The Fire of Greed Read Online Free PDF Page A

here with his brother Will, just two men at the threshold of their twenties looking for adventure and fortune, as young men often do. When they had left Virginia after the War Between the States, they had spent several seasons herding cattle from Texas up into Kansas, where they picked up a contract hunting buffalo to feed railroad work crews. Gradually, they worked their way farther west, following the promising trail toward the gold and silver strikes in New Mexico Territory.
    One night they dropped into a saloon down in Silver City, one of those places where prospectors came down out of the Mogollon Mountains with too much gold dust and not enough sense.
    The brothers from Virginia had been drinking far too long for their own good that night, as young men barely into their twenties occasionally do. So too had been another pair of young men barely into their twenties. As often happens in circumstances such as prevailed that night, neither pair of young men walked away, as they should have, from a quarrel that ensued.
    Perhaps, if Bladen had tugged at Will’s sleeve and insisted that they let the two men go, it never would have happened, but he had not, and it
did
.
    What happened next, happened fast. It happened in such a fog that Bladen never really knew which man drew his gun first, but Bladen knew he was the
last
.
    When the dust had settled, two men lay dead, and one was Will. The fourth man, the cowardly one with the narrow face of a rodent who had shot Will, had vanished into the night.
    Bladen spent the next several months searching in vain for the rat-faced man who had taken his brother’s life. At last, he realized that he was being eaten alive by circumstances that he could never change, so he headed north. He had no particular destination, he rode only to be someplace new, someplace that was not so packed with reminders of Will.
    It had been about a year or so after Will’s death that Bladen had found himself in a small mining town not far from the bustling metropolis of Cripple Creek, Colorado. Through a series of auspicious events, he played a role in foiling a bank robbery and was asked by the city fathers to consider becoming their sheriff.
    It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and perhaps it actually was. He had been starting to think that he should be thinking about his future, so he accepted, and decided to settle down.
    It was then that he met Sally Lovelace, a young woman with whom there was a mutual attraction and a seriousness that had
almost
led to a wedding. Bladen Cole had always fancied himself as a man who was not meant to be too long in one place, but for a time it seemed that the effects of a steady job, and
mainly
the effects of Sally Lovelace, had changed him.
    However, before that could happen, Sally took a fancy to a high roller who swept her off her feet. J. R. Hubbard was one of those men who attracted the attention of good women like a magnet attracts iron filings. Sally had swooned to his charms, and had allowed herself to be seduced by the honey of his sweet talk, and by starry promises that could never have been fulfilled by a man on a sheriff’s salary.
    Around the same time that Hubbard swept Sally away to San Francisco, Bladen unearthed a festering pool of corruption in the city’s government, but he was thwarted politically in his attempts to bring the perpetrators in high places to justice.
    Angrily tossing his badge on the mayor’s desk, he climbed on his horse and, as he had done after Will had died, just rode away without looking back.
    Not long thereafter, in a mining town up in Wyoming Territory, he began seeing wanted posters of a particular bank-robbing duo, and he decided that the reward money looked good. It also looked like his future.
    Several wanted posters, and several successful pursuits later, his remarkable skill with a Colt .45 had found Bladen Cole with a new career—and one that agreed with his innate