Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) Read Free

paper from the midget’s pocket.
    He unfolded the single sheet until his own image stared up at him—an inked sketch of his face looking exaggeratedly menacing beneath his hat brim, his eyes more heavy-lidded and intimidating than they actually were. Or, at least, than he thought they were.
    The artist had dabbed in a few freckles across his nose. Colter’s mouth was depicted as a thin knife slash. The sketch included the S that had been branded into his right cheek by Sheriff Bill Rondo at a slight angle from left to right and starting an inch down from the inside of his eye. Unconsciously, Colter lifted a gloved hand to his cheek, touched his index and middle fingers to the knotted scar, feeling his ears warm as he wondered if the brand was really that stark and hideous.
    The rendering made it larger and darker than it really was. He knew from appraising it in a looking glass that it wasn’t quite that large, and it was more pink with knotted scar tissue than black. But to him it often seemed just as big and bold and threatening as on the paper before him. Especially lately, when he’d been fooling with Miss Lenore, the pretty daughter of the commander at Fort Grant who often came out to the stables to watch him and Willie breaking horses.
    Across the top of the page in large, blocky letters, the circular read REWARD: $1,000 DEAD OR ALIVE . Beneath the picture was his name, COLTER FARROW . Then: NOTORIOUS YOUNG PISTOLEER WHO MAIMED AND SCARRED SHERIFF BILL RONDO OF SAPINERO, COL. TERR . In slightly smaller letters the reward proclaimed that Farrow wore “the mark of Satan” on his cheek and had “murdered countless numbers in an ongoing bloodbath across the West!”
    Colter tore up the paper and tossed the bits into the hot, dry breeze. He ran a thumb under one of his suspender straps and stared off in anger. “Mark of Satan, huh? The mark of Sapinero, more like.”
    Indeed, it was the “mark of Sapinero” that Sheriff Bill Rondo had burned into his cheek after Colter had discovered that Rondo and several others from Sap-inero had killed his foster father, Trace Cassidy. He till couldn’t quite work his mind around all that had happened up in Sapinero, all that he’d discovered after Trace had been sent home in the back of his own wagon, dead, his clothes nearly whipped off him, his hands and ankles nailed to the wagon bed.
    A grisly, horrific crucifixion—an act of unspeakable brutality even for a man like Rondo and the ranching king of Sapinero County, Paul Spurlock.
    Colter had been taken in by Trace and Ruth Cassidy at six years old, when his parents had died in a milk plague that had swept the Lunatic Mountains of south-central Colorado, where they’d ranched. Trace and Ruth had owned a ranch not far from where Colter was born. They’d raised the orphaned boy like their own, and he’d grown up as an older brother to David and Little May, though after he’d turned twelve he’d moved out to the bunk-shack and worked as a puncher right along with the other men Trace had hired to keep up his fences, cut hay, and tend his growing cattle and horse herds.
    It had been a good life, and Colter had intended to marry his sweetheart from a neighboring horse ranch—Marianna Claymore—until that fateful day on which Trace had been carried home dead in the wagon he’d driven to Sapinero to buy supplies.
    So Ruth had sent Colter and his Remington pistol to Sapinero to seek out the responsible parties behind Trace’s murder. That’s how things were done in the Lunatic Mountains populated mostly by the tough, intransigent men and women from the Tennessee and Georgia hills. A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Colter had been old enough to shoot and ride, so in Ruth’s way of thinking he’d been old enough to avenge his foster father’s brutal murder.
    Ruth had sent him to Sapinero to find out who had killed Trace and to