In this compelling new installment of bestseller Ralph Compton's The Gunfighters series, a man driven by the destruction of his family seeks to protect a woman and her children from a band of desperados. John Stockbridge was once a peaceful man of medicine. Now, he's better known as Dr. Vengeance, a man who is as fast with a shotgun as any other gunfighter is with a six-gun. The murders of his wife and child left him with an aching hole where his soul once was. His only solace comes from wandering the West. Along the way, he encounters a woman and her two children searching for their missing fur-trapper husband/father in the Rockies. In the process, they run afoul of some foul former Confederates who have amassed money and local power by robbing those traveling west through a mountain pass. While searching for the missing trapper -- and aided by a Mexican mountain man and an independent woman who works at the local hotel-- Stockbridge must take down the vicious highwaymen one by one. Ralph Compton stood six foot eight without his boots. He worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist. His first novel, The Goodnight Trail , was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was the USA Today bestselling author of the Trail of the Gunfighter series, the Border Empire series, the Sundown Rider series, and the Trail Drive series, among others. Jeff Rovin is the author of more than 150 books, fiction and nonfiction, both under his own name, under various pseudonyms, or as a ghostwriter, including numerous New York Times bestsellers and over a dozen of the original Tom Clancy's Op-Center novels. Chapter One The black bear bore the scars of a life lived in the mountains. The animal lumbered on all fours under a fading sun, his leather-bottomed paws and long blue-gray claws sure on the granite-and-gneiss surface. He was not yet ready to winter. There was a presence-mostly scents but also sounds and movement-that was unaware that this was his territory. It was unafraid. That meant danger to the bear, his mate, and their cubs. The threat had to be chased away or destroyed. The foothills sloped north from the Onhe'e River, where the bear made its home. The terrain was treed and still free of the snows that had fallen in the higher elevations. The soil, already frozen, bore no tracks, but that did not matter. The bear's sense of smell was greater than that of its prey, greater than even that of the gray wolves that stalked him in packs. None challenged him in what the Cheyenne had named Nhkohesvse-the Bear Paw Mountains. Yet in his sixteen winters, the bear had learned that no animal, not even one that weighed four hundred pounds and could rear to a height of six feet or greater, could afford to be careless. His fur was marked by conflicts with other bears, with mountain cats, with wolves. If not the wolves, then a dislodged rock or storm-weakened tree or landslide could deliver instant death. The bear's head bore the scar of a tumble on slick rocks by the river near his den. But this was not a wolf the black bear sought. It was a different scent, a different enemy, one who walked upright and could kill from a distance, from behind a boulder or atop a tree. A foe who dressed in the skins of his kind but was otherwise frail and easily broken. The last of the full moon threw a pale ivory cast over the pines and oaks that stood above and below him on the gentle incline. An occasional cloud briefly blanketed the entire landscape in darkness, and the crunch of fallen leaves now and then dulled his hearing. That did not stop the large nose from dipping, rising, seeking the scent he had picked up by the cave, the smell of the upright killer, the stench of dead hides upon its weak shoulders- The double-spring steel trap clanged shut an instant before the bear howled. He fell, writhing, swatting at the sharpened metal teeth that chewed through fur and flesh, digging into bone. The creature roared as it twisted on its back, each move causing the teeth to bite deeper, wider. The more the bear struggled, the more its wound opened and the more blood spilled onto the crushed leaves. It coated the animal's lower leg and poured onto the exposed rock, making it slippery for the men who emerged from hiding. They appeared suddenly, as if the trees had suddenly birthed them, and slowly converged on the fallen beast. Even though the bear was held fast in a trap that was securely chained to a tree trunk, they were not incautious. They would not have survived the Civil War and eighteen years in the wilderness had it been otherwise. There were six of them, all in furs and most with caps-fur or Confederate 1st Virginia Infantry. With a seventh, the cook, back at their mountain compound, they called themselves the Red Hunters-just that. The one man who was bareheaded came forward with a drawn Bowie knife, its b