Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) Read online

  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.

  Chapter 2

  Colter frowned as he studied the savage-looking little man. The midget had a scrunched-up piglike nose. A piece of paper fluttered inside his auburn vest, angling out from a pocket of his pin-striped shirt. Colter crouched and plucked the 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 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.

  “Heard the shootin’,” Willie said, his eyes looking wild. “You all right, boy?”

  “I’m all right, Willie.” He took his hat, a bullet hole in its crown, from Willie.

  “What 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?”

  “They was just after our horses, I reckon.” Colter feigned a rueful chuckle. “I reckon their hearts weren’t really in a lead swap.”

  “Coulda 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.”

  “Ah, 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

  “Colter 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 indispensable position, it was not an esteemed one.

  A bony shoulder clad in blue wool and capped with a lieutenant’s polished brass bar appeared out of nowhere, ramming into Colter’s chest and stopping the young cowboy and Miss Lenore dead in their tracks. “Now, Miss Lenore,” said Lieutenant Pres Belden, “you know this boy can’t dance. Why, I don’t think he even scraped his boots off before he entered the hall.”

  The lieutenant—tall and square-shouldered, with a coal black dragoon-style mustache, belligerently jutting jaws, dimpled chin, and cobalt blue eyes that always owned an angry, condescending cast—worked his nose, sniffing, then made a dismissive face. “Why, I know he didn’t!” He glanced at Colter before giving his back to the young horse breaker and hooking his right arm for Miss Lenore. “Allow me.”

  “I do apologize, Lieutenant,” said Miss Lenore, not influenced a bit and just as relief that he wouldn’t have to dance was beginning to ease the tension in Colter’s shoulders. “But I’ve promised this and possibly the next dance to Mr. Farrow.”

  Smiling and radiant, the pearls around her creamy neck setting off the chocolate brown of the sausage curls dancing around her pink cheeks and the amber brown of her sparkling eyes, Miss Lenore Fairchild stepped around the slack-jawed lieutenant. With Colter in tow, she continued out onto the dance floor where, Colter noticed with a horrific shudder, the music had suddenly changed and the dancers were now dancing face-to-face and hand in hand, only two or three inches apart!

  “Miss Lenore,” Colter said, hearing the nervous quaver in his voice, “I’m afraid Lieutenant Belden is right—I can’t dance. Oh, I’ve barn-danced a few times back home, but mostly I whacked an empty kettle with a kitchen spoon, keeping time for the banjo picker.” He gulped as she grabbed both his sweating hands in hers and held them up between them, smiling warmly at him, showing all those perfect white teeth sheathed in rich, ruby red lips.

  “Nonsense, dear Colter,” Miss Lenore said, her head just a little lower than his. “The waltz is the very picture of grace and simplicity. Follow me. Watch my feet. Hold on tight, and I’ll step you through it.” Her laugh sounded like snowmelt water chiming along a cedar-lined creek bed high in the Colorado mountains, which was where the young cowboy wished he were right now.

  She put her moist lips up close to his ear once more, and he could feel her breath again, soft as a butterfly wing. “And we’ll no doubt win the jam-and-apple basket at the end of the evening!”

  “Oh, Lordy,” Colter muttered as the girl began sidestepping and swinging her hips, tugging his reluctant, six-foot-tall body along like an extra, oversized appendage. “I just don’t think I can do this, Miss—”

  “No, you’re doing well, Mr. Farrow,” the girl encouraged.

  “I’m liable to hurt you and face a firing squad in the morning.”

  She laughed heartily. “Just watch my feet and do what I do, and I’ve no doubt you’ll be leading in a minute. See—it’s not so awfully hard, now, is it?”

  Colter concentrated on the girl’s metallic green, elastic, side-zipper shoes showing below the swirling pleats of her cream ball gown, and, ignoring the other dancers he felt himself running into frequently, forced himself to learn the steps lest he should stomp all over this poor girl and likely send her sailing into the punch bowl yonder. It was pure fear rushing through his veins like miniature arrows that kept him on his own feet and off hers as well as off the hem of her obviously expensive dress as they shuffled this way and that about the dance floor.

  After one song Miss Lenore insisted they stay for another—he was catching on so quickly it would be a shame to stop now!—he found himself growing more aware of the others around him, and how out of place he must look in this crowd of handsome soldiers with their waxed mustaches, red sashes, and gilt-braid tunics, and the beribboned, curly-haired, cream-skinned girls in their colorful ball gowns hand sewn from the finest cloth shipped from St. Louis to Tucson.

  There were a few enlisted men and noncommissioned officers who lumbered around the floor nearly as awkwardly as Colter Farrow was, but it was the handsome officers and equally attractive dance partners he was most aware of—them in all their charm and grace and formal cavalry attire, and he in his crude, faded albeit freshly washed Levi’s jeans with deerskin inseams, pale blue chambray shirt with its collar frayed from many scrubbings, and ancient green neckerchief. His copper-red hair hung straight down to his shoulders; he kept it long to hide the grisly scar on his freckled right cheek as much as possible.

  His three-year-old brown leather boots with their undershot heels had not been polished, just rubbed down with a damp rag. They looked as worn as Indian moccasins, but, contrary to the lieutenant’s comments, he had taken a stick and scraped the shit from the heels and from the stitching between the uppers and the soles, by God. Colter himself had had a bath only the day before, so if the lieutenant had indeed smelled any horse shit, it had come from his own heels, though Colter doubted the arrogant officer had ever visited a corral or stable, much less mucked either out with a bucket and a pitchfork.

  Colter had been breaking horses here at Camp Grant—on the banks of the San Pedro River in the sun-blistered valley of the Gila—for only a month, but he’d known after two days that Belden hailed from a moneyed family from a West Virginia tobacco plantation, and that his father, a Unionist during the Civil War, had been a close friend and associate of General Grant.

  Colter had also learned quickly that Belden had firmly set his hat for the delectable Miss Lenore.

  That bit of information could not be ignored. Several times as they danced, with Colter even beginning to enjoy himself a little, he glimpsed the lieutenant glaring at him amongst the crowd milling at the edges of the dance floor or sitting in cane-bottom chairs back against the adobe walls or around the cloth-covered mess hall tables appointed with small ham salad sandwiches, coffeepots, and cakes. The lieutenant stood alone, like an angry bull, turning a cut-glass punch cup around in his beringed right hand.

  His anger must have been as plain to everyone else in the wooden-floored dance hall as it was to Colter, for no one came near him much less tried to engage him in conversation. His anger was plain to everyone, that is, except to Miss Lenore herself, who appeared completely oblivious, engaged as she was in counting the steps aloud for Colter and helping him twirl her with more and more adeptness under his arm.

  Colter himself was as confused as everyone else in the dance hall. Why was she paying so much attention to him—a lowly horse breaker from the Lunatic Mountains in south-central Colorado Territory? True, it was no secret to anyone at Camp Grant that Miss Lenore both knew and loved horses, for she could be found milling about the holding and breaking corrals whenever she managed to slip away from her family’s impressive home quarters and the watchful, ever-protective eye of her mother. Was she so enamored of horses that she’d become enamored of Colter, who broke and trained them?

  Colter had no illusions it was a serious attraction, as he himself, with the nasty S-brand forever burned into his right cheek at a slight slant starting about two inches below his eye, could never be an attractive prospect for such a girl as Miss Lenore Fairchild. Miss Lenore was a beaut
iful, cultured girl—“a great room girl,” as folks of Colter’s humble station knew young ladies like her—who could never be seriously attracted to anyone outside her own moneyed class. She was lured to Colter for the same reason she was lured to a breaking corral—because she was a hemmed-in, romantic girl in need of frivolous diversions.

  And that, Colter realized now with admittedly a sinking feeling in the pit of his belly, was what he was. A frivolous diversion. Possibly even an instrument with which she could make Lieutenant Belden even more attracted to her.

  “Ouch!”

  “Oh, shit—I’m sorry, Miss Lenore!”

  “No, it’s all right,” she said, laughing, continuing to dance despite the slowing of his own boots. “You just lost your concentration. Count, now—one, two, three . . . four!”

  She let him twirl her once more, and he stared in heartsick amazement at her brown hair and cream skin and cream skirts and glistening pearls swirling above her corseted breasts in a beguiling whirlwind of radiant femininity so rich that Colter felt his blood rise like a spring stallion’s—hot and churning. The rushing, warm air around the girl was filled with the delicate cherry perfume he was sure he’d recall, grinding his jaws, on his deathbed.

  “Perfect!” she cried.

  Just then another uniformed shoulder nudged Colter, and her father, Fort Commander Major Angus Fairchild, attired in his company grade dress uniform complete with horsehair-plumed helmet and steep rear visor, stepped between the dancers. The metallic gold thread embroidering the chest of the major’s brass-buttoned, double-breasted coat became visible as the grizzled but stately old officer glanced with faint admonishment at Colter before returning his fatherly blue gaze to his flushed and breathless daughter.

  Lenore’s bosom heaved as she stared up at the leonine gent in surprise. “Father, we—”