After finishing The Space Trilogy after a year of working on it, I wanted something quick and easy to read to pad my annual reading total before diving into the other long-term and lengthy tomes on my chairside table. And, boy, mister, was this book quick and easy.
It weighs in at 137 pages of large print, double-spacing, and pages with chapter titles and blank pages before each chapter. So it’s really more novella length and young adult in tone and depth; it has a good plot, sparse and moving prose, but not a lot of umami; the main character is good, the people who help him are good, and here are the events/set pieces for the plot. Better, but shorter, than the worst of men’s adventure paperbacks (including Westerns) and probably heavily influenced by television and movie tropes.
So: After recovering from a long bout of pneumonia, the main character, “Red” Weathers, goes hunting for the people who stole his herd of 35 cattle and his really good horse while he was will. He watched them do it, but when he tried to make an effort to stop them, he passed out from the effort before leaving his house. His first stop is a town up the way where he learns that the thieves sold the horse to the local hardman or bad rancher, so he goes to buy his stolen horse from said rancher–who immmediately goes to the gun, and some of the rancher’s gun hands get shot–and Red frees a squaw, the wife of an Indian he has met, from captivity. The rancher gets his friend the sheriff on the case, and Red, the Indian, and the town blacksmith, goes on the run, sets a trap, and kills some of the other gunhands but get captured. After a trial that turns from corrupt to fair–and where Red is freed and the bad rancher is booked, Red goes on to gather his horses from a crooked gambler and to settle scores with those who have wronged him before a happy epilogue where he’s back to ranching and living with a new wife.
So: Well-written, but not very deep. The author is/was a Pentecostal professor/speaker, and a list of his other books includes what looks to be a number of other westerns plus some nonfiction, Christian, motivational, and/or memoirs. I won’t seek the author out, but if I see some of his other books in the wild, I might pick them up.
I bought this book at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library in 2024. In years past, I’ve kinda gamified hitting all four of the Friends of the Christian County Library book sales in a year at the rotating libraries (Ozark, Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). This year, though, I’ve missed the Ozark sale and the Clever Sale (I could not parse the markings on the calendar for a while, and when I figured it out, somehow I managed to forget what Saturday it was even though it was, semi-scrutibly, upon the calendar). That leaves Nixa’s three day sale in August and Sparta’s one-day bag sale in the autumn. Will I go? I dunno. I seem to be making slight progress on my stacks, or at least my chairside table, so I don’t want to maybe overfill them. HOWEVER, on an autumn day, with a $3 bag (or two) in my hand, who knows to what levels of gluttony I might descend.
