Indie Book Promo is happy to welcome Van Holt to the blog. He’s here to share about his book, Rebel with a Gun. If this sounds like the sort of book you are interested in reading, please find some buy links below and pick up a copy or two.
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REBEL WITH A GUN description
He was fifteen when the Civil War started, nineteen when it ended. His parents were dead by then, their farm sold for the taxes. The girl he loved had married a boy he hated. Nothing seemed right.
So he headed for Texas with a disreputable old snake oil peddler and a beautiful blonde with a jealous husband and a dangerous secret that could get them all killed.
Even though he had ridden with Quantrill and Bloody Bill, he was not like the others. Many of them were not the only bushwhackers who flourished during the war. Men just like them had waved the Union flag and used it to cloak their crimes, and now that the fighting was over not all of them would be content to lay down their arms and return to their former pursuits. Some, like their southern counterparts, would become outlaws. Many on both sides had never been anything else, and for them the war had just been a continuation of a life of lawlessness and violence. Now they would use the unsettled conditions in the wake of the war to camouflage their activities.
Of course, many would go west, especially to Texas. For years men had been going to Texas who were wanted or not wanted in other states. There was a well-known saying— “Gone to Texas.” It usually applied to men who had gone there a jump ahead of the law.
Warning: Reading a Van Holt western may make you want to get on a horse and hunt some bad guys down in the Old West. Of course, the easiest and most enjoyable way to do it is vicariously—by reading another Van Holt western.
Van Holt writes westerns the way they were meant to be written.
Rebel with a Gun can be purchased:
AmazonUS | AmazonUK | B&N
CreateSpace | Three Knolls Pub
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Bio: Van Holt wrote his first western when he was in high school and sent it to a literary agent, who soon returned it, saying it was too long but he would try to sell it if Holt would cut out 16,000 words. Young Holt couldn’t bear to cut out any of his perfect western, so he threw it away and started writing another one.
A draft notice interrupted his plans to become the next Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. A tour of duty as an MP stationed in South Korea was pretty much the usual MP stuff except for the time he nabbed a North Korean spy and had to talk the dimwitted desk sergeant out of letting the guy go. A briefcase stuffed with drawings of U.S. aircraft and the like only caused the overstuffed lifer behind the counter to rub his fat face, blink his bewildered eyes, and start eating a big candybar to console himself. Imagine Van Holt’s surprise a few days later when he heard that same dumb sergeant telling a group of new admirers how he himselfhad caught the famous spy one day when he was on his way to the mess hall.
Holt says there hasn’t been too much excitement since he got out of the army, unless you count the time he was attacked by two mean young punks and shotone of them in the big toe. Holt believes what we need is punk control, not gun control.
After traveling all over the West and Southwest in an aging Pontiac, Van Holt got tired of traveling the day he rolled into Tucson and he has been there ever since, still dreaming of becoming the next Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour when he grows up. Or maybe the next great mystery writer. He likes to write mysteries when he’s not too busy writing westerns or eating Twinkies.
Van Holt can be found:
Amazon Author Page * FB page
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Excerpt from
Rebel With A Gun
by Van Holt
On a gray, drizzly day in the spring of 1865, a tall slender young man on a brown horse rode along the muddy street of Hayville, Missouri. Several heads turned to stare at him, but he seemed not to notice anyone, and he did not stop in the town, but rode on out to a weather-beaten, deserted-looking house and dismounted in the weed-grown yard.
At the edge of the yard there was a grave surrounded by a low picket fence and he went that way and stood with his head bared in the slow drizzle and stared at the grave with bleak, bitter blue eyes. He was only nineteen but looked thirty. He had been only fifteen when the war started. That seemed like a lifetime ago, another world —a world that had been destroyed. All that was left was a deserted battlefield, a devastated wasteland swarming with scavengers and pillagers.
An old black man with only one eye appeared from a dripping pine thicket and slowly reached up to remove a battered hat and scratch the white fuzz on his head.
“Dat you, Mistuh Ben?”
“It’s me, Mose,” Ben Tatum said.
“I knowed sooner or later you’d come back to see yo’ ma’s grave. She died two years back now. Never was the same aftuh we heard the news about yo’ pa. And too she was worried sick about you. Is it true you rode with Quantrill, Mistuh Ben?”
“You can hear anything, Mose.”
“Yessuh, dat’s de truth, it sho’ is. But I wouldn’t rightly blame you if you did. Dem Yankees sho’ did raise hell, didn’t they, Mistuh Ben?”
Old Mose was something of a diplomat. Had he been talking to a Yankee, he would have said it was the Rebels who had raised hell.
Or he might have said it was Quantrill’s raiders.
“The war’s over, Mose.”
“Yessuh, I sho’ do hope so, I sho’ do.” Old Mose reached up and rubbed his good eye, and for a moment his blind eye seemed to peer at the tall young man in the old coat. “But folks say there’s some who still ain’t surrendered and don’t plan to. I hear there ain’t no amnesty for Quantrill’s men. Is dat true, Mistuh Ben?”
“That’s what I heard, Mose.”
“Dat sho’ is too bad. I guess dat mean there still be ridin’ and shootin’ and burnin’ just like befo’.”
“Maybe not, Mose.”
“I sho’ do hope not. Has you only got one gun, Mistuh Ben? I hear some of Quantrill’s men carry fo’ or five all at one time.”
Ben Tatum glanced down at the double-action Cooper Navy revolver in his waistband. He buttoned his coat over the gun. “I just got in the habit of carrying this one, Mose. I wouldn’t feel right without it.”
“Guess a man can’t be too careful dese days.” Old Mose thoughtfully rubbed the wide bridge of his nose, his good eye wandering off down the road toward Hayville. “Well, I just come by to check on yo’ ma’s grave. She sho’ was a fine woman. Mistuh Snyder down to de bank own de place now. I guess you heard his boy Cal done gone and married dat Farmer girl you was sweet on?”
Ben Tatum let out a long sigh. “No, I hadn’t heard, Mose. But it doesn’t matter now. I can’t stay here.”
Old Mose looked like he had lost his only friend. “Where will you go, Mistuh Ben?”
“I don’t know yet. West, maybe.”
He turned and looked at the old house with its warped shingles and staring, broken windows. He did not go inside. He knew the house would be as empty as he felt.
He turned toward his horse.
“Oh, Mistuh Ben!”
“What is it, Mose?”
“I almost forgot,” old Mose said, limping forward. “Yo’ ma’s sister, what live over to Alder Creek, she said if I ever saw you again to be sho’ and tell you to come by and see her.”
“All right, Mose. Thanks.”
He thoughtfully reached into a pocket, found a coin and tossed it to the old Negro.
A gnarled black hand shot up and plucked the coin out of the air. “Thanks, Mistuh Ben. I sho’ do ‘preciate it. Times sho’ is hard since they went and freed us darkies. Them Yankees freed us but they don’t feed us.”
He rode back through Hayville. The small town seemed all but deserted. But it had always seemed deserted on rainy days, and sometimes even on sunny days. But for some reason Ben Tatum could no longer recall very many sunny days. They had faded into the mist of time, the dark horror of war.
He stopped at a store to get a few supplies. The sad-eyed old man behind the counter seemed not to recognize him. But Ben Tatum had been only a boy when he had left, and now he was a tall young man with shaggy brown hair and a short beard. He had not shaved on purpose because he had no wish to be recognized. And he suspected that old man Hill did not recognize him on purpose. It was usually best not to recognize men who had ridden with Quantrill.
The slow rain had stopped, and when he left the store Ben Tatum saw a few people stirring about. A handsome, well-dressed young couple were going along the opposite walk. The young man had wavy dark hair and long sideburns, a neatly trimmed mustache. He wore a dark suit and carried a cane, like a dandy, and his arrogant face was familiar. The girl had long dark hair and just a hint of freckles. It was Jane Farmer. Only it would be Jane Snyder now. Cal Snyder had stayed here and courted her and married her while Ben Tatum was dodging bullets and sleeping out in the wet and cold, when he got a chance to sleep at all. Cal Snyder had not gone to the war. His father had hired a man to go in his place, a man who had not come back. He had been killed at Shiloh.
Ben Tatum stopped and stared at her as if a mule had kicked him in the belly. But neither Jane Snyder nor her dandified husband showed the slightest sign that they recognized him or even saw him. They went on along the walk and turned into the restaurant.
With a sick hollow feeling inside him, Ben Tatum got back in his wet saddle and rode on along the muddy street, returning to the bleak empty world from which he had come, homeless now and a wanderer forever. The war had taught him how to lose. Turn your back and ride off as if it did not matter. Never let the winners know you cared.
“Ben! Ben Tatum!”
For a fleeting moment hope rose up in him like an old dream returning. But then he realized that it was not her voice, and when he looked around he saw a fresh-faced girl just blooming into womanhood, a girl with long light brown hair that was almost yellow and a face that looked somehow familiar. She was smiling and radiant and seemed happy to see him. Puzzled, he searched his memory but failed to place her, and it made him uneasy. He lived in a world where it did not pay to trust your closest friends, much less strange beautiful girls who seemed too happy to see you. Many girls that age had been spies during the war and had lured many a dazzled man to their destruction. Some of them might still be luring men to their destruction, for the war still was not over for some men and never would be over. Men like Ben Tatum. And the fact that she knew his name proved nothing.
So he merely touched his hat and kept his horse at the same weary trot along the muddy street, and behind him he heard a little exclamation: “Well!” He rode on out of town, wondering who she was. He noticed that it had started raining again.
Alder Creek was a two-day ride west of Hayville. There were no streets in Alder Creek, just narrow roads that wound among the trees that grew everywhere, and most of the houses were scattered about in clearings that had been hacked out of the trees and brush.
Ben Tatum’s aunt lived in a big old house on a shelf above the hidden murmuring creek that had given the town its name. Her husband had died years ago in a mysterious hunting accident and she had soon remarried and had a lively stepdaughter. Her two sons had died in the war and she had no other children of her own.
Cora Wilburn had been a slender, attractive woman in her late thirties the last time Ben Tatum had seen her. But the war had aged her as it had aged everyone else. There were lines in her tired face and streaks of gray in her hair, and she had put on weight. But she seemed glad to see him, and it was good to see a smiling, friendly face.
She hugged him and patted his back just the way his own mother would have done had she lived to see him come home. “My, you’ve sure grown into a tall, fine-looking man,” she said, blinking away tears. Her voice sounded as old and tired as she looked. “But you need a haircut and some decent clothes. Sam’s a pretty good barber, they tell me, and you can have some of Dave’s clothes. He was tall like you. I appreciate the nice letter you sent me when Dave and Lot were killed.”
He nodded, and just then he noticed a tall slender girl of about thirteen standing on the porch watching him with lively green eyes and a mischievous smile. “This can’t be Kittie,” he said in a slow surprise.
“Yes, that’s Kittie,” Cora Wilburn said in her tired voice. “Ain’t she run up like a weed? Soon be grown. It’s getting hard to keep the boys away from her or her away from the boys.”
Kittie Wilburn gave her dark head a little toss and flashed her white teeth in a smile, but said nothing.
“Sam’s at the barbershop,” Cora Wilburn added. “Soon as you eat a bite and catch your breath, you should go on down there and get some of that hair cut off your head and face. I want to see what you look like without that beard.”
Sam Wilburn was a strange, moody man, by turns silent and talkative. He had a habit of watching you out of the corners of cold green eyes, without ever facing you directly. He was trimming an old man’s white hair when Ben Tatum opened the door of the small barbershop. He glanced up at him out of those strange green eyes and said, “Have a seat. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Ben Tatum sat down in a chair against the wall and picked up an old newspaper. The war was still going on when the newspaper was printed, but Quantrill had already disappeared and was thought dead by them and his followers had scattered, some of them forming small guerrilla bands of their own, or degenerating into common outlaws and looters, preying on the South as well as the North. Others had gone into hiding or left the country. Few had any homes left to return to, even if it had been safe to go home.
When the old man left, Ben Tatum took his place in the barber’s chair and Sam Wilburn went to work on his hair. He did not seem very happy to see the younger man. They had never had much use for each other, and now and then Ben Tatum had idly wondered if Sam Wilburn had arranged the hunting accident that had left Cora Medlow an attractive young widow. Why Cora had married Sam Wilburn was another mystery he still had not figured out. But the world was full of things he would probably never understand.
Sam Wilburn glanced through the window at a wagon creaking down the crooked, stump-dotted road that passed for the town’s main street. “I’ve been wondering when you’d show up,” he said. When Ben Tatum made no reply, he asked, “You been to the house?”
Ben Tatum grunted in the affirmative.
Sam Wilburn worked in silence for a time, evidently doing a thorough job of it. The coarse brown hair fell on the apron in chunk’s. Scattered among the brown, there were hairs that looked like copper wires, and there were more of them in his beard, especially on his chin. Those dark reddish copper hairs gleamed in his hair and short beard.
“What do you plan to do, now that the war’s over?” Wilburn asked, his attention on his work.
“I ain’t decided yet.”
“You can’t stay around here. They’ll be looking for you.”
Ben Tatum sighed, but said nothing. He sighed because he knew Sam Wilburn did not want him to stay around here. He had known already that they would be looking for him.
“Texas,” Sam Wilburn said. “That’s your best bet. I’ve been thinking about going down there myself. I don’t think I’ll like it much around here when the carpetbaggers move in. I don’t like nobody telling me what to do or how to run my business.”
“I doubt if it will be much better in Texas.”
“Can’t be any worse. Quite a few others around here and Hayville feel the same way. They’ve been talking about getting up a whole wagon train and going down there.”
“I imagine talk about it is about all they’ll ever do.”
“No, they’re serious. Even old Gip Snyder is talking about going. He says it’s a new country with a lot of opportunities and we can build ourselves a new town down there where nobody won’t bother us. Course, he plans to start a new bank, and I could start a new barbershop. The more I think about it, the better I like the idea.”
“There’ll be carpetbaggers in Texas just like there are here,” Ben Tatum said.
“It won’t be as bad. This state’s been torn apart worse by the war than any other state in the country, and now that it’s safe the carpetbaggers will be flocking in like vultures to pick our bones. Our money’s already worthless. That’s why old Gip Snyder is so keen on going. His bank at Hayville is in trouble, and he wants to salvage what he can and get out.”
Ben Tatum shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “What about all the property he owns around Hayville?”
“I think he’s found a buyer for most of it. That’s the only thing that worries me. I don’t know what I’d do with our property here if I went, and Cora ain’t too keen on going. She’s been in bad health lately. Losing them boys nearly killed her.”
Ben Tatum was silent.
After a moment Wilburn asked, “What about the beard?”
“Get rid of it, I guess. Aunt Cora don’t seem to like it.”
After supper Ben Tatum went for a walk down along the creek. A path led him past an old shack almost hidden in the trees and brush. There was a light burning in the shack and through the window he caught a glimpse of a very shapely, blond-haired woman taking a bath. The long hair looked familiar.
When he got back to the Wilburn house he found Kittie in his room. “What are you doing here?” he asked, taking off the coat Aunt Cora had given him. It had belonged to Dave Medlow but it fitted Ben Tatum all right.
Kittie’s lips curled back from her white teeth in a teasing smile. “Straightening up your room, Cousin Ben,” she said with a deliberately exaggerated southern drawl.
“You run along,” he said. “I’m not your cousin and the room don’t need straightening up.”
“That’s right, we ain’t cousins, are we?” she said. “We ain’t no kin a’tall, now I think about it. But I was gonna marry you anyway. You sure do look handsome without that old beard. It made you look like a old man of about thirty.”
“I’ll be thirty before you’re dry behind the ears,” he said. He hung the coat in the closet and put his gun in a bureau drawer. In the mirror he saw Kittie Wilburn watching him with a smile, and he turned around with a frown. “Are you still here?”
“No, I’m still leaving. I just ain’t got very far yet.” She lay down on the bed and put her bare feet up on the gray wallpaper, so that her skirt fell down around her thighs, revealing very shapely legs for a skinny, thirteen-year-old girl. “Did you go see Rose?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Rose Harper. That girl who lives down by the creek. She just got back from Hayville a little while ago. I saw her go by. She lives over here now. Ever since she married Joe Harper. But she don’t stay here much, ‘cause he ain’t never around. The bluebellies and nearly everybody else is looking for him, ‘cause he rode with Quantrill. Like you.”
“What does she look like?”
“Don’t you know? You went to see her, didn’t you? Anyway, you used to know her when she lived at Hayville with her folks.”
“Wait a minute,” Ben Tatum said. “Didn’t Joe Harper marry that Hickey girl? Rose Hickey?”
“He shore did, Cousin Ben. He shore did.”
“I thought that was what he told me after he came home the last time. My God, she was just a kid the last time I saw her.”
“She ain’t no kid now.”
“She sure ain’t,” Ben Tatum agreed. “I saw her in Hayville and didn’t even recognize her.”
“I hate her,” Kittie Wilburn said. “She makes me look plumb scrawny.” She pulled her skirt up a little higher and looked at her thighs. “Do you think I’ll ever outgrow it, Cousin Ben? Looking so scrawny and all?”
“You might,” he said, “if I don’t get mad and wring your neck.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll go.” She swung her bare feet to the floor and rose, stretching and making a sort of groaning sound in her throat. She looked at him with that teasing smile. “But you’ve got to promise me something first.”
“What?”
“I’ll have to whisper it. I don’t want anyone else to hear.” She put her arms around his neck and rose on tiptoes, putting her warm moist lips close to his ear and whispering, “You’ve got to promise to marry me someday. Then I’ll go.”
“That’ll be the day!”
She giggled and again made as if to whisper something, but this time she bit his ear and then ran from the room. At the door she pulled her skirt up to her waist, bent over and showed him her bottom. And it was quite a bottom for a skinny, thirteen-year-old girl to be flashing. He saw it in his mind until he went to sleep, and he wondered if he was the only one who had seen it. If so, it was probably only because she had not had an opportunity to show it to anyone else.
He knew he should tell Aunt Cora about the girl’s naughty behavior, for her own good. But he also knew that he wouldn’t, for his own good. Aunt Cora might think he had encouraged the child in some way, and think less of him because of it.
He slept late the next morning, and was awakened by the slamming of the door when Sam Wilburn left for the barbershop. He had just gotten dressed when he heard a dozen or more horsemen crowding into the yard, ordering all those inside to come out with their hands in the air.
The preceding was from the western novel
Rebel With A Gun
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