This was the story of the first time I met Francis William Brown. This was the story of when I took a strange little boy and turned him into a monster.
There wasn’t much justice in the world, I’d learned, but there was some. If you looked deep enough into people, you’d almost always find it. Some people, like Trish, you didn’t even need to look very hard. I figured that so long as decent people still walked the desert, we would be fine. The world would move forward. Right and wrong would sort themselves out. There was justice and it didn’t all come from me.
That’s why I left. I would be back one day to help the world sort itself out, but at that moment I needed to figure myself out first. My mother had been part Hopi. My father had taught me the traditions of an old cowboy. It was time for me to let go of some of that, to look further back to a time when man truly lived in peace with his world. I would follow the Hopi, learn their ways. Become them.
I was no longer a peacemaker.
I was a man of peace.
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Justice in an Age of Metal and Men. A special thanks goes out to my wife Carol and my boys Isaac and Gabe. Without their support I would never have gotten this book written, edited, and published. Thanks, also, to the many others who helped and supported me along the way. Thanks go out to Scott Alexander Jones for editing and Aaron Wood for cover art.
Please take a moment to drop me a review over on Amazon or Goodreads. Or, feel free to drop by my blog or Twitter and send me piles of messages. I love to hear from readers and I’m always excited to discuss my current projects. At the moment that happens to include a sequel tentatively titled Peace in an Age of Metal and Men.
-Anthony W. Eichenlaub
About the Author
Anthony W. Eichenlaub
Anthony is an author and software engineer from Rochester, Minnesota. His free time includes a dizzying array of hobbies such as brewing beer, board games, running, cooking, parenting, and landscaping. He holds a degree in Computer Science as well as a Masters of Agriculture in Horticulture.
eichenblog.org
twitter.com/AWEichenlaub
amazon.com/author/anthonyeichenlaub
www.goodreads.com/anthony_eichenlaub
About the Cover Artist
Aaron Wood
Aaron is a graphic designer currently residing in the state of Massachusetts. When he’s not creating artwork that has a social media or pop culture angle to it, he’s probably trying to cook up a plot to score some lobster.
www.etsy.com/people/Justonescarf
About the Editor
Scott Alexander Jones
Scott is an editor, writer, and ghostwriter, currently based out of Lawrence, Kansas. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana (2009) and a BA in English from The University of Texas (2006). Additionally, he is the recipient of the 2011 Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Award from Emrys Journal, and he was a writer-in-residence at The Montana Artists Refuge in 2009.
www.scottalexanderjones.com/
Grit and Grace
Welcome to the Republic of Texas, a country mined from the rubble of a fallen America and forged into steel by civil war and unending corporate conflict. Technology and neglect made this country what it is. It’s near as wild as it was after America wrestled it from the native civilizations. Maybe more so. It’s a tough place to make a living, but it’s home and on a good day it’s a bounty hunter’s gold mine.
Winston Brand was a bounty hunter, but it sure didn’t feel like a gold mine when he woke after a battle he didn’t remember. By the looks of it, it wasn’t a battle he’d won. All he knew was that Goodwin was paying good money. There were other hunters after the girl, too, so Winston hardly had time to ask himself the question:
Why does Chester Goodwin want his own daughter back “dead or alive”?
Available now on Amazon.
Justice in an Age of Metal and Men Page 18
