Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635)

REOPENED WOUNDS

The bandito had dropped his eyes to the stream, but now looked up again as though at a fly that would not go away. He looked puzzled. “What you say, little scar-face gringo boy?”

“I don't want you comin' around Miss Alegria anymore. I seen what you did to her.” Colter bunched his lips and shook his head. He let his glance flick to the three pistols the bandit was wearing. Machado might be fast, but he was too big to be faster than Colter. Besides, when a man wore that many guns, he was usually trying to compensate for a shortcoming.

Colter was not yet twenty, but he'd lost his fear of death long ago. Now he felt only rage, which he held on a tight rein. He drew regular breaths as he remembered the scar on Alegria's face, and the terror in her brown eyes. He thought of this big man sauntering into the hotel now and beating her again, maybe cutting her again, with no one to stop him.

No one except Colter Farrow.

PRAISE FOR FRANK LESLIE AND THE YAKIMA HENRY SERIES

“Frank Leslie writes with leathery prose honed sharper than a buffalo skinner's knife, with characters as explosive as forty-rod whiskey, and a plot that slams readers with the impact of a Winchester slug . . . Edgy, raw, and irresistible.”

—Johnny D. Boggs, Spur Award–winning author of
The Killing Shot

“Frank Leslie kicks his story into a gallop right out of the gate . . . Raw and gritty as the West itself.”

—Mark Henry, author of
The Hell Riders

“Explodes off the page in an enormously entertaining burst of stay-up-late, read-into-the-night, fast-moving flurry of page-turning action. Leslie spins a yarn that rivals the very best on western shelves today.”

—J. Lee Butts, author of
Hell to Pay

“Hooks you instantly with sympathetic characters and sin-soaked villains. Yakima has a heart of gold and an Arkansas toothpick. If you prefer Peckinpah to Ang Lee, this one's for you.”

—Mike Baron, creator of
Nexus
and
The Badger
comic book series

“Big, burly, brawling, and action-packed,
The Lonely Breed
is a testosterone-laced winner from the word ‘go,' and Frank Leslie is an author to watch!”

—Ellen Recknor, author of
The Legendary Kid Donovan

Also Available by Frank Leslie

Dead River Killer

Revenge at Hatchet Creek

Bullet for a Half-Breed

The Killers of Cimarron

The Dangerous Dawn

The Guns of Sapinero

The Savage Breed

The Wild Breed

THE LAST RIDE OF JED STRANGE

Frank Leslie

A SIGNET BOOK

SIGNET

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, January 2012

Copyright © Peter Brandvold, 2012

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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For Sherman and Sharon Langehaug of Grand Forks, North Dakota— for their friendship and support over all these years

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 1

The bullet nipped the crown of Colter Farrow's hat and blew it off his head before smashing into a stone scarp with an echoing
wham!
and a shrill whine.

The whine was almost instantly drowned out by the crash of the rifle up the hill on the left side of the old Indian trail that Colter and his horse-breaking partner, Willie Tappin, had followed out from Tucson.

“Down, Willie, down!” Colter cried, throwing himself out of his saddle as his mustang gave an indignant whinny, then buck-kicked and galloped on up the trail, reins bouncing along behind him.

Colter rolled as two more bullets plowed up dirt around his head and shoulders, and threw himself behind a small cedar and a rock. Willie Tappin—older and slower—swung down from the back of his pitching horse and dropped to one knee beside a rock on the other side of the trail. As his piebald gelding ran up the trail after Colter's coyote dun, Willie poked back his Stetson's broad, flat brim and looked over the rock toward the source of the gunfire.

“What in tarnation?” the older man exclaimed.

“Keep your head down, Willie!”

“You don't have to tell me twice!” Tappin looked at Colter. “Hoss thieves, you think?”

Colter jerked his head down behind his covering rock as two more bullets smashed into it and a third whizzed past his right shoulder to hammer a gnarled cedar behind him. The shooting continued for nearly a minute, bullets whistling and hammering and the ricochets whining, until a lull drifted down over the Arizona desert, in the shadow of the Rincon Mountains. Colter glanced at Willie, crouching low behind the boulder, his hat down over his eyes. None of the bullets had appeared to land anywhere near the older horse breaker. Most if not all had churned the dust and rocks around Colter.

“Good God Almighty!” Willie said, lifting his head now, directing his long, horsey face toward Colter. “Whoever they are, there's a few of 'em, and they don't like us a heap!” He had his Schofield revolver in his gloved hand, but he didn't appear overly eager to use the weapon, which he wore mainly to guard against rattlesnakes and for smashing coffee beans. Willie's specialty was horses, not gun work. It had been for nearly all of his thirty-odd years.

“You stay here and keep your ugly head down, Willie.”

“I heard that!”

Colter slid his Remington revolver from the soft leather holster on his left hip and flicked open the cylinder's release tab. He pinched a .44 cartridge from one of the loops on his shell belt and slid it through the loading gate, filling the cylinder that he always left empty beneath the Remy's hammer, so he wouldn't inadvertently shoot himself in the leg.

He flicked the loading gate closed and spun the cylinder. The gun was old and tarnished and prone to rust, but he kept all its machined pieces well oiled and free of debris.

Wanted as he was by the law as well as by bounty hunters, the eighteen-year-old redhead kept the pistol ready for work at all times. Now he lifted his battered tan hat, ran a hand through his shoulder-length, sweat-damp hair, and cast a glance around the rock to the high, rocky hill on the other side of the trail.

Smoke puffed around a rifle maw about halfway up the hill, the shooter himself concealed by the rocks. The slug hammered the face of Colter's covering boulder, and he jerked his head back behind it as rock shards flew in all directions.

The rifle's crack flatted out across the valley, chasing its dwindling echoes.

“Colter, you all right?” Tappin yelled.

“I ain't hit, if that's what you mean.”

“Them boys seem to have a bone to pick with you.”

Colter tried to keep the tone light, not wanting to give away any information about his previous and ongoing trouble, which neither Willie nor anyone else at Camp Grant, where he was currently employed as a horse breaker, knew anything about. “They're probably after my hoss. Must've seen Northwest back at the stage station.”

He and Willie had been out scouting a herd of wild horses south of Soldier Gulch, and had stopped for water and coffee at a swing station about five miles back. Several other men had been there—a couple of Mexicans, a half-breed Indian, and two white men including a plug-ugly midget—eating lunch on the station house's front porch. Colter had kept his distance but he'd thought he'd glimpsed a couple of the ragged crew favoring him with lingering gazes. All, including the midget, were a savage-looking lot bristling with guns and ammunition. Either game hunters for the railroad or bounty hunters, Colter had figured.

“What's your hoss got that my hoss ain't got?” Willie wanted to know as more rifles hammered away on the slope.

“That horse of yours is a beat-up old cayuse ready for the glue factory!” Colter shouted. “You stay here. I'm gonna work around behind 'em.”

“There's too many of 'em, Red. Let's hightail it!”

“You hightail it,” Colter shouted. “I'm gonna work around behind 'em, see if I can discourage 'em.”

“Damn it, Colter—
there's too many of 'em
!”

Ignoring the warning, Colter took advantage of the lull in the shooting to bound up from behind his boulder and run crouching across the trail. Two bullets licked up dust behind him as he scrambled into the thick brush and stunt cedars lining the base of the hill and running around the hill's shoulder. After only a few yards, he could no longer see the nest of rocks from which the dry-gulchers were slinging lead, which meant they couldn't see him, either.

A pistol popped behind him. Willie was triggering shots at the bushwhackers, keeping the brigands distracted.

As Colter moved along a rocky wash that angled around the side of the hill, partly concealed by saguaros, spindly cottonwoods, and mesquites, he wished he'd had time to grab his Henry rifle from his saddle boot before he'd left his horse. All he had was the six-shooter. It had done for him before, though. It would have to do for him again.

A rattling sounded. He leaped to his left, grunting with a start, for anyone who'd been raised in rattlesnake country had an instinctive horror of such a warning. He turned to his right, where a diamondback lay coiled atop a rock in the shadow of the ridge, flicking its forked tongue toward Colter while shaking the hard rattle at the end of its tail. Its flat, pelletlike eyes regarding him devilishly.

Colter lowered the Remington and stepped back away from the viper, out of range of a lunging strike. “Easy, feller. You're not one of the snakes I'm after.”

He turned and continued walking along the wash, noting that the cracks of the dry-gulchers' rifles had fallen eerily silent. Slowing his pace, he moved more quietly, ratcheting back the Remington's hammer and holding the pistol straight out in front of him. Just ahead, a notch was dug into the side of the hill—a narrow, dry watercourse filled with dead weeds and jumbled rock left by previous monsoon floods.

Colter turned into the cut. It should take him right up behind the shooters. When he'd walked a dozen yards, he heard someone moving down the slope on his right and turned to see the midget he'd seen at the swing station skip-hopping down the rocks, angling toward him from the crest of the rocky hill. Colter swung his pistol toward the midget, who was dressed in a pin-striped shirt and auburn vest trimmed with a gold watch chain and a miniature tan slouch hat. His leathery face with its pinched little nose and a blond patch beard gave him a goatish look. He wore whipcord trousers and the black boots of a ten-year-old child. He'd been reloading the pistol in his doll-like hands when he saw Colter, and now he flicked his pocket pistol's loading gate closed.

“Hold it there, shorty,” Colter said, keeping his voice pitched low.

The midget snarled, stopped on a flat boulder, and swung his pocket pistol toward Colter. “Hold this, Red!”

Colter's Remy barked, leaping in his hand, sending the midget tumbling backward off the boulder. The goatish little man dropped the pistol as he clutched his bloody neck and fell down out of sight.

“What a rotten thing to do!” The voice came from Colter's left.

He froze, his powder smoke still wafting in the air around his head. In the corner of his left eye, he saw several figures step up onto the rocks on that side of the cut.

Slowly, he turned just as the fifth man was stepping onto a boulder, all five holding pistols down low in their gloved hands. Three of the four wore long dusters that blew around the tops of their scuffed, dusty boots. An Indian near the middle of the pack wore a deerskin vest under crisscrossed cartridge bandoliers, and a black sombrero. His face was cadaverously narrow and crooked, with a long nose against which were set two incredibly small eyes, the left one angling inward as though perpetually staring at the end of the man's beak.

“You just shot my brother, Red, you son of a bitch!” he told Colter, jutting the gun in his hand in the direction of the unseen midget.

A man at the far left of the line of five wore a dusty white frock coat. His bearded face was broad and fat beneath the brim of his straw sombrero. He held a long-barreled Colt Navy down low by his left thigh clad in white- and red-checked trousers with green-patched knees. He smiled, showing the black nubs of his teeth. “Bill Rondo done sent you a message in care of us, Red.”

Colter turned slowly, making no sudden moves but keeping the Remington held tight in his right hand, aimed at the ground near his right boot. “That right? Well, I got one to send back to him.”

He hadn't finished the sentence before he swung around, bringing up the Remy. He fired from a crouch, the old pistol roaring and belching smoke and saffron flames. The bushwhackers went down like dominoes. Screaming dominoes spewing blood from the wounds in their chests or heads, but dominoes just the same. One after another, they flew back off the rocks as though they'd been lassoed from behind, hitting the ground with grunts, groans, and crunching thuds.

After they were down, none made another sound except a single, short gurgle. The rowel of one of the dead men's spurs spun.

Colter straightened. His heart beat slowly but now, in the aftermath of the killing, it began to quicken. That's how it had been lately. When he'd been forced to kill, it had come easily to him. He'd approached it as calmly as a poker player dealing cards. Only later did his nerves start to twang, his mouth go dry, his hands shake. He wasn't sure what to make of it all. On the one hand, the calmness meant he'd grown comfortable with killing. On the other hand, it made killing easy. At least it made the killing of men who would otherwise kill him easy.

And that was how it should be, shouldn't it? Otherwise, after all the men who'd hunted him down over the last, long two years, he might be dead.

Still, something bothered him about it now as, looking around warily, making sure no one else was about to dry-gulch him, he plucked the spent brass from the Remington's cylinder. He slipped .44 shells from the loops on his cartridge belt and punched them through the Remington's loading gate, then flipped the gate shut and rolled the cylinder across his forearm, having the gunman's appreciation of the gun's smooth action and the solid-sounding clicks.

A fluttering, rasping sound rose from the rocks on his left, and he aimed the Remington in that direction, clicking the hammer back. When no one appeared, he climbed the bank and walked around the large boulder the midget had been standing on, and stopped, aiming the pistol straight out from his right shoulder, angled down.

The midget lay back against another rock. His little paunch was rising and falling sharply. His hat was off, and sweat dribbled down his wizened face, his thin lips capped by a scraggly blond mustache. His eyes were a depthless gray brown and they bored into Colter as he said, “You sure are fast with the smoke wagon, Red.”

Colter didn't say anything.

“Good thing you are, 'cause there's gonna be a whole lot more . . . from where we come from.” Then the midget died, his head rolling to one side and his belly behind the gaudy vest falling still. He gave a jerk and his little tongue slithered out from between his lips.

Then the rest of him fell still, as well.