by Ray Hogan
“I’m not afraid of holding it.”
“Good enough. Just so you know. And there’s one thing more … Sally.”
“What about Sally?”
“I figure to keep trying there, too.”
Jordan grinned. “You just do that, cowboy. She’ll pick the best man … just like her pa did.”
the end
About the Author
Ray Hogan was an author who inspired a loyal following over the years since he published his first Western novel, Ex-Marshal, in 1956. Hogan was born in Willow Springs, Missouri, where his father was town marshal. At five the Hogan family moved to Albuquerque where they lived in the foothills of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. His father was on the Albuquerque police force and, in later years, owned the Overland Hotel. It was while listening to his father and other old-timers tell tales from the past that Ray was inspired to recast these tales in fiction. From the beginning he did exhaustive research into the history and the people of the Old West, and the walls of his study were lined with various firearms, spurs, pictures, books, and memorabilia, about all of which he could talk in dramatic detail. “I’ve attempted to capture the courage and bravery of those men and women that lived out West and the dangers and problems they had to overcome,” Hogan once remarked. If his lawmen protagonists seem sometimes larger than life, it is because they are men of integrity, heroes who through grit of character and common sense are able to overcome the obstacles they encounter despite often overwhelming odds. This same grit of character can also be found in Hogan’s heroines, and in The Vengeance of Fortuna West (1983) Hogan wrote a gripping and totally believable account of a woman who takes up the badge and tracks the men who killed her lawman husband by ambush. No less intriguing in her way is Nellie Dupray, convicted of rustling in The Glory Trail (1978). One of his most popular books, dealing with an earlier period in the West with Kit Carson as its protagonist, is Soldier in Buckskin (1996). Above all, what is most impressive about Hogan’s Western novels is the consistent quality with which each is crafted, the compelling depth of his characters, and his ability to juxtapose the complexities of human conflict into narratives always as intensely interesting as they are emotionally involving.
