Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) Read Free Page A

exact vengeance where vengeance was due. Lead had flown. Colter’d gotten out alive but wearing the Sapinero brand on his cheek—the brand that Rondo had used to mark those he barred from his town. Yes, Colter survived but not before killing Deputy Bannon, crippling Rondo with a bullet to his back, and branding the sheriff with his own iron . . . and earning a hefty price on Colter’s head.
    Of course, he hadn’t been able to go back home to Ruth and David and Little May. Not with the price on his head.
    So Colter had run. First to Wyoming. When his trail had grown hot up there, he’d ridden down here to Arizona, where he was now trying to live quietly, unassumingly earning an honest living by breaking horses with Willie Tappin at Camp Grant, a dusty little military outpost on the hot, desolate banks of the San Pedro River.
    Certainly no bounty hunters would find him there. . . .
    Colter walked away from the dead midget. He surveyed the five other men he’d left dead atop the blood-splattered bank of the wash, then stomped around until he found their horses. He unsaddled the mounts and spanked them free, to be picked up by one of the area ranchers.
    Hot and dusty and thirsty, he found Willie riding toward him, leading Colter’s coyote dun by its bridle reins.
    â€œHeard the shootin’,” Willie said, his eyes looking wild. “You all right, boy?”
    â€œI’m all right, Willie.” He took his hat, a bullet hole in its crown, from Willie.
    â€œWhat the hell happened?”
    Colter shrugged as he grabbed his canteen off his saddle horn and pried the cork from the lip. “Managed to scare them dry-gulchers off with a few shots from my Remy.”
    Willie’s angular, deeply lined face looked skeptical. “You did?”
    â€œThey was just after our horses, I reckon.” Colter feigned a rueful chuckle. “I reckon their hearts weren’t really in a lead swap.”
    â€œCoulda fooled me.” Willie leaned forward and patted his piebald’s neck. “Well, I reckon we’d best get on back to the camp. We got us a hoedown tonight, remember.”
    â€œAh, hell,” Colter said, scowling as he stepped into the leather. “I can’t dance a lick.
Can’t
dance and I don’t
wanna
dance!”
    Willie chuckled as he followed Colter back toward the main trail they’d been following when they’d been bushwhacked. “I bet Miss Lenore’ll have the last word on
that
!”
    His chuckles broke into coughs from too many cigarettes rolled with spicy Mexican tobacco.
    As he rode, Colter fingered the “mark of Satan” on his cheek and thought about the midget’s warning.

Chapter 3
    â€œColter Farrow, you’re gonna dance with me whether you like it or not,” the girl whispered in a breathy, intoxicating, Deep South accent. Her mouth was so near to Colter’s ear that the young cowboy could feel the moistness of her warm breath pouring through his head and rushing clear down to his boots, making his toes tingle.
    Even though Colter had never been east of the Mississippi—had never, in fact, been anywhere but West—Miss Lenore Fairchild’s raspy voice conjured images of sprawling, white-pillared plantation houses, rolling green hills studded with mossy oaks, and mist-enshrouded creek banks lush with blooming laurel.
    Before the redheaded cowboy could protest, Major Fairchild’s daughter ground her fingers into his right biceps and pulled him out onto the dance floor. Several groups of dancers—the young women of the fort do-si-do-ing with well-groomed, young officers—made way for the major’s ravishing, bubbly, and roundly adored young daughter, while raising incredulous eyebrows at her choice of a dancing partner. The lanky, long-haired, blue-jean-clad Colter Farrow occupied the lowly though indispensable position of bronc breaker at Camp Grant. While an