Retired cavalry captain Gus Parham only meant to ride into town, have a drink, and recover a runaway horse.
Instead, he and Red Hawk Stands Alone, his Crow foreman and oldest friend, find a Shoshone girl fighting for her life in the Wyoming hills. Hisei has escaped from a government school in Pennsylvania and crossed half a continent trying to get home. But the men who attacked her are Arapaho, and one of them is the son of a feared war chief.
Gus and Red are forced to take lethal measures against her attackers to assure her safety.
Now Gus and Red have a choice: hand the girl over to the authorities and let her be sent back east, or cross the brutal Red Desert with vengeance riding hard behind them.
With little water, tired horses, and a wounded past closing in from every direction, the three must outrun four Arapaho warriors, including Thorn Vine, a warrior driven by grief and blood debt. What begins as an act of mercy becomes a desperate journey across unforgiving country, where survival depends on trust, grit, and the hard decisions good men make when there are no clean choices left.
Red Desert Crossing is a lean, character-driven Western novella about friendship, honor, consequence, and the dangerous distance between justice and revenge.
Fans of these authors will enjoy Red Desert Crossing
Readers who enjoy the hard-country storytelling of Louis L’Amour, the dry humor and grit of Charles Portis, the moral weight of Larry McMurtry, the lean dialogue of Elmore Leonard’s Westerns, and the emotional frontier journeys of Paulette Jiles will find plenty to like in Red Desert Crossing.
