His Last Ride to Save Her (Preview)

Chapter One

“Move your goddamn wagon or I’ll move it for you!” was all John Thorne heard as he uncoiled the rough rope through his callused palms. He didn’t look up. Not right away.

Men fussed at the crossing every day in one way or another. There was always an argument about who rode where first. The river cut right through the valley, splitting it in two, and people had to get across. Some men were finished working for the day and wanted the river behind them; others were just beginning and needed to get across before the light ran out.

The river road narrowed here, forcing every wagon to funnel into a single loading ramp at the water’s edge. John’s loading ramp. There was no shoulder to pull onto, no easy way to turn around. If you needed the other bank, you waited. Or, if you were like many of these men, you fought about who went first.

John had one hand on the ferry rope, his boots planted wide on the deck as the current shoved against the hull. The Eagle River. It was running fast this morning, swollen and impatient with rough snowmelt. It was spring. Time for everything to move. Time for life. And the damn ferry sure was coming to life and fighting him at every turn that day.

“You touch my brother and I’ll shoot you where you fucking stand!” someone else yelled.

Dammit.

John hauled once more, feeling the cable bite then settle, before tying off the rope. He turned to see two groups of men, red-faced and angry as hornets. Staring at one another. Their wagons were nose to nose at the ramp and from the looks of it neither of them looked like they were going to back down.

He moved off the plank deck and onto the packed mud, watching the two lines of wagons facing one another, damn near colliding at the crossing.

There were two different kinds of men down there, each with their own hunger.

The miners coming down from the high country had hollowed eyes and were worn down from a hard day’s labor. Most of them were tired and angry every day, and all of them were armed. 

John couldn’t blame them. Mining was taxing work.

Black coal clung to their faces and caked in their beards and eyebrows. They’d been up there all day. Their mules were gaunt and stubborn, just like them, and held packs weighed down with whatever it was they carried from out of the mountains, so they were tired, too. He understood them being angry. They wanted the ferry now because they wanted a drink and a bed.

But the men heading up had the opposite hunger. Their faces were flushed with whiskey and ambition. They wore newer boots and clean shirts and wore their rifles like accessories and their pistol holsters were still that shiny, stiff leather.

John had already run several crossings since first light and he was getting tired. Too tired to deal with this, but he could tell by the rising voices that it was about to get ugly.

He was halfway down the bank already, his boots sinking into damp mud as he practically slid down with the ferry rope slung over his shoulder. The Eagle was loud enough to make men raise their voices just to be heard. That was usually enough to start trouble in itself. Forget about hot-headed men trying to leave work, and others trying to go to it. John ignored the wagons still rolling in and pressed through the crowd.

“Hold up!” someone yelled.

“No, you hold up, motherfucker!”

A mule balked and wagon wheels creaked as they lurched. John broke into a run. “Easy!” he called out to both sides.

Nobody listened.

One of them shoved past everyone and stepped into the open space by the ferry ramp. “We were here first,” he snarled.

“No, you weren’t,” a miner snapped back. “Get your fancy-pants clothes out of my way before I shoot you dead. We’ve been working all day and need to get home!”

“Just because you work the mine don’t mean you own the river!”

John stepped between them. “That’s enough,” he said sternly. “This crossing runs on rules and those coming from the mines cross first. It’s always been that way.”

The rule had been set long before John ever took over the ferry, and he’d kept it.

A man in a fancy bowler hat snorted. “Says who?”

John didn’t raise his voice. “Says me.”

That earned a laugh from somewhere. It wasn’t friendly. Bowler Hat took another step forward. His boots were too clean. His revolver sat high on his hip, leather still stiff.

“You’re just a ferryman,” he said. “Move aside.”

Bowler Hat’s hand hovered over his gun. One thing was clear in his demeanor: He was ready to fight over who went first on the ferry.

John glanced out past the road to his cabin, where his daughter, Lily, played on the porch. She’d come out barefoot, hair loose, hands gripping the railing. She was watching. John didn’t look back.

“Hands off your weapons,” he said to them.

Bowler Hat smiled thinly. “Or what?” The revolver cleared its polished leather.

One step. Inside the draw. Wrist first, then the throat. Drive him back, crush the wind out of him, put him down hard enough that he won’t get back up. John could already feel the give of muscle under his forearm flexing, ready to go.

It would be fast. Cleaner than a gun. The knowledge sat in him, sharp and ready. His jaw locked.

Don’t.

These men had no idea how much restraint he was showing them. He didn’t want to shoot anyone. He didn’t want blood on the ferry planks, although he wanted to make the man bleed. To show him what it truly felt like to be helpless. To wrap his hands around his neck and not let go until all the fight left him and he crumpled to the ground. 

John could almost feel his hands around him; he knew the exact amount of pressure it would take. It was funny, how fragile a life could be in a man’s hand. He could almost see the man’s body give up as it was deprived of oxygen.

He had done it before.

Too many times to forget.

But Lily was on the porch.

If he crossed that line, she wouldn’t see her father as a simple ferryman stopping trouble. She’d see what he’d been before. What he still was, if he let himself be. 

Not here. Not now. Not in front of her.

He still moved, stepping inside the draw, slapping Bowler Hat’s wrist sideways and driving his palm under the man’s thumb.

The gun cracked like thunder, but the barrel was pointed at the sky.

John twisted the man’s wrist and smirked when it popped and the man screamed.

John ripped the revolver free and turned before anyone else could think to shoot. He didn’t aim it, although part of him wanted to. Instead he threw it, arcing it like he was trying to hit the sun.

Then a miner shouted and a rifle came up from a wagon bed. “He said we go first, you bastard! Let us fucking go! We’re losing daylight!”

John crossed the space in two long strides, jamming the barrel upward. The rifle fired uselessly into the air and John slammed his shoulder into the man’s chest, sending him crashing into the mud.

“Enough!” John barked.

He planted his boots on the ferry deck and faced them all. “This is the only crossing for miles,” he yelled. “You start shooting, you’ll hit someone you didn’t mean to. You’ll tear holes in this ferry. And when I shut the ferry down for the day, you’ll all be stuck on the wrong side of the river!”

Someone spat, and although his temper was getting the best of him already, he ignored it. “Downhill crosses first,” he said. “Two wagons. Then uphill. You don’t like it, you can try the ford and drown! It’s too fucking strong, but be my guest!”

Silence at first, and then an older miner nodded and holstered his gun.

One by one, others followed. All the while Bowler Hat man stared at him, mouth agape, and the miner he’d disarmed still sat in the dirt, clutching his arm. His face went white in shock. Nobody helped him up.

John turned his back on them and grabbed the ferry rope.

“Miners go first,” he growled. “Load up!”

The first wagon rolled forward, hooves of horses thudding heavily on the planks. The ferry dipped under the weight, and John braced—but he knew it would hold. The overhead cable that stretched bank to bank groaned.

The river fought him, trying to swing the deck downstream as the cable hummed relentlessly from the tension. John leaned into it as much as he could, gripping the road hard, letting it burn as it slid through his palms. His boots slid, his arms burned. 

Just a few more loads left for the day.

***

When the last wagon rolled off the ferry and the last man went about his way, John climbed the bank up. Lily met him halfway.

“Did you throw that one man’s gun in the river?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Why?”

“So nobody got shot.”

She thought about that. “Can he get it back?”

“No.”

She nodded, satisfied. “Were you scared?”

John knelt and brushed dirt from her knee. “I was careful.”

She smiled and John’s throat clenched tight. She looked more like her mother every day. Even now, at just seven years old, and built so thin she might float away if he didn’t keep an eye out, she still held an aura about her that was fiery and strong.

She was all elbows and knees skinned up from rough play and climbing things she wasn’t supposed to, and dark hair that never stayed fixed. He remembered how hard his wife Sarah had worked to fix it before she passed away. He, however, had given up trying.

That was something he’d always loved about Sarah. She never gave up. She always kept at something, even when it seemed completely futile.

Lily looked like Sarah minus the messy hair. Those big, beautiful, blue eyes, too.

He sighed when he caught a glimpse of a fresh wound on her forearm.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked, grabbing her wrist to pull her arm closer. Looked like a burn, but there was fresh blood coming up in dots.

She giggled. “That rope over there…” 

The ferry line. He shook his head. It was thick and rough and it had a habit of biting anyone careless enough not to take heed of it. Lily had been the victim for the day, and careless was the best word for her.

He sighed heavily. “I told you to stay away from the docks…”

He couldn’t keep an eye on her all day while he transported the ferry back and forth, but he’d tried. She always stood too close to trouble, like she didn’t know quite where the edge was. He shook his head. Reminded him of himself as a boy—but that was the problem. She wasn’t a boy. She was a girl.

He hated that she didn’t have a mother. He would always watch her from the corner of his eye, when he was able, but she wasn’t like other girls. She couldn’t be reined in, no matter how much he tried.

She was a little hellion. Running barefoot on rough boards, trusting every damned one of them to hold her weight. But she was the best thing that ever happened to him. And it seemed like she and this river were the only things keeping him grounded.

She kept him honest, as a father and a man. She even knew when he was lying, just like Sarah had. That was why he didn’t lie. That was why he did everything he could so he wouldn’t have to. She always asked questions to him straight, her eyes fixed right on him. He tried to answer the same way. Straight and to the point.

Everything he did at the crossing—and everywhere else for that matter, every single choice he made—it all passed through a single thought before his hands would react.

What does she see when she looks at me?

Come on, Lil,” he said, standing up with a groan, his bones rattling. Gray threaded through his dark hair now, the thickest at the temples, and he felt it in his joints more often than he cared to admit.

“We have to stop at Ruth’s!” she called behind her as she skipped a pace ahead of him.

The trading post sat back from the road, just across the way from his cabin, with a small little path bordered by rock and wildflowers. A woman’s touch. Although the owner, Ruth Farrell, seemed the opposite of the kind of woman that would do such a thing. The bell over the door jingled once and Lily pushed ahead. Ruth Farrell looked up from the counter, pencil paused mid-mark. Her eyes landed right on John.

“You’re done early,” she said, moving her eyes to Lily.

“Done enough,” John replied.

Ruth held her pencil still, tapping it slightly on the counter. “Something stirred things up at the crossing from the sound of it.” The shouting must have carried all the way up the bank for her to hear.  

He didn’t speak on it. Ruth Farrell ran her trading post the way some men ran a poker table. She was quiet, and she was observant, but she was always counting more than what was in front of her.

John didn’t trust people, and he definitely didn’t waste time gossiping.

She took a breath, dabbing her lip with her pencil. “Flour?” she asked him. “Unless you want to tell me what happened?”

“Flour,” John said.

“Coffee?”

“Coffee.”

Ruth moved toward the shelves, unhurried. “Figured.”

She was tall for a woman and slender with dark auburn hair that she had pinned up beautifully. She was a nice-looking woman, but there was absolutely nothing about her that invited softness.

She had sharp brown eyes that were intimidating to some of the miners, and although John had known of her for years, he really had never seen her smile.

She moved through the store biting her lip in thought as she weighed flour. Then she moved back to the book she was writing in, picking up her pencil, writing out what John could only assume was his credit.

Still, no emotion moved across her face.

John sometimes wondered what she’d been before the mountains hardened her. Or if the mountains, with their hard men and ruthless weather, had just given her permission to be the way she had always been.

She slid Lily a peppermint stick with a sly smile. He rolled his eyes with a smirk. She always seemed to favor Lily in that way, giving her candy. Although, neither of them really spoke to one another.

Lily grinned, unwrapping it quickly before stuffing it in her mouth.

“What do you say?” he asked in a grumble.

She beamed, looking from him to Ruth. “Thank you,” she said politely, half the stick protruding from her mouth.

Ruth nodded, and looked back to her notepad without another word. John grunted and gathered up his supplies from the counter, bundling them under his arm. The bell above the door rang out again as they moved back outside and across the way to the cabin.

Lily immediately bolted to the door, her peppermint stick lodged in her mouth. He was a little slower behind her. He could hear her little feet as they pounded down the hall to her room. But he was set for the kitchen at the back of the house.

He set the supplies on the kitchen table, then went out of the back door toward the corral, the horses already nickering when they saw him. Beyond them, his low, modest barn squatted against the next rise of hill on his property. That was where the hay they were eager for was kept.

He shook his head. “Always nice to know you’re happy to see me,” he said sarcastically, moving to gather hay to feed them.

What he had here was small and modest, but it was his.

A handful of cattle that grazed the hillside, a few chickens that wandered around the yard, his horse and Lily’s, and two mules. 

It wasn’t exactly a ranch, but it was enough. Enough to keep him fed, to keep Lily busy—and enough to feel like he had something worth protecting.

He forked hay into the troughs as quickly as he could, his body wearing down fast, ready for rest after a long day. By the time he got back into the house, he was famished. Hungry. Tired. And yet, his eyes went to the mantle in the sitting room at the front of the house. 

His father’s gun. He hadn’t touched it in years, and yet there was something about today that made him want to hold onto it. The miners and businessmen were always at each other’s throats, but today he’d wanted nothing more than to put every one of them in their place.

He didn’t like that.

He didn’t want to be that man.

Not for Lily, and not for himself. And yet, he knew deep down he was capable of going back to that life. He was capable of becoming that man again. He almost had when he lost Sarah. But Lily kept him tethered. This home kept him tethered.

It was his everything.

Chapter Two

Mid morning was always John’s slower time of day, once everyone had already settled into where it was that they were going for the day. And that was when a man on a mighty fine horse galloped into the crossing.

John noticed the horse before he noticed the man. It was a deep chestnut-colored stallion with a black mane, well brushed and well shod. It had muscles that rolled clean and stout as it moved. Its tack was plain but high quality, with nice supple leather well cared for.

It came down the river road at an easy gallop with its head low. It was well fed, well bred, and seemed to have a confidence about it, unlike most of the horses that pulled freight wagons day in and day out.

This animal moved like it trusted everything around it. Like it had the most pampered life of anything he’d ever seen. It was the kind of animal that didn’t end up in places like this often. Or, by John’s experience… ever.

He was halfway through tying down the ferry raft after a crossing, coiling up the rope, when the horse came to a halt near the dock. The rider dismounted, tying his stallion off a few yards short of the water. The man was a bit plainer-looking than the horse, not nearly as flashy.

He wore a fine coat, though, despite the warmth of the day. It was tailored close to his shoulders and fit well in his midsection. His boots were polished. Not new, but well cared for, just like the animal’s leather. And from what John could tell, he wasn’t carting any kind of supplies that usual businessmen at the crossing had on them. He wasn’t even carrying a gun.

Men without guns in places like this either trusted the world too much, or they had learned they didn’t need one.

“Mr. Thorne?” he asked.

The horse’s tail and ears flicked and the animal made a soft blow as the rider looked up, in John’s direction, smiling.

John didn’t answer right away. He just studied the man’s face. He was in his early forties maybe. Clean shaven with a long, smooth looking scar that ran along his jawline. His hair was gray, just like his eyes.

“Mr. Thorne?” he asked again, moving around to the other side of the horse.

“Yes,” John said.

The man stepped closer and offered his hand. “Ned Cooper. I represent the Mountain Valley Development Company.”

John glanced at the man’s hand and hesitantly took it. Cooper’s grip was firm. Not challenging or intimidating, but like a man well-practiced. A man who had shaken a lot of hands in his life. But his palms weren’t callused even the slightest, telling John all he needed to know. 

This man didn’t get his hands dirty with anything.

“What do you want?” John asked.

Cooper’s smile widened. “A straightforward kind of man. I like that,” he said before gesturing with his chin toward the ferry. “You operate the only reliable crossing of the Eagle River for miles in either direction. That makes this place… quite valuable.”

John said nothing. He didn’t need another man to tell him what was valuable and what wasn’t.

Lily’s laughter rang out from the porch. She was chasing a butterfly or something.

“I’ll be direct,” Cooper said. “The company would like to purchase this crossing.”

He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and withdrew a folded envelope. The paper was thick and cream-colored, like fresh milk. It was the fanciest paper he’d ever seen. He didn’t open it. He just looked at the man again, his eyes narrowed in curiosity.

“How much?” he asked.

Cooper’s eyebrows rose slightly and he chuckled. “Three times the assessed value,” he said. “Paid immediately.”

“Assessed by who?”

“County records,” Cooper said. “With consideration given to future development.”

“Future development, huh?” John asked, biting the inside of his cheek. “Who’s behind your company?”

Cooper didn’t hesitate, but the way he answered it didn’t sit well with John. It was rehearsed. Fake. “Investors, most of them out of Denver. Men who believe the railroad will reshape this territory.”

“And you think it will?” John asked.

“It already is!” Cooper exclaimed with a hearty laugh.

John turned the envelope over once, then handed it back. “Ain’t interested,” he said with a hint of finality in his tone.

Cooper blinked. It was quick, but John saw it. The moment when the world failed to follow a script. John could tell the man wasn’t used to hearing “no.” And it wasn’t something he particularly liked, either.

“I haven’t asked you to read it yet,” Cooper choked out.

“You don’t need me to,” John replied, turning back to his rope, coiling it up again. “I don’t need to read it to know the answer,” he continued with nonchalance that he could tell irritated the man. “I’m happy here, and it ain’t for sale.”

Cooper’s eyes widened and then narrowed. “You’re a widower,” he said. “With a young daughter. Running a ferry alone is a demanding life. And this is more money than you’ll ever see here.”

John felt something whirl in his gut. He didn’t like that this man knew his business.

“Been doin’ it for a lot of years, and it’s my life,” he bit out. “I’m sorry, but my life ain’t for sale. I don’t care how much money someone’s got for it. You can take that fine horse of yours on, and offer money to someone else.”

“Of course your life isn’t for sale,” Cooper said with a smooth and defensive chuckle that John immediately was offended by. It seemed more condescending than not. “But futures are. And this crossing—” He gestured again toward the river. “It ties you to risks you won’t ever have to deal with if you take this offer. Why not make a better life for yourself and your daughter?”

John dropped the rope he just now realized he was still holding and took a few steps closer to Cooper. Not threatening. Just enough to make a point. “There’s risk in everything you do, but I’m willin’ to take that risk here because this is my home, Mr. Cooper.”

For a flash of a second, the pleasant mask of Ned Cooper slipped away. Not entirely, but enough that John caught a glimpse of it. He was not only irritated, but flustered. He didn’t like John’s answer. 

John gritted his teeth. If he didn’t like that answer, he was really going to hate the next one John gave if the man didn’t take his horse and ride out.

“The valley is changing,” Cooper said with a salesman smile. “Men who don’t change with it sometimes find themselves… isolated.”

There it was. Spoken gently, like advice, but it sounded like a threat.

John smiled slightly, refusing to give him the satisfaction. He’d tried to be polite, and his patience was thinning, but he had to continue to try to be civil—for Lily’s sake, who was just up on the porch.  

“I’ve been isolated before,” John replied with a shrug.

Cooper continued to stare at him for a moment, and then he took a step back. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat and slipping the envelope into John’s coat pocket. “I’ll be nearby.” His lips curled up in a polite smile. “In case you reconsider.”

He mounted his horse and rode off at the same unhurried pace he’d rode in with. John watched him go, gallantly, as if the conversation had gone exactly to plan. For a moment, he wondered if he’d just been made a fool, as if he had somehow fallen into some sort of game of cat and mouse. 

He took a breath, dug into his pocket, and opened the envelope. Part of him was angry he let the man give it back to him. Part of him was curious.

It looked real and official enough, with legal language he barely understood. The offer was large. One that would have made other men feel small for turning it down. But not John.

He folded it once and slipped it back inside his pocket. 

Truth was, John hadn’t been in Colorado long, but this place—the town of Eagle’s Hollow—had become a safe haven to him. 

He’d been born in Tennessee to a trapper father. He’d been the best damned man John had ever known. After he died, John had drifted west. He served as a Union scout during the war, then spent six years tracking Apache for the Army.

Those six years broke him. More than he ever thought they would. More than he could have ever imagined. Then he’d inherited his father’s old partner’s ferry crossing—this very crossing—and that had been his ticket out of the Army.

He met Sarah. They married.

He thought they’d live happily ever after. How silly of him to believe in those old tales, but he had. He’d finally belonged with Sarah and Lily again, after spending a lot of years completely alone.

This ferry and this land. This cabin. This small lot of mules and cattle. It had become home. Violence and ruin was behind him, and there was no way he’d leave this way of life, knowing what kind of life he had before Colorado.

Lily came down from the porch, dragging a stick behind her, dust puffing at her heels. “Who was that fancy man?”

He shrugged and grabbed his bundle of rope again, slinging it over his shoulder. “Nobody important,” he grunted, stepping off the dock and up toward the cabin on the hill.

***

That night, after Lily was sound asleep in bed and the entire valley had gone quiet, John took his father’s old rifle down from the mantle before moving to his rocking chair with it. He sighed, grabbing the rag he’d gathered earlier to clean it. There in the lamplight he sat, gun in hand, eyes scanning out the window. When he finished cleaning it, he didn’t put it back on the mantle. Instead, he kept it close and walked outside.

He made a slow perimeter check of his property. There was something about that meeting that felt… off. Something about that man’s demeanor that felt forced and menacing.

He knew what polite threats sounded like. He’d heard them wrapped in orders by better men than Ned Cooper. 

Men who smiled while they destroyed everything in front of them.

Chapter Three

It took him a lot of hours to finally get to sleep, and even still, he slept with his rifle leaned up against his bedside table. Yet, he still woke up before the sun—to the wrong kind of quiet.

He didn’t hear anything in the corral. No impatient stamp of hooves, no complaining huffs of mules that wanted fed. Not like usual.

The sound of the river was all he heard. That never stopped. He even heard that sound in his sleep every night. He wasn’t even sure he could ever sleep without that sound again. But the animals’ sounds were part of his home, too.

It was part of his routine.

A routine he had spent years perfecting.

John lay still for a moment, training his ears to block out the river and listen more intently for any animal sounds. But nothing came but the river, and the sound of wind as it moved through the cottonwoods at the bank.

He sat up without thinking, already reaching for his trousers.

The floorboards were cold on his feet, but he ignored it to pull on his shirt and step to the window. The yard was gray and dark, the world still asleep. But the animals usually weren’t. Yet, there was no sign of horses shifting or cattle pressing close to the fence, ready to eat. There was nothing.

He dashed out of his bedroom, through the house and out the front door before he could bother with boots or anything else. Porch boards creaked as he stomped down the steps, his feet instantly getting wet from the dew on the grass. He crossed the yard in long steps where the corral gate hung…open.

Not broken. Not torn from its hinges. Open, with the hook unlatched and chain undone. Sons of bitches!