Wardlock’s Legion

After all the trails they’d followed, and all the times they’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder against one bad man or another, the time had finally come for Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos to ride their separate ways. And though they had never really gotten along too well, each man felt a sense of loss at the prospect. But Benedict had met and fallen in love with the beautiful Charity Flint. The couple were about to go back East and get married. Then Colonel Oliver Traven, an old friend of Benedict’s, asked for his help. Traven’s son Mark had gone missing three years earlier in the parched lands of the Llano Estacado – the Staked Plains. Traven wanted to make one last search for his son – or his son’s body – before he gave up hope completely of ever seeing him again. Benedict couldn’t refuse the man … and before long he and Brazos were up to their shell belts in trouble. But the outcome of their search was to hold a terrible sting in the tail … for all of them. E. Jefferson Clay was just one of many pseudonyms used by New South Wales-born Paul Wheelahan (1930-2018). Starting off as a comic-book writer/illustrator, Paul created The Panther and The Raven before moving on to a long and distinguished career as a western writer. Under the names Emerson Dodge, Brett McKinley, E. Jefferson Clay, Ben Jefferson and others, he penned more than 800 westerns and could, at his height, turn out a full-length western in just four days. The son of a mounted policeman, Paul initially worked as a powder monkey on the Oaky River Dam project. By 1955, however, he was drawing Davy Crockett—Frontier Scout. In 1963 he began his long association with Australian publisher Cleveland Pty. Co. Ltd. As prolific as he was as a western writer, however, he also managed to write for TV, creating shows like Runaways and contributing scripts to perennial favorites like A Country Practice. At the time of his death, in December 2018, he was writing his autobiography, Never Ride Back … which was also the title of his very first western.