Broddock-Black 05 - Force of Nature Read Online Free PDF Page A

his place of solitude when the burdens of the world became onerous. And after yesterday’s standoff with the crew of the Empire Cattle Company who was found three miles inside his borders, and after his men had discovered a score of his cattle slaughtered at the Aspen ford this morning, he needed the peace of the graveyard to clear his thoughts.
    To plan and prepare his reprisals.
    He and his men would be riding out come nightfall.
    The remittance men who ran the Empire Cattle Company needed to be taught a lesson.
    Standing before the simple headstones, the granite unembellished except for the names carved into the rough stone, he spoke to his parents as though they were still alive.
    “They keep coming, Father—like you said they would— the Sassenach devils,” he murmured, a small smile forming on his mouth. His Irish mother had detested the English.
    Like many of the large cattle companies, the Empire was funded by English nobles looking for profit in the American West, and on occasion for a distant locale to send their scapegrace sons until their scandals died away. Remittance men, they called those ne’er-do-well sons, and tonight, Flynn would face those running the Empire Cattle Company. Not that blue bloods from England were worth a damn as fighters. But the brutal men they hired to maintain their range lands were quick with a gun and dangerous.
    And like his samurai father before him, Flynn had fought a constant battle to guard his land from men like that. In this outland beyond the arm of the law, the strong took from the weak. An eye for an eye wasn’t just a biblical injunction, and justice was determined by the number of armed men who rode at your side.
    Flynn’s men were loyal, their fighting skills well honed. He’d learned the art of war at his father’s knee. The military arts were the highest form of study in Japan, the way of the warrior a philosophy of honor and loyalty his father had always lived by. A ronin or “wave man” (wanderer), his father had been set adrift when the feudal system had been replaced by a central government and the samurai class disenfranchised.
    Ito Katsakura had sailed for the goldfields of California to mend his fortunes, taking with him his samurai swords, the badge of his class, and the principles of Bushido that had guided his life.
    Flynn’s mother, Molly, an Irish immigrant, endured the drudgery of a scullery maid in Boston for three scant months before seeing the advertisement heralding high wages for mule skinners in California. Who hadn’t heard the glorious tales of striking it rich in the goldfields? Hadn’t she seen a team driven a thousand times? How hard could it be?
    She’d learned to drive by sheer audacity and wits, holding her own against the male drivers, working the route from San Francisco to the goldfields for almost two years. By then, she’d saved up enough to stake her claim, and on her first day panning for gold, she’d met Katsakura. She’d known immediately, she’d always said, that she’d found a man as strong as she.
    The young couple worked a series of claims up and down the Sierra Nevadas, making just enough to keep their appetites whetted for more. But the big bonanzas were few and far between eight years after the Sutter’s strike. And when word arrived of the new gold discoveries in Montana, they’d followed the rush to the virgin fields.
    Their luck turned in ’63—maybe it had to do with the fact that Molly had called their claim Flynn’s Luck, after their five-year-old son. She’d always said it had, but whatever the reason, that patch of real estate near Diamond City lay over a gold vein rich enough to enable them to buy vast acres of prime land, make them good friends with the bankers in town and give them a life free from want.
    With bowed head, Flynn stood at his parents’ graves, asking their blessing as was his habit before he rode off to face his enemies. “We leave tonight,” he said, his harsh features in