Trusted Partner — A Ranger's Badge Excerpt

March 1904. Shane Harper has been putting off a letter to his brother Flynn for three nights running. Here, camped in a stand of juniper with Kendall Bowden, he finally has to reckon with the question he's been avoiding.

I'd been putting off the letter to Flynn long enough that Kendall noticed before I did anything about it.

We made camp in a stand of juniper off the main trail, close enough to a seep spring to water the horses, far enough back to keep our fire from being seen.

"That's the same paper you had out three nights ago," he said, dropping onto the log across the fire from me. "You write 'Dear Flynn' yet, or still working up to it?"

"Working up to it."

"Seen you write faster reports when somebody's shooting at us."

"Rynning doesn't ask me questions I don't have answers for."

He let that stand. I smoothed the paper on my knee, weighted one corner against the wind with a stone, and turned the pencil over without putting it to the page.

In his last letter, Flynn asked whether I'd thought more on what he'd said to me in Holbrook. Whether I'd found what he'd found.

I still didn't have an answer for him. Two years on from that conversation, and the truth was I'd mostly stopped looking for a family of my own.

"You ever think on it?" Kendall asked, working a stick into the coals. "Settling. Having someone waiting for you at the end of a hard ride, instead of just more riding."

"Some."

"And?"

"I figure some men aren't built for it. Or aren't built for it yet. Hard to say which." I folded the paper back up, unwritten, and placed it back in my saddlebag. "Flynn found his. Doesn't mean I'll find mine."

"Suppose not." He was quiet a moment, watching the fire, his knife working slow shavings off a stick he'd picked up off the ground. "For what it's worth, you've got more than most. You know that."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning you've got me riding beside you most days of the year, and I'd wager that counts for something, even if it's not what your brother's talking about." His voice didn't waver saying it.

Couldn't fault the truth in it. Near three years now since we'd been paired together. The rimrock above Cottonwood Wash, and what he'd done there without a half-second's hesitation. The cold ridge above the Hartley place, waiting for men who never came.

I'd had partners before him. Grady had given me a decade of proof that a man could be trusted. But Grady had built his own life now, off in Prescott with Justine and their children, and what I had with Kendall had filled a space I hadn't admitted was empty.

"You're right," I said. "Counts for plenty."

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.