and instead of flying to the side, when the cow raised her head the girl flung up over the cow's back, landing with a puff of dust on her spotted shoulders. The cow hunched her shoulders and kicked off the ground, making Trina strike the hoof-churned ground with a thud. Trina let out a little scream, the first sound she had made through the entire affair. The cow wheeled around, tail in the air, and kicked the girl with one foot in the chest, knocking her three feet backward, where she lay still.
Tom Vanse's bay horse had lunged to its feet and scrambled for the brush, trailing some of its innards. That left Tom on his hands and knees in the clearing, pawing the dust in search of his pistol.
Underneath Gringo and Sam Coffey, the bull made one more skyward leap, this time throwing Gringo backwards off him. Before the horse's feet could securely touch the ground, the bull spun and struck the horse in the hip with its wicked, curved horns. He left a huge gash in the horse's hip that instantly sprayed blood as the horn pulled loose.
Gringo grunted, and his eyes rolled, showing white. When the bull came at him again he made another buck skyward. Once again, Sam found himself up high on the horse, the bull beneath them both. But this time Gringo rolled to the left, his blood painting the back of the bull.
Sam Coffey rolled to the right.
The cow saw Tom Vanse digging in the dirt for his pistol at the same time he saw her. He rolled and tried to make it to his feet, but pain shot through his left leg, and he fell face down. Rolling onto his back, he was just in time to see the cow bearing down on him. As she lowered her head to hook him, he kicked up hard with both of his feet. His sharp heels caught her in the forehead. It was by chance that his booted right heel slipped, and the rowel of his spur found its way into her one good eye. The cow bawled madly and backed away, blood already coming down her cheek. Shaking her head, she spun around and trotted off into the brush after her calf.
Sam Coffey landed on the head of the bull as Gringo was rolling sideways off his rump. Instinctively, the bull tossed Sam, and he landed in the dust, the air knocked horribly from him. But there was no time for the luxury of trying to breathe.
With the bull trying to gather his legs again, after the horse knocked his rear end out from under him, Sam tried to push himself backward with his heels dug into the ground. It was thus he found his knife. It jabbed into his elbow, cutting his shirt and drawing blood, he did not know how bad. Turning enough to grab the knife, Sam clutched it and looked back to see the bull nearly on him. He rolled to one side, and the bull tried to hook him as he passed. He managed only to rip another hole in Sam's shirt.
Sam turned to see the horns coming back at him, and he dove. He felt one hoof dig into his back, but strangely he felt no pain, just the tremendous pressure. The bull's horns had missed him once more, but he looked up to see the bull's belly in his face. Without thinking, he drove the knife upward into the tawny belly. The bull roared like a buffalo. One of its hind hooves struck Sam in the right shoulder, sending him backward to the ground. Sam tried to raise the knife again, but his arm wouldn't come up.
The bull whirled, blood streaming out its nose and from its belly. It raised its head and looked at Sam with one eye, making sure it had him well pegged, there on the ground. It rolled its eyes and bawled. Then it lowered its head and its thick and scaly, wrinkled horns…to kill Sam Coffey.
To order Yaqui Gold, include the following information:
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To order Yaqui Gold send requests to:
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