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Chapter One
Texas 1878
Joshua Bridger hadn’t fully understood the reason he hadn’t hanged for the murders until fifteen years later, on the day of his release. The courtroom in Laredo, Texas, had become a recurring nightmare for Joshua. He’d learned to channel the frustration and hate into productive means. Every day, for fifteen long years, Joshua had had one purpose, one aspiration that had made him get up every day and endure the endless suffering that had become his life.
A tapping on the cell door made Joshua open his eyes as the guard teased him. “Alright, Brick, it’s rise-and-shine time,” Guard Floyd Owens said as the steel key rattled against the rusted iron of Joshua’s cage. “I got up especially early for you this morning.”
Joshua stood and approached the open door. He knew better than to step beyond the yellow line on the floor at the cell entrance. He’d learned this through witnessing others’ mistakes.
Something prison guards didn’t consider when they spent ten hours a day surrounded by prisoners: their words had a way of spreading through the penitentiary. Joshua waited longer than he should for the smug guard to stare at him. Owens plucked his teeth with a toothpick. He wore the black uniform with the white shirt and dark yellow-stained collar, glaring at Joshua with slitted eyes.
“Ain’t you taking any of your stuff, Brick?” Owens asked. He had arrived five years after Joshua. Before Guard Owens reached his one-year mark, every prisoner knew him as another enforcer willing to bloody his nightstick when he thought anyone got out of line.
Joshua glanced over his shoulder, looking at the single-cot cell for the last time. He had enough items collected over the years, gifts from other prisoners to fill the apple crate the prison guards had provided him the night before. The same crate they’d used for his release clothes.
He faced Owens again and shook his head. He wondered if Owens heard the blacksmith hammer in his chest banging against the anvil of his ribs.
“Well, alright then. Come on, time’s wasting.” Owens used the nightstick to wave Joshua beyond the yellow line. Owens walked behind Joshua, using the nightstick against the other cells along the corridor. The deafening rattling made sure anyone not awake for the five a.m. release heard them leave the cellblock.
Joshua had to stand facing the wall at the end of the walkway while Owens found the keys to unlock the door. While he waited, not looking at Owens, Joshua glanced back at the long, narrow hallway lined with cells.
Many men gave him hand gestures, never speaking, letting him know they would miss him. Prisoners making noise before general morning release sometimes received the blunt end of the nightstick. Sometimes, they lost daytime privileges on the whim of guards; they might see the inside of the hole or go without food for a day. The smart ones learned fast to keep their mouths shut.
Once the door opened, Joshua passed through and faced the wall again while Owens closed the door. They walked through the next hallway, the next door, constantly repeating the same actions. Prisoner releases happened one hour before the general population had to get up for breakfast. Released prisoners weren’t allowed breakfast. The warden preferred to save money instead of feeding another freed felon.
Arthur Preston waited for Guard Owens and Joshua at the caged counter at the end of the cell block wing. Again, Joshua stood against the wall, this time allowed to face the men. Preston had a ledger on a desk.
“Prisoner A683, Joshua Benton Bridger, thirty-four years of age, you are hereby discharged for the term of imprisonment for the murder of Mr. Desmond Earnest Sawyer, aged fifty-two, and Adeline Flora Sawyer, aged nineteen.” Prisoners called Arthur Preston “Hawkeyes” because he never missed details. Hawkeyes made a notation in the ledger. “By the great state of Texas and the Acting Governor R. B. Hubbard, you are hereby released of custody of this day, April eight, 1878.”
Hawkeyes leaned over the desk, allowing Joshua to make his mark on the release ledger. He approached the desk. Owens twisted the nightstick in his palm so the thick truncheon made enough noise for a warning. All other releases ahead of his had X marks.
Joshua picked up the pencil and scrawled his name in perfect cursive in the available space before gently placing the pencil on the desk. His hand remained as steady as his breathing, while the blacksmith’s forge in his chest hammered on his ribcage, pulsing in his ears.
“Well, now, ain’t that a surprise,” Hawkeyes said. “Here I was thinking you was as dumb as a brick and couldn’t write. Turns out you’re just built like a brick house.”
Joshua didn’t answer because he hadn’t been asked a question. Guards liked to trick prisoners. If prisoners weren’t paying attention to the words, they would get beaten for speaking out of turn.
“Alright, Brick, get along. I got things to do.” Owens shoved Joshua with the nightstick. But he wasn’t moving Joshua unless Joshua wanted to move.
At the end of the next corridor of solid brick walls, Joshua faced the wall as Owens unlocked the door to an alcove that opened in three directions. To the right were the courtyard and some annex buildings, kitchen and mess hall, and gallows. The straight passage led to the textile mill. To the left was the last walk to freedom. The end of the corridor led to the sallyport and beyond.
When Joshua turned to the doors, the center iron bars stood open. Owens smirked at him. That rapid pounding in his chest paused.
“What’s wrong there, Brick? You get stupid again? Move along before I bust your knee and you got to drag yourself out of here.” The truncheon smacked against Joshua’s arm, but he didn’t move. “Go on, get moving.”
The second strike of the nightstick was on the shoulder, harder. If Joshua failed to move again, the third strike would be to the side of the head.
Joshua stepped forward, slowing his pace without making it look too obvious. Over the last fifteen years, he had brooded and learned to redirect his anger. He’d walked that corridor seven days a week, knowing every cracked tile underfoot and imperfection of the brickwork of the walls and ceiling.
In ’63, when Judge Mortimer Dawes sentenced Joshua to prison instead of death, he arrived at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. Prisoners called it the Walls Unit because, without a ladder or a rope, no one could scale the 300-square-foot enclosure with walls fifteen feet high and three feet thick.
Over the years, Joshua endured while others suffered and died. Some died by hanging, either by their own hands or another. Some died for ratting out other prisoners—they perished in unspeakable ways. He’d been nineteen years old when he’d taken his first step into the place, and the rest of the country was already at war.
Joshua strolled down the long corridor between the living space and the workhouses. Owens kept a slow pace behind.
Heavy war demands turned prisoners into profit-makers. They were free labor to produce goods at the textile factory. Millions of yards of cloth and yarn were spun from cotton and wool as unpaid laborers turned fabric into Confederate army uniforms. Three hundred inmates and Union prisoners of war produced more and more products as military demands heightened.
The Walls Unit became warehouse factories, churning out vital supplies for military men and civilians. Joshua worked on the construction team, learning carpentry and masonry taught by prisoners of war and fellow Texan inmates, using skills brought in from the outside. Joshua was a quick learner. He absorbed knowledge and talents like a sea sponge.
He learned reading and writing from a Union soldier who was a university professor before he joined the cause to defeat oppression. Joshua learned about the War Between the States from infantrymen.
From a book-smart old man who stabbed his wife’s lover ninety-nine times, Joshua learned arithmetic. From a bank robber who had a day job as a postmaster, he learned the art of deception, requiring proficiencies in actively listening instead of reacting.
The slow pace took Joshua further away from freedom and deeper into his memories. He used the past as a distraction.
Before the war and before prison, Joshua learned the most valuable lesson from a man who he cherished like a father. Desmond Sawyer had taught Joshua the value of self-preservation when he was brought to Sawyer’s ranch as an orphan. He’d cooked and run gopher for the wagon schooner after his parents died on the trail. Ranch hands, drovers, and cowhands taught Joshua how to ride horses, break bulls, tie calves, brand, shoe, and rope.
But Sawyer had given Joshua the best advice of all: “Son, any time someone wants to teach you something, you grab it, you hold on like you got a steer by the horns. At the end of the day, you could lose it all. Someone can take away anything from you except what you keep up here.” Sawyer had tapped his head. “No one can take away the knowledge you can learn.”
And it was Joshua’s will, using a dead man’s guidance, that kept him active and alive. Of course, it helped that he was a force of nature that other prisoners learned to avoid. They called him Brick because of his size.
When he arrived at the Walls Unit, Joshua was already nineteen-and-a-half hands tall, towering at six-and-a-half feet. He was lanky until he began swinging sledgehammers and hauling gravel to build the additional factory for the prison. Joshua had expanded, gaining strength and girth with hands larger than an average man’s face. His shoulders were as wide as a bridge, and he often outgrew shirts, tearing seams whenever his muscles bunched.
Joshua had Nordic blue eyes and thick ash-blond hair. Before the war, before her murder, Adeline Sawyer had shown Joshua lithograph pictures from books in her father’s library. She likened him to Adonis, some Greek deity that made her blush whenever she remarked about him.
Desmond Sawyer commented he’d met a few men from Scandinavian countries with similar features to Joshua. He mentioned Joshua was more like a Viking than a cowhand. Sawyer knew his daughter fancied Joshua, and as much as Joshua knew about love, he would never forget sweet Adeline.
The thwack of Owens’ baton against the wall brought Joshua back from the past.
“Well, Brick, I got a little extra I need from you,” Owens said, tapping Joshua’s shoulder blade with the end of the stick. “You’re just gonna screw up and end up dead or get hauled back in here anyway.”
Joshua faced the wall as Owens unlocked the door to the supply room adjacent to the textile mill. The factory remained silent. Inside the large space with crates, cotton bales, and endless bolts of fabric and tools, there was shuffling. It wasn’t rats scurrying across the floor—unless rats wore work boots.
Joshua stepped through the open cell door, Owens locked it behind him. He looked around. Figures shifted from the gloom. It didn’t take much to find men willing to kill in a prison. Guards used sticks or carrots to bribe prisoners to do their handiwork. Eight men emerged from the early morning shadows carrying bale hooks, sledgehammers, carving knives, and fabric shears. Sometimes, killing was sport to prisoners that belonged behind the wall.
Joshua knew better than to turn his back on the approaching group. Behind him, Guard Floyd Owens inspired Joshua instead of frightening him when he said, “Corbin Willis sends his regards.”
Footsteps behind Joshua sounded the departure of Owens; the cell door at the end of the hall slammed and locked. He’d put Joshua into a slaughterhouse when he was supposed to be released.
Joshua’s massive hands balled into fists as the men approached in a semicircle. He kept his back to the door. To his immediate left was a large metal shelf of canisters, crates, and iron tools. To his right was an open space for ten to fifteen feet before the first of many weaving machines. Learning how to fight to survive came surprisingly easy for Joshua. His height and strength were advantageous against anyone who saw a giant and wanted to slay it.
The prisoners, dressed in their obligatory black and white striped two-piece clothes, gathered as a weighty send off. A prison gang with likeminded predator instincts, they had formed an alliance based on violence, shaking down other prisoners for food and contraband.
They took payoffs from guards, supplied information, and performed in-cell executions when called upon. The Walls Raiders Gang had amenities and privileges far cozier than any other inmate. Over the years, Joshua never crossed paths with them, never bothered or upset them. It cost a lot of money to have someone killed, and suddenly, he was their target.
Joshua hadn’t thought about or heard the name of Corbin Willis in fifteen years. Willis was an angry man from the past. He’d thought Joshua’s justice came from the end of a rope. Somehow, the past had caught up to Joshua and meant to end his life before he saw freedom again. It was the spark he needed, and that blacksmith in his chest flared the fire pot, heating the burning coke to ignite Joshua into action.
The first man swiped at Joshua to get ahead of the others. He rushed forward, swinging the cotton hook in an overhead arc. Joshua stepped forward and caught the man’s arm in his left fist as his hand snapped around the man’s throat. Both hands squeezed.
The next brave man lurched forward with the long fabric shears meant to stab Joshua in the stomach. He hauled the first prisoner to the right, using the man’s body as a shield to block the stab. The shears went into the prisoner’s back and Joshua released as he jumped left.
Both hands gripped the shelving unit, and he used momentum and weight to pull the rack away from the wall. The iron framing and supplies fell on two more prisoners before they could get out of the way. One man landed face down, trapped with his upper body under the heavy wreckage. The other man got his legs caught under the mess. He dropped the sledgehammer to grab the iron, screaming.
Joshua jumped on the shelving, shattering the legs of one man and breaking the back of the other. He hopped away from the four men, scrambling to get him as the fifth man yanked the bloody sheers out of the fallen inmate.
Jumping over a desk as another cotton hook came down, embedded in the wood, Joshua had a second to grab the man’s head with both hands. The prisoner over-extended and was off-balance. He grunted, smashing the man’s face against the desktop and the various items in the way. The body flopped and sagged to the floor.
He reached for the stuck hook but nearly lost his hand when one of the four men still standing slammed the sledgehammer down. Joshua hopped back, lifted a boot, and kicked the desk at the prisoner. The sledgehammer clattered to the floor as the man bucked backward.
Joshua sprinted along the left wall of the warehouse, hurtling over stacked crates of clothing ready for shipment. His boot broke through the thin wood, causing him to stumble. His left shoulder banged against the floor as he tucked, trying to roll away. Men screamed, bellowed, and ran at him. Someone swiped at him as he rolled from front to back, and he kicked the side of the knee, causing the leg to fold sideways outward as the man yelled, grabbing his leg as he fell.
The fabric shears slammed down, catching Joshua’s jacket moments before he moved his arm. Sparks from concrete and iron shot out as he rolled away. Once he was back on his feet, three men pursued. He reached the line of connected tables and benches with the Gibbs sewing machines. The black steel one-armed contraptions had a plate for fabric that could be sewn in any direction.
As soon as Joshua leaped over the rows of machines, the others scattered, two running around left, the other right, hoping to corner Joshua between two rows of machines. The unfortunate single assailant realized too late that he was between Joshua and freedom, wide-eyed and backpedaling as Joshua rushed forward like a charging bull. He caught the man in the midsection, hoisting him off his feet, shoulder carrying him a few strides before heaving him forward as Joshua ran to the right.
The man landed in a heap on the Platt Brothers textile machine, prepped for another day of work. He thrust and tangled among the ribbons of fabric.
Two men followed Joshua, chasing him farther into the factory. When he reached a back wall, looking for a weapon, the first of the two men dodged forward, swiping at his back, catching his jacket and skin with a knife. Joshua sucked air, jamming his elbow up and cracking the cartilage of the man’s nose. When the knife dropped, Joshua caught it, turned, and jammed the blade into the attacker’s leg. He twisted the knife before releasing the handle.
Out of breath and bleeding, Joshua pressed farther along the back wall before reaching the corner. He kicked over a cabinet, looking for a weapon, before he realized the last man hadn’t tailed him. He saw the last standing member of the Walls Raiders Gang glancing at the men still making noise but unable to get up.
Joshua exhaled, bracing his hands on his knees, then spat on the floor and stood upright to his full height as the man backed away, dropping the ball-peen hammer.
“Hey, look, no hard feelings,” he said, waving empty hands and backing toward the exit. “I was paid to do a job. It ain’t personal.”
“It is to me,” Joshua said as he smirked. His knuckles cracked as he stepped over the broken cabinet and moved forward.
OFFER: A BRAND NEW SERIES AND 2 FREEBIES FOR YOU!
Grab my new series, "Grit and Glory on the Frontier", and get 2 FREE novels as a gift! Have a look here!
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