Showing results by author "Matthew Blaine" in All Categories

Barnabas Locke, seasoned frontiersman, husband and father, becomes strangely embroiled in international competition for gold illegally mined in the Ute mountains of Colorado. Among the converging players is his cousin, Captain Enoch Locke, sent on a secret mission to confiscate the gold. Guilty of the escape of an unscrupulous French schemer, Barnabas and his life-long friend, the Abenaki Prophet, Squando, hatch a daring plan to thwart the gold seekers and to restore spiritual balance to the Ute way of life.

In October 1759, as the French and Indian War wanes, Ranger brothers Frederick and Edward Locke stumble upon an ambush and an abduction along the new Crown Point Military Road in the heart of the contested Green Mountains.

War-seasoned young Barnabas Locke arrives at Harris’s Ferry, where he does business with John Harris II, as a trader of goods going into the contested Ohio Country. Powerful interests want information about Indian alliances with the British, even as the Revolutionary War continues in the East and as white settlers illegally swarm across the boundary line of the Ohio River.

It is 1777, early in the Revolutionary War, when fleet young Barnabas Locke runs against an hourglass to become a courier in Captain Whitcomb’s Rangers. In the defense of Fort Ticonderoga, he is dispatched as a solo spy to track the movements of troops and gunboats as British General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne masses his forces for the expected assault down Lake Champlain.

Young Revolutionary War veteran Barnabas Locke makes winter camp in an isolated canyon in the Colorado wilderness, finding pictographs and petroglyphs made by the Ancient Ones. His elderly Arapaho mentor appears like a dream at his fire, issuing a warning but leaving behind a very real huge black dog. Barnabas uses all his frontier skills and learns new ones to survive a mountain winter, but traps himself in a manmade pit, discovers a mysterious abandoned city, and outruns an unnaturally large and beautiful spotted cat.

In spring 1782, young Revolutionary War veteran Barnabas Locke and his Abenaki friend, the visionary Squando, reunite to cross the Mississippi and travel deep into the Great Plains. At the riverbank, they find their hired keelboat commandeered by the imperious young Spanish Isabella and her brother Ramon, who are fleeing the river pirate Joe Fontaine with a cache of jewels.