Long Ride

Long Ride (An Eldridge Sample Western)The hunt for one outlaw is over. The war for the Territory has just begun. U. S. Marshal Eldridge Sample has done the impossible: he's hunted down the ghost of the plains, Cowboy Jim, and delivered his body to Fort Smith. But the victory rings hollow. His partner, Thomas Going Snake, is dead, and Judge Parker's courtroom justice feels a long way from the hard reality of the trail.
The cost of the hunt comes due when Sample's report reveals that half of the recovered outlaw gold-$2, 500-was given to Thomas's widow as a pension by the Creek Lighthorse. Furious at this "theft" of federal property and the Creek Nation's independent trial of the surviving gang members, Judge Parker gives Sample a new, impossible order: ride back to Okmulgee, take back the money, and arrest any man who stands in his way-including his former ally, Captain Samuel Checote.
Saddled with a loud-mouthed, trigger-happy deputy and a by-the-book lawyer, Sample returns to a town that now sees his badge as an invasion. But as federal and Creek law face off in a tense Council House showdown, a new, professional killer strikes, murdering a merchant and setting a deadly trap. With a false trail leading one posse south and a deadly fugitive racing north, Sample is caught in the middle.
He must choose between the iron-clad law of the U. S. government and the hard-won justice of the Territory, a choice that will force him to confront a conspiracy of land-grabbers, out-gun a team of killers, and decide, once and for all, which side of the river his loyalty lies on. Packed with the gritty action and razor-sharp dialogue, Long Ride is a relentless Western thriller that tears down the myth of the frontier, exploring the brutal, high-stakes conflict between federal law and a sovereign nation's right to justice.