Eli Creed: The Last Ride

Inside the book

Explore this title.

Nine years on the road. Eli rides home.

The road did not look any different.

It is the first thing Eli Creed reads as he comes up the rise above Two Pines for the first time in nine years. The town has not shifted. The country has not softened. The men on the boards do not yet recognize the face he wears now. There is a saloon at the end of the street where a woman stands at the door with eyes that find him at the second sight and a question in her voice he should have known would come before he came.

There is a boy at her fence.

Ten years old. Working a rope the way a man works it. Reading a fence post the way a man reads a country. When Eli asks him his name, the boy answers without flinching.

For two years, the country lets them have it. Eli builds a fence. Adaline keeps the saloon. The boy grows.

Then a federal marshal rides up the basin road. He is twenty years old. He is the son of the marshal who let Eli go nine years before. The order his father gave at the road south of Silas sits in a file at the federal court at Cheyenne, written down in a hand neither of them has read.

The country between them has come back for what it was owed.

A father's ride ends. A son's begins.

The conclusion of the Eli Creed Trilogy. A literary Western about what a man carries and who carries him.

Book Three of the Eli Creed Trilogy. Follows Eli Creed and Eli Creed: The Long Ride.