Life Debt — A Ranger's Badge Excerpt
Six days into hunting the last of Chacon's border gang, Shane Harper makes one miscalculation on a narrow trail south of Morenci. What follows is the moment the partnership between Shane and Kendall Bowden becomes something neither man can walk back from.
We'd been hunting the last of Chacon's border gang for six days when the rocks above Cottonwood Wash nearly killed me.
Word had come down that the remnant of Chacon's outfit had scattered into the high country south of Morenci rather than ride home and wait their turn at the same rope. Bowden and I drew the eastern approach, a tangle of broken rimrock that forced a man to pick his footing or pay for it.
I should have read the ground better that morning. That's the plain truth of it, and I never dressed it up as anything else.
The trail narrowed into a chute between two slabs of red rock, wide enough for a horse and rider single file and not an inch more. I checked the rimrock on both sides before I put Cinder into it, the way I always did, and saw nothing but broken shadow and loose scree. I went in first because I always went in first when there was a chance of going in wrong.
I was three lengths into the chute when the rock above me spoke.
The shot came from higher and closer than I'd accounted for, and the man behind it was shooting downhill at a target moving away from him. That miscalculation on his part was the only mercy in the whole business. The bullet caught me high on the right shoulder instead of square through it, and the force of it spun me half out of the saddle before my mind had caught up to what my body already knew. Cinder shied hard. I lost the stirrup, lost my grip on the reins, and went down onto rock that didn't give an inch to break my fall.
The air left me on impact. For a moment I couldn't do anything but lie there and try to remember how lungs worked, my rifle pinned somewhere under my weight and my revolver lost in the dirt where I couldn't see it. Above me on the rimrock, a second man showed himself, working the lever of his rifle with the confidence of someone who believed he had all the time he needed.
I remember the particular quiet of that moment. Not calm, exactly. My body catalogued the sky, white with midmorning glare. The grit under my palms. Cinder's hooves scrabbling somewhere off to my left, still spooked. A man on his back in open ground with an empty hand doesn't get to argue with arithmetic like that.
Bowden didn't hesitate. I know that because I watched him do it with my own eyes, not pieced together afterward from what someone told me. He put his horse straight up the slope at an angle no sane man takes a horse, into open fire from two directions at once, and he didn't fire a shot himself until he had a clean line on the man above the chute.
About The Ranger's Badge
Two lawmen. Eleven missions. A bond forged in gunsmoke.
Shane Harper didn’t want a partner—until Kendall Bowden saved his life. Set against the real history of the Arizona Rangers, The Ranger's Badge follows their rides across a gritty territory of rustlers, border standoffs, and siege.
