FIRST PAGE: The Bravos by Brian Wynne, Ace, 1966.

The Bravos by Brian Wynne PB Paperback 1966 Vintage Ace Books Western – Monster Books and Items

SYNOPSIS:

The odds were high, but the stakes were higher!

"If the law's only wanted when it's convenient, then you can find yourself a marshal who thinks that way." Jeremy Six took his badge off, mounted his horse, and rode away from Spanish Flat.

But habit lingers and a trained trigger finger gets itchy. So when Jeremy fell in with an odd pair -- a greenhorn newspaperman and a bespectacled ex-con -- and the three were ambushed on the road to Rifle Gap, it proved beyond his ability to keep out of the action.

And action there was plenty as an intricate plot unfolded for control of the lush Concho Valley that also involved extracting a six-gun vengeance for the dark doings of a desperado past.

Page 1:

Jeremy Six rode along the narrow mountain trail with his back braced taut, half expecting a bullet. Great shelves and slabs of gray-yellow rock shot back glittering reflections of the sun, making him squint and rendering vision difficult. Behind any glaring rock a rifle might be waiting for him.

His horse was a sure-footed sorrel gelding, white-maned, a mountain-trained cutting horse. On careful feet it carried him at a ground-eating gait, up past the glittering rock faces. Jeremy Six was both an experienced manhunter and a cautious man: he carried his sixgun in his hand while his narrowed eyes swept the crags and shadows of the tortured mountainsides.

He came around a bend onto a high promontory. From here the land fell away from him like a rock into a well. Below the promontory, the great Mogul Rim plummeted down. The country planed off severely until, a thousand feet beneath him, Jeremy Six could see the vast flow of the desert plain sweeping away into the west. This abrupt change in the land, from jagged mountains to barren flats, always had the capacity to stir him, no matter how often he came upon it.

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The Bravos by Brian Wynne PB Paperback 1966 Vintage Ace Books Western – Monster Books and Items