Click on image to enlarge.

eBook Category: Historical Fiction
eBook Description: "I leave it up to you to decide whether I told the truth or the biggest windy you ever heard in your life." San Antonio, Texas, 1916. Jim Ed's hot temper keeps him in constant trouble with his father, Leo Pargrew, a wealthy lawyer. After a long absence, the Pargrews are visited by Leo's father, Virge, an old cowman, come to reconcile Leo with his family. While staying with Leo, Virge tells Jim Ed a yarn of hair-raising exploits with his wild granduncle Heck in search of Jim Bowie's legendary silver mine down in old Mexico in 1865 with Comanches, bandidos, and French Foreign Legionnaires all in hot pursuit. Enthralled by the tale, Jim Ed doesn't know whether to believe it, but one summer at Virge's ranch, he learns the real secret of the lost treasure of Santa Perdida. The Pirooters is a rootin'-tootin', wild'n'wooly Western novel full of action, humor, and authentic period detail and dialog, one that will readily appeal to Western and pioneer fiction's many and devoted fans. It is an unforgettable adventure yarn as well as a tribute to Western movies, the Southwest in general, and the great state of Texas in particular.

eBook Publisher: Treble Heart Books, Published: 2008
Fictionwise Release Date: February 2008

2 Reader Ratings:

Great	Good	OK	Poor

Arango scowled.

"Give me your pistols, gringos!"

"Did he say what I think he said?" Heck said.

"Yep," Old Moze answered.

"Reckon there ain't nothing to do but hand them over then."

Heck reached down to his pistols and turned them in their holsters so the butts faced away from him. Smiling at Arango all the while, he ever so slowly stuck his index fingers into the pistols' trigger guards and slowly removed them from the holsters. He held them out before his waist. The pistols hung upside down from his fingers, the barrels pointed toward Heck.

"Give me those guns," Arango demanded.

Quicker than the eye could follow, Heck spun the pistols round on his fingers. The gun butts plopped comfortably into his hands. In a split-second, the tall Texan cocked the pistols and fired two shots. The left ball caught Arango in the cheek. It tore out the back of his head. The right ball whizzed inches over the head of the pistolero next to him.

"Dang!" Heck yelled. "Out of practice."

The enraged bandit returned fire. The other pistoleros opened up also. Old Moze riddled one from neck to knees with a shotgun blast of buckshot. He dropped to the ground to reload. Virge hit the dirt as well. He steadied his pistol with both hands, picked his target carefully despite the heavy fire, as he'd been taught in the war, and shot a pistolero dead.

Heck stood, indifferent to the deadly lead bees that hummed past him, gold dots dancing in his eyes. He calmly cocked and fired his pistols, one after the other. Gifted with perfect coordination and eyesight, he could fire equally well with either hand. His twin buckers blazed leaden death, blazing black smoke and red flame. Every ball found its target. The pistoleros fell like marionettes with cut strings.

The Texans were left amid the trailing gray smoke, the acrid bite of burnt gunpowder bitter in their mouths, the only living men in the bolson.

Heck looked over the pistoleros' bullet-riddled bodies to make sure they were dead, holstered his pistols, and said, "Whoo-eee. That's about as purty a shooting scrape as I ever saw, I tell y'all that, for sure. Did you ever see such a sweet road agent spin as the one I did?"