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

trying to replace the image of the beautiful, dead Lenore with pictures of a dead Hobart.
    No. Of Hobart howling as he died . . .
    He ate the last sandwich Lenore had made for him, and for which she’d given her life to bring to him, finished the whiskey and water, and swiped a fist across his nose, trying to puzzle it out.
    Lenore.
    Such a senseless, tragic killing. Why?
    But Colter knew why. She’d been a headstrong girl, and in her zeal to stop more killing she must have told Hobart that she knew the real story of Belden’s death. To keep her from revealing his and McKnight’s lie, Hobart had shot her. How easy it had been to blame Colter for her death, to say that she’d been killed by the man she’d ridden into the desert to see.
    How easily one lie led to another.
    Now, because he’d danced with a pretty girl, the pretty girl was dead and Colter was on the run for his life.
    He slept fitfully only a few hours, his dreams tormented this time not from pain, but from images of Hobart’s gun blasting into Lenore. Rising early, when dawn was a pale, shallow streak behind the eastern ridges, he ate some beans and jerky washed down with water and whiskey, saddled Northwest, and headed out.
    He saw no sign of the cavalry all that morning and into the afternoon. They wouldn’t give up on him, he knew. He was wanted now for killing not only the major’s intended son-in-law but the major’s daughter, as well. He especially hoped that Hobart didn’t give up on him. Likely, a contingent had taken Lenore’s body back to Camp Grant, but there would still be a goodly portion of Grant’s soldiers combing south-central Arizona for him.
    Something told him he’d see Hobart again soon. The lieutenant would want to make sure that Colter died, so that no one could contest his and McKnight’s claim about the night of Belden’s death and that it was Colter who’d killed Lenore.
    Willie’s whiskey made the ride easier on Colter’s ribs. But when he stopped in the midafternoon to take a swig, the bottle slipped from his hands, and it shattered on a rock, giving Northwest a start. The loss of the painkilling whiskey grieved him, but he smiled with relief when, an hour later, he crested a low butte and stared down into a hollow before him in which a collection of log and mud-brick buildings squatted in the Arizona sun. Likely, he’d find a replacement bottle there. A stagecoach was pulled up to the side of a barn, its tongue drooping, and there were ten to fifteen horses in the corral off the barn’s other side.
    A wide, rutted trail came down out of the east, to Colter’s left, and split the yard of the place before continuing on up into a jog of low hills in the west. He was looking at a stage relay station, most likely. Maybe one that served food and whiskey. He’d go in out of the sun for a time, give Northwest some water, parched corn, and rest, as well, before continuing on his way.
    Colter sleeved sweat from his brow and booted the horse on down the hill.

Chapter 9
    Colter turned onto the trail at the bottom of the hill, scattering a few chickens pecking at the edge of the yard in which several sun-blistered buildings crouched amongst dusty yucca plants and tumbleweeds.
    A windmill stood in the middle of the yard, the blades turning lazily with a dry breeze, the sun making a lemon on the surface of the straw-flecked water in the stone tank. A small dust devil lifted between the windmill and the station house and died against the house—a long, low, brush-roofed shack with a sagging front gallery decorated with bleached animal skulls. Wooden shutters were thrown back from the windows, a few of which were covered with animal skins scraped thin enough to resemble waxed paper. The sign above the gallery’s roof of ironwood poles announced DELACORTE STAGE LINE RELAY STATION NUMBER 3 .
    Another sign nailed to a front gallery post