Ride A Long Shadow

Texas, 1878. Somewhere dark in the Texas Hill Country, lies a 50-year-old cache of gold and silver buried there by knife fighter Jim Bowie before he went to die at the Alamo. The hoard is protected by the spirits of the dead Comanche and a living Apache chief, Choya, who is riding north with a massed war party their goal is the undermanned Fort Bowie....and vengeance. Only one man, Wes Harper, the Shadow Rider, can stop them but he has enough trouble on his hands with the Murchison bunch, a beautiful Mexican woman and a crooked partner. Fighting for his life and the survival of his ranch against the Apache, Wes finds the odds stacked against him. Only an iron will and hot lead will buy him time.

Texas, 1878: Somewhere in the Texas Hill Country lies a fifty year old cache of gold and silver buried there by knife fighter Jim Bowie. The hoard is protected by the spirits of the dead Comanche and the living Apache chief, Choya, who is riding north with a massed warparty. Only one man, Wes Harper, the Shadow Rider, can stop them...

In 1920 the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs captured eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking. Steffen Rimner shows how local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to harness naming and shaming in international politics—a deterrent that continues today.

This is but a glimpse at that struggle and how it not only impacted men and their families but a way of life that can still be seen in many parts of Florida if one is willing to take time and look. Cowboys still saddle their horses and drive to an old set of cow pens and spend many an hour atop their favorite horse gathering, working and selling a new calf crop. They string miles of barbed wire and drive thousands of staples in fence rows built by their grandfathers and great grandfathers. To many, thou, it is lost and only a fading dream. Deep in the soul of Florida lies a great heritage called the True Florida Cracker. Not the urbanized rednecks that can afford a pair of Wrangler jeans, a shiny belt buckle, a fancy felt hat and black pointed toed cowboy boots but the true country boy and girl. Those who know the reason why you carry a pocket knife, how to keep it sharp and not cut yourself. Those who can appreciate a good pot of collard greens without the sweet cornbread you buy in a box. Those who are not afraid of taking a firm hold on a catfish as it flops around and taking out the hook without getting stuck. To those who had actually stepped into a fresh pile of cow crap and knows what it smells like and in a way appreciates the experience. To those who were taught to say yes mam and no sir and remember what respect is. To those who say to themselves that they were born in the wrong time.

Lucas Santana is a freelance range detective working for both the US Marshals Service and the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the 1880s. A wanted man in some States, he takes great care where he rides and has a number of off-the-cuff aliases - and is not too shy about lining his own pockets in order to finance his Wyoming Wildcat ranch. When a number of gold coins surface in South Texas, loot from a long ago three-quarters of a million dollar heist at the end of the Civil War, both Pinkerton and the US Marshals call on his services to find the source of that gold. The problem is, he is not the only one searching for it. Then when a fellow agent is murdered in cold blood, Santana's quest becomes personal and he sets off on the long dark trail to nowhere....

After a long hiatus following the death of his wife, Annie Blue, sometime Pinkerton Agent, Deputy US Marshal and freelance detective Lucas Santana is once again called to serve. The smooth-talking, well-read Wyoming private eye is ordered south to Riverton County Texas, to investigate the rumoured growing unrest there. Washington is worried that the ambitions of one man could destroy the peace on that lonely stretch of borderline. The ambitious Frank Vagg controls the local law on both the Mexican side and the Texas side of the Rio Grande, straddled as it is by his headquarters, the township of San Pedro. Santana's attractive contact, Henri Larsson, wary at first of the senior operative with the reputation for action, proves to be more of a match than he would like. Santana attracts trouble like horse manure attracts dung beetles and it isn't too long before he is compelled to use his big Colt. When the lead begins to fly he is joined by fellow Pinkerton agents Joshua Beaufort and Jacob Benbow and the body count grows in the grim, grey borderline county where no ravens fly.

When ex lawman Captain Joshua Beaufort, late of Hood's Texas Brigade, marches clear of the hell that was Gettysburg he has no intention whatsoever of any further engagement in the Civil War; he has, in his own words, killed enough Yankees. But the war has not finished with the Confederate captain and, captured by Union troops, he is given a choice - help to end the war on their terms or spend the rest of it in a prisoner-of-war camp. Colonel Horatio Vallance and the mysterious E.J. Allen persuade him it is in his best interests to cooperate with the North. So, in company with and under the watchful eye of young Corporal Benbow, Beaufort returns to his home state of Texas to old loves, old friends and old enemies. His task, to bring back the head of Buford Post, a notorious warmonger and gunrunner who is in possession of 300 stolen Henry repeating rifles....

Harry James Luck, Civil War veteran, US Cavalry captain, sometime lawman, gambler and part-time town drunk, resigns his army commission and heads south to the High Plains country of Texas in the hope of settling down to a trouble and conflict free life. He meets the lovely Bonnie Luxford, buys a small but attractive ranch and sees his trail clear ahead and going on forever. Texas trails never run straight, though, and a wandering band of Comancheros bring the dream to a fire-ravaged close. Harry knows he cannot forever hide in a bottle and with an elderly Comanche as his only companion, he sets his sights on a new road, a trail of revenge. The two men, together with a small company of adventurous young Texas Rangers and an over-the-hill lawman, seek out the infamous Comanchero Miguel Sanchez and beard him in his own den, a little Mexican hamlet without a name. What followed went down in Western folklore as the Gunfight at the Nameless Village.