The Black Trail

The Apache began to turn, a smile of contempt on his face. He died not even certain about what he'd seen. The last image imprinted on his sight was so blurred and so unbelievable that he doubted himself. There was the white man, holding something. A gun? Then there was a flash and a burst of smoke. He even heard the crash of the explosion.Then he was dead.The first barrel of the Purdey spat out its load of ten-gauge shot at less than twelve feet range. The lead ripping into the Apache's head and shoulders, flaying the skin from his face. Pulping both eyes in their sockets. Smashing the teeth in the gums through torn lips. Blasting him back off his feet to lie near the edge of the cliff, feet kicking and fingers scrabbling in the dust as the life poured away from him. James W Marvin was the pen-name for Laurence James. "Know what Crow used to say about livin' by your guns? Said it made him like a kind of alchemist. Said he was the first man in history to turn lead into gold. Yeah. Meanest son of a bitch ever. Crow."No other name. Just Crow. Dressed in black from head to toe. The meanest man in the bullet-scarred annals of the West. Nobody ever turned their back on him. A cold voice in the shadows, a vengeful angel of death ...The Crow series was written by the late Laurence James, one of the authors in the small group known as the Piccadilly Cowboys, who produced some of the most violent and brutally graphic westerns of their time. James perhaps writing the most twisted and sadistic books of them all.