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

dropped his feet to the floor.
    A shadow passed outside a near, moonlit window, and Colter clicked the Remy’s hammer back, his heart thudding slow but hard in his ears.

Chapter 4
    Colter pulled his jeans on over his threadbare balbriggans and looped the leather suspenders up over his shoulders. He wrapped his shell belt, gun, and holster around his lean waist, donned his hat, and glanced at Willie still sawing logs on his bunk. Colter stepped into his boots and then stole quietly over to the door and tripped the latch.
    He gritted his teeth as the hinges squawked but continued to slowly draw the door open. When he had the door half-open, he stood there, cocked Remington now in his hand, angling a look into the moonlit yard beyond the brush ramada fronting the shack.
    The corrals were forty yards from the shack, their rails looking like black velvet in silhouette though their tops were furred with pearl moonlight. The ground was floury pale. The windmill between Colter and the corrals stood still and silent, the wooden blades unmoving. There were three horses in the corral—three broomtail broncs from California that were up next for breaking—and they, too, stood still as black statues. The water in the stone holding tank glistened like quicksilver.
    Nothing moved. The eerie silence pricked the hair at the back of Colter’s neck. Not even a night bird called, nor did a coyote howl. The coyotes milling around the washes surrounding Camp Grant usually howled nearly all night long.
    Colter caressed his Remy’s hammer with his thumb and ran his tongue across his bottom lip. He’d come down here to Arizona to escape the bounty hunters in Colorado. Could more have followed him here? Maybe he shouldn’t have been so stubborn, and changed his name to an alias. But he’d thought he’d be safe here at Grant amongst soldiers. As remote as the fort was, and as much as he kept to himself, avoiding most towns, surely his name hadn’t spread beyond the fort.
    Who cared about a scar-faced young horse breaker who kept to himself?
    Of course, no matter what he called himself, the scar on his face would give him away. That’s undoubtedly how the midget and the others had identified him at the swing station. It was Colter Farrow’s mark of Cain, and he’d wear it to his grave. But it had taught him one thing, he mused now, as he glanced down at the cocked Remy held steady in his work-thickened left hand. It had taught him how to use a gun—in fact, he’d become about as fast, one Colorado newspaper had claimed, as John Wesley Hardin.
    Of course that same writer had also said he was as mean and crazy as Hardin, that he’d filed his Remington’s front sight off and rigged the hammer for fanning, and that his “demon eyes” matched the “mark of the Devil” on his cheek. You couldn’t put much stock in the words of writers. They just wanted to sell stories—the more lurid and exaggerated, the better.
    But Colter knew he was fast. He had to be or he wouldn’t be standing here now, feeling that sudden, almost unsettling calm float over him again, easing the tension in every muscle and bone, and slowing his heart.
    Colter drew a breath, then stepped quickly out under the ramada, putting his back to the wall beside the half-open door. He swung the pistol from right to left and back again, looking and listening. Nothing. He was about to step forward when something moved in the corner of his right eye, and someone gave a short, soft whistle.
    Colter swung around to face the man-shaped shadow stepping out from behind the shack to stand off the end of the ramada, his gloved hands raised shoulder-high. “Easy, shit-kicker.”
    Behind Colter rose a ratcheting click. The familiar sound froze him as would the rattle of a diamondback. A man on the opposite end of the shack said, “Set the gun down, boy.”
    Colter turned his head a little, saw a tall