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    Branded a Coward
    Branded a Coward
    Branded a Coward
    Ebook123 pages2 hours

    Branded a Coward

    By Robert O' Hanlin

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    About this ebook

    Beau Lewis was the last of Custer's Seventh Calvary but he was not honored as such...he was branded a coward. He had ridden with Custer through the Civil War and now into the Indian wars but being the only survivor was not the honor he wanted, and not the honor he received. He was a soldier and that was what he did best, but now he lost all that and the love of his life. He was charged with desertion under fire by an army Court Marshal. Being on the run from the army was hard enough but being on the run from himself was almost impossible.
    He had to prove his innocence and rebuild his life, but the odds were against him...until he met a very unique woman. The white man was against him and the Indians were against him, but she stood by his side and gave him the faith and love he needed to continue his search for the truth.
    The army and the bounty hunters were dogging him at every turn and he was a man fighting for his life, butt was a life that didn't mean much as long as he lived under the dark cloud of cowardice. He was hoping that the truth was somewhere in the camp of Red Cloud but finding that truth meant going into that camp and coming out alive.
    The army was too busy with the Indian war to hunt him, but the Billings family was not. Old Amos Billings was a mean man and his offspring were cut from the same cloth and the price on Beau's head was enough to keep their attention. They were drifters, gypsies of the plains, who had no qualms in breaking the law to make a living, but when they snatched the woman that Beau loved they made a bad decision.
    They wanted to make a trade for her, all he had to do was give himself up to them, but he knew that there was no way they would let either of them live. He also knew that there would be a lot of killing but he was prepared for that as he rode alone into the rolling hills.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobert O' Hanlin
    Release dateAug 29, 2015
    ISBN9780992002589
    Branded a Coward
    Author

    Robert O' Hanlin

    I was born in Canada but spend much of my time roaming the Sonora Desert of Arizona, which is truly a place to inspire a writer.I write in the Western genre inspired by the great Western writer Louis L'Amour. My stories are fiction with a mixture of real history and I hope you enjoy reading them.

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      Book preview

      Branded a Coward - Robert O' Hanlin

      BRANDED A COWARD

      By Robert O'Hanlin

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      PUBLISHED BY

      Robert O'Hanlin on Smashwords

      Branded a Coward

      Copyright 2015 by Robert O'Hanlin

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Please share it with your friends and family through the source you downloaded it. Please remember that all rights are reserved, and no part of this eBook may be copied or reproduced by any means electronic or mechanical or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critic’s articles or reviews. Your respect for the author is appreciated.

      This is a fictional book and any resemblance of the characters to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

      Books by Robert O’Hanlin

      The Outlaw Series

      The Montana Outlaws

      The Alberta Outlaw

      Last of the Outlaws

      Others

      Windfall

      O'Bannions Return

      Justice in Lonesome Valley

      The Cougar Man

      Once a Gambler

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 1

      The tall raw-boned man slowly opened his eyes…everything was fuzzy, as his eyes started to come into focus he realized he was staring at the sky. He watched the only cloud in the sky until it finally came into full focus. His eyes were clear now but his mind was slow to react, where was he, and what was he doing there? Then he heard a noise, and his mind suddenly became as clear as his eyes...the Indians were coming again.

      He was lying on his back and he reached out with his right hand to feel for his rifle, but it was not there. Then he did the same with his other hand, but he felt nothing but the bare ground he was lying on. As the sound drew closer he began to panic, with no rifle he would have no chance. He listened as the sound grew steadily nearer, then he recognized it...it was not Indians. He breathed a sigh of relief, it was a sound he had heard many times before. It was the sound of a horse-drawn wagon.

      It grew louder and closer to his position until he felt it was almost upon him, then he tried to call out, but no sound came from his parched throat. He must get their attention, so he mustered all his strength and sat bolt upright, only to fall over on his side again drifting into unconsciousness.

      That movement was enough for the man driving the wagon to catch out the side of his eye. He pulled the horses to a stop, jumped down, and made his way into the rocks where he had seen the movement. There among the rocks lay a man totally naked and covered in blood, mostly caked on his head and face.

      He yelled back to the girl who was following him into the rocks.

      Lizzy, bring me my bag and a blanket!

      She turned and ran back to the wagon without any questions as the man knelt beside the seemingly lifeless body. He could see a severe head wound along the left side of his skull where it looked like a bullet had creased his head leaving a long crack that left part of his brain exposed.

      The girl returned with the bag and blanket and gasped when she saw the body lying among the rocks. She quickly threw the blanket over him, leaving only his head exposed.

      Is he alive Uncle Frank?

      He opened his bag, but he knew he had nothing in it that would save this man.

      Barely Honey, barely. He's got a bad head wound, one of the worst I seen on a man still living. Let's get him out of here, it looks like he has been baking out in the sun for a few days.

      Frank Abbott was a good doctor, but there are times when there is nothing even a good doctor can do but wait. With the help of his niece Elizabeth, they moved the wounded man out of the sun and into the shade beside the wagon.

      They laid him on a blanket and Frank started working on his wounds. When they were cleaned and dressed as well as could be, he gave Lizzy an eyedropper and had her start squeezing water into his mouth an eyedropper full at a time, even dehydration at a time like this could be a killer.

      He had not regained consciousness, but they hoped the water was getting into his system as she slowly squeezed it between his parched lips. Frank was not worried about his leg wound, but the head wound was another matter.

      He had seen head wounds before, and although there was little known about the brain it was generally believed that a severe blow to the head caused the brain to swell inside the skull where without any room for expansion it usually resulted in death. As he cleaned and dressed the wound he suspected that the man's brain had swelled, but it swelled out into the long crack and eased the pressure enough to let him live.

      He watched as Lizzy continued slowly feeding him the water, and he asked his wife Prairie Flower to make a broth. She had already made a fire and gathered enough wood and buffalo chips to keep it burning through the night, and now she disappeared behind the wagon.

      He went back to the man laying on the ground and stood looking down at him, his big concern with the head wound was the fact that the man had not again regained consciousness. The movement that had attracted his attention was what he was hoping for again.

      They had passed a dead horse a short ways back and when he removed the saddle he noticed it was an army saddle, so he suspected the man was part of the army that had just invaded the Sioux territory.

      He looked down helplessly at the man, he had done all that he could do, but he realized that even with all his skill he could not save every life. It had taken him many years of living on the plains to come to grips with that fact.

      His skill could not save his wife from the cholera that finally took her life, and being a young doctor he could not handle that fact. He was a devastated and broken man who finally gave up his practice and moved from the east to the Dakota Territory.

      When he rode through the Powder River Country and came upon the Big Horn River he knew this was the place for him. There were few white men in this country, but there were lots of Sioux. He had heard reports that the Sioux were generally friendly with the white men that had passed through their country and even with the ones who stayed on trapping for furs.

      He was not sure if he believed the stories as he rode into the camp of Red Cloud, but he was welcomed by the warrior chief and a lasting friendship began. The Sioux did not consider that they owned the land, as the white man did, but they claimed territory and protected it fiercely against all intruders.

      When Frank asked for permission to own a small piece of land along the edge of the Big Horn they did not understand the concept, but he was granted the right to stay and welcomed to the area. It took a long time, but he finally found a feeling of inner peace and in doing so he managed to make a peace with the Indians in the territory.

      He looked down at the man he reckoned was a soldier, he had been beckoned by his friend Red Cloud to come to his camp, and it was there that he heard about the big battle. While he dressed the wounds of four of Red Cloud’s young men he recognized the wounds as bullet wounds, but he didn't ask any questions, he knew his friend Red Cloud would tell him eventually. He was right, when he was finished dressing the wounds Red Cloud beckoned him to his lodge.

      It was then that he learned about the battle in the Rosebud Valley and the invasion of their territory. The Indians had achieved a major victory and held off the attack, but now the soldiers were regrouping and he expected them to show up at his camp at any time.

      The bands under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were the ones involved in the battles and now they had moved off into the prairie to the east. It was the Indian way, while the white man waged war until the enemy had totally capitulated, the Indians waged battles and when a battle was done they went back to the work of day-to-day survival of their tribe.

      Red Cloud, with the exception of a few of his young men, had kept his band out of the battle and was keeping his people where they were. He had fought the white man and soldiers for two years over the creation of the Bozeman Trail. The Sioux had signed a treaty that would allow settlers to cross their lands on the Oregon Trail but when gold was discovered in the Montana Territory and the Bozeman Trail was created he viewed the encroachment as the breaking of that treaty.

      After two years of bitter struggle he had become convinced that fighting the white man would only result in the total destruction of his people so he, along with several of the other chiefs, finally ended up at the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty. That treaty guaranteed the Lakota People the Black Hills and the vast Powder River Country for all time.

      His friend Frank Abbott had been there as well, and it was through him that he began to understand the white man's ways. When trouble began again with the encroachment of the sacred Black Hills by some men looking for gold and others looking for the valuable timber resources, he and two other chiefs, Spotted Tail and Lone Horn traveled to Washington in a last-ditch effort to get President Grant to honor

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