Free Last Ride of Jed Strange (9781101559635) by Frank Leslie Page A

across his face as he realized that that was not what had happened.
    Hobart had shot Lenore.
    â€œ
You son of a bitch!
” Colter screamed, reaching for his Henry and heeling Northwest across the slope in Hobart’s direction.
    The lieutenant snapped his head up, facing Colter, and then he turned sharply to stare behind him. As he followed Hobart’s gaze, Colter pulled back on Northwest’s reins, and the coyote dun’s rear hooves skidded across a talus sliding, nearly losing his footing and going down. Behind Hobart, rounding a bend in the canyon, several blue-clad riders were galloping toward the lieutenant. Hobart shouted something that Colter couldn’t make out from this distance. Then he saw Hobart jerk his arm and his pistol sharply toward Colter.
    As Hobart faced Colter, Colter could make out the shouted cry as the lieutenant waved his pistol at him, “. 
. . killed the major’s daughter!”
    Raw fury was a pack of blood-hungry wolves charging through every vein in the redhead’s body. He slid his Henry from its sheath, held Northwest steady, and planted his sights on Hobart’s chest.
    Ka-bam!
    Rock dust puffed from the slope just left of Hobart. The lieutenant jerked his head down and threw an arm up with a start, then cast his exasperated gaze toward Colter. At least, Colter figured it was an exasperated gaze. From this distance he could see only a pale oval beneath the brim of the killer’s tan hat. He hoped the look he cast back toward Hobart was as easily read despite the distance between them, because it was Colter’s sincere promise that he would kill the man no matter what it took.
    He wanted Hobart to know that Lenore’s killer was going to die bloody. Like a rabid wolf, he was going to die howling.
    Now the six or seven other soldiers put their mounts into ground-eating gallops, heading toward Colter and disappearing amongst the steep stone walls of the canyon. Hobart, recovering from the shock of Colter’s near miss, shouted something else that Colter couldn’t hear and gigged his bay after the others.
    Colter stood with his rifle butt pressed against his thigh, his eyes hard, his nostrils contracting and expanding as he stared at Lenore sprawled belly-down on the ground where the soldiers had left her. He felt a knife twist in his chest, tears of fury glaze his eyes.
    Lenore . . .
dead.
He sat feeling slack and dead in his saddle, his shoulders weighing down on him like a yoke. How could such a sweet, kindly, and beautiful girl be dead? Killed so savagely?
    Colter would have faced all the soldiers now if he thought he’d had a chance. But they’d likely get around him, and others would come, and he’d be dead and Hobart would still be alive, spreading his lies.
    So he reined Northwest around and continued following the path across the shoulder of the hill and down toward the canyon floor. He’d stay ahead of the soldiers for now, until the time was right. And then he’d turn to face them, and they’d wish like hell they’d never known him.
    He spent that night in a long-abandoned stone shack a good ten miles from the cave. The shack, likely belonging to a Mexican farmer or goatherd at one time, was hidden in a deep crease between two hills. Its covered well still held cool, sweet-tasting water. There was an old garden patch long since grown up with weeds.
    It was a cold, bitter night despite the fire he’d built inside the roofless hovel and the whiskey he’d thinned with the cool well water and sipped from a tin cup to dull his sundry aches. The memory of Lenore lying in a lifeless pile at the bottom of that canyon was crisp in his mind, firing him with a fury he hadn’t known since he’d crippled and branded Bill Rondo.
    It was a killing fury. He sat with his blankets draped about his shoulders, sitting near the fire but facing the dark night beyond the shack, sipping his whiskey and