The Chase — Blair Howard

During the last few days of the Civil War, a company of Confederate raiders rode into the small Kansas town of Elbow. There they raped, pillaged and murdered among the local populace, thus triggering a chain of events and a chase that extended for more than a thousand miles across the grasslands and mountains of Kansas and the deserts of New Mexico. Along the way, Confederate Lieutenant Jesse Quintana, a ruthless, cold-blooded killer without a conscience, and his men massacred a band of Comanche women and children, fought two battles with Comanche War Chief, White Eagle, and murdered and plundered his way southwest along the Santa Fe Trail. Quintana had a nine-day start over his pursuers, Captain Ignatius O'Sullivan and Sergeant Major Boone Coffin, along with an Osage Indian scout and a small company of Federal cavalry. The climactic end to the chase came among the mountains on the Mexican border six weeks after it began. You will remember O'Sullivan and Coffin from the author's previous novel, The Mule Soldiers. Their adventures continue.