Perdition- Four Navajo Tom Raine Stories by Jackson Cole

Book Details

Perdition – Arizona Ranger, Navajo Tom Raine smashes outlaw bands in the Arizona Territory in these four novelettes.

Boothill Beller Box (1944) – When Wayne Morgan, Famous Robin Hood Outlaw, Faces Hangnoose Peril at the Hands of Human Polecats, a Lightning-Swift Arizona Ranger Joins the Fray to Help a Fellow Fighter for Justice!
Chapter I – Murder Rides at Sundown
Chapter II – Rawhide Ranger
Chapter III – Timber for Trouble
Chapter IV – Bullets Before Breakfast
Chapter V – Pistols Buy Peace

Ride Your Hunch, Ranger! (1950) – Where there’s no smoke there’s a clue that leads a Frontier lawman to a band of thieving killers!

Passport to Perdition (1945) – The Arizona Ranger Answers the Trickiness of Two Blackguards with Flashing Forty-Fives!
Chapter I – Ghost Town
Chapter II – Against the Law
Chapter III – Troubled Trail of Duty
Chapter IV – Way of a Ranger
Chapter V – Boothill Bounty

Take A Rest, Ranger (1949) – When ambushing outlaws go on a rampage, Arizona Ranger Navajo Tom Raine rides into fast action—and wakes up the town of Wagon Gap with the hot music of a pair of roaring six-guns!
Chapter I – Bushwhack Trap
Chapter II – Tough Sheriff
Chapter III – Sam Bedford, Ex-Sheriff
Chapter IV – Shocking News
Chapter V – Killers Cornered
Chapter VI – Dan Muller Dies
Chapter VII – Ranger’s Gun-Reckoning

Jackson Cole was a house pseudonym (active 1930s-1950s) used by Better Publications, Inc. in its Western imprints. At least twenty different writers used this pseudonym.

Perdition has 23 illustrations.

Files:

1. JCole-Perdition.epub

Passport to Perdition

Chapter I

Ghost Town

THERE were men in Lodestone who said the town had been born to violence and bloodshed, that the graves on Crying Dog Hill had, from the beginning, outnumbered the town’s living population.

The men who said that had reason to know. Most of them had been on the stage that had pulled into Lodestone when it was a single make-shift corral and adobe hut built to service the cross-country stage line. That day the stage travelers had found the station in smoking ruins and its five occupants cruelly murdered by raiding Apaches. They had also found the mongrel dog on the barren hill slope behind the station, crying over the body of its dead master who had been lanced and mutilated by Geronimo’s raiders while trying to escape.

As “Navajo” Tom Raine waited in the shadowy office of the Golden Queen Mining Company, he was thinking the murder of those five stage hands must have planted virulent seeds which had rooted and grown with the town. Gold had made Lodestone. Guns and the ruthless greed of men had blackened the soul of its inhabitants.

Through the open door of the mine office, Tom Raine, famed member of the Arizona Territorial Rangers, could look down the rocky hill slope to the town sprawled out in the gray light of dawn. It wasn’t a pretty place to look at.

The streets were narrow and disfigured by the ruts carved by the wheels of heavy freight wagons, and weeds were beginning to spring up in the rubbish-littered alleys. Convenience and haste had overruled orderly pattern in the frame buildings that had been thrown up five years ago. Then the town had been an over-night miracle on the desert, a golden magnet which had drawn speculators and businessmen and hard-case gamblers to the scene of the new strike.

Now Lodestone was decaying, for the barren hills around had been robbed of their last pound of ore.

This day, Navajo Tom Raine knew grimly, Lodestone was to die as it had been born—in violence.

Motionless in the doorway of the mine office, Navajo Tom Raine stood waiting patiently, his dark face expressionless. But for his curious green-flecked eyes, he might have been mistaken for an Indian, this most feared of all Captain Burt Mossman’s Arizona Rangers. Certainly Navajo Tom Raine looked enough like an Indian to be one, with his hawkish features and his long black hair, worn shoulder length after the fashion of the Navajo.

ORPHANED during the bloody Tonto Basin war while still only a boy, young Tom Raine had been forced to flee into the mountains after the murder of his lawman father by desperadoes. He had been rescued from death by hunger and exposure by the wandering tribe of Navajos who had taken him among them as one of their own race. Now, in manner as well as garb, Tom Raine reflected the influence of those friendly Indians. Even the butts of his heavy guns were ornate with the hammered silver and turquoise stones of the Navajo.

“See any sign of them outlaws yet, Raine?”

The Arizona Ranger turned momentarily away from the doorway, his mouth thin and hard. There, was nothing he liked about this job Captain Mossman had given him. It filled him with fury to realize he was risking death for men who used the word of the “Law” only for their own selfish advantage. Men like Milo Ream and “Cash” Hinkle were worse, to Navajo Raine’s bitter way of thinking, than any outlaw who used a gun to get what he wanted.

“Bill Downer’s gang will hit town from the south,” Cash Hinkle went on. “You shore they ain’t in sight yet, Raine?”

Navajo Raine shook his head. Cash Hinkle was like a huge frog hunkered down by the mine office window, a man who had made money his only god. He was massive of girth, yet unsuspected speed and power lay beneath his layers of fat. Cash Hinkle was a man who could smile while he sold an outlaw’s life for the price on a wanted dodger.

The Arizona Ranger made no attempt to conceal his contempt as he stared at the bounty hunter.

“Are you worried about the blood money you won’t get if Downer’s gang fails to show up?” asked Raine.

With an oily smile the fat man shrugged. “The Territory’s offerin’ a thousand-dollar reward for Bill Downer, dead or alive,” he said. “So I figured I’d collect on Downer. Money’s money, Raine.”

“It’s what some people will do to get it that makes this place smell!” Navajo Raine retorted.

But Cash Hinkle was a man who couldn’t be insulted. He just grinned. Across the room Milo Kearn, who owned the Golden Queen, showed irritation as he got out of his chair. He was a tall, slabby man, ruthless and arrogant.

“Raine, I don’t like yore attitude in this!” he snapped.

Navajo Raine turned to the mine owner, letting Kearn also feel the weight of his anger.

“Kearn, I don’t give a hoot what you like,” said the Ranger.

Suppressed temper darkened the miner’s face. His tone sharpened.

“Raine, I’ll have yore job for that!”

Navajo Raine laughed.

“You don’t throw that much weight, Kearn,” he answered. “When it comes to men such as you and Cash Hinkle, Captain Mossman sees eye to eye with me. He told me what I’d run up against here, and I’ve heard the same story all over the Territory about you. You’re as bad or worse than any outlaw who ever hit the brush.”

A black scowl showed how deeply Milo Kearn resented the words of the Arizona Ranger. He was a man who fought with cunning or bluff, or the guns of other men, and just now he was gripped by a deep fear. That fear had urged him to call for the protection of the Rangers against Bill Downer’s outlaw gang. So he took Navajo Raine’s contempt without trying to strike back.

“It was you who made Bill Downer an outlaw,” the Arizona Ranger said cuttingly. “Downer discovered gold here, and took you in as partner. When he sent you to file on his claim, you crossed him and filed it under your own name. You stole his mine. Then you had him kicked out as a claim jumper. Next you had him outlawed because he used a gun to take back some of the gold you stole from him. I reckon I won’t blame him much if he tries to kill you today.”

Excerpt From: Jackson Cole. “Perdition: Four Navajo Tom Raine Stories.”