Excerpt from Fallen Land by Taylor Brown, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The man looked hurt.

"Well, if you're extra partial to bridges, the nearest is ten miles yonder. Them sons a bitches blown her last month. Dynamite. But she's still operable, least tolerably. Don't you go telling nobody, though. That's in confidence."

He winked.

The boy looked upriver in the direction indicated. Then he tipped his cavalryman's hat at the ferryman.

"I'm much obliged, sir."

As he hauled the horse down to the soft flats of the riverbank, the boy knew his pursuers would learn all they needed to know from this man. They would know what condition he was in, what condition his horse. They would know what direction he was headed, how much ground they could gain on him by taking the ferry. And, most of all, they would know he was not a boy without fear.

He stopped the horse a ways down the bank and looked back over his shoulder at the dozing ferryman. The boy knew how he could remove all of that knowledge from the man's head. All that might betray him. And he could prove to them what kind of a man he was. A kind better left alone. His fingers touched the butt of the Colt. A moment later he gripped great fistfuls of the horse's mane and shot away toward the bridge.

He began to catch shapes quivering upon ridges he'd crossed, dust rising from paths he'd taken just hours before. They were gaining. He stopped for nothing, and still they gained.

They overtook him two days later in the valley of the farmhouse. It was the Colonel and two of his fastest riders, the Colonel riding hatless on a big blood bay, the other two flanking him. The trio broke from the trees diagonal to the boy in a flying wedge, the Colonel leading with his horse pistol drawn, the others with Spencer repeaters already shouldered like buffalo hunters of the plains. It was just the three of them, riding light for speed, and it was plenty.

They came on not firing at first to save the horse he rode. They headed him off right before the porch of the house. He called out to her over them, and they smiled from behind the long barrels of their weapons, pointing him down. Ava appeared in the window of the room where he had first and last seen her, where she had perhaps sewn the coat he wore with those white and slender fingers that spread now flat upon the windowpane like a prisoner's.

"Off the horse," said the Colonel.

He had his horse turned broadside to the porch steps, the front door.

"Didn't hear you," said the boy, cocking his ear toward him.

A blow landed across his back and he fell forward. His hands streaked across the sweat-slick musculature of the horse, helpless. It was too lean to grip. Too hard. He landed shoulder-first in the yard and his wind left him, thumped out of his lungs. He rolled onto his back and looked bleary-eyed at the men and horses, their shapes warped and wavering as those seen from below the surface of a well. He could not get enough air.

The Colonel shucked his near foot from the stirrup and brought his other leg over the pommel and dropped from his horse without ever turning his back. The gaunt hollows of his face, his cheeks, looked down into the boy's. The upturned points of his mustache sat upon his face like a black smile. He reached out of sight and his hand came back, placing the slouch hat on his head, pulling the brim into place.

"I give a boy a chance, and look what it gets me. All for a goddamn woman."

"Her name is Ava," said the boy. "I saved her."

The Colonel pulled him off the ground by the coat.

"But can you save yourself?"

The boy heard the patchwork of colors strain against the stitches that bound them, begin to tear faintly but not to give.

"I saved her," he said.

The butt of the horse pistol came hard across his temple, his jaw, his nose. Bone and cartilage succumbing to harder matter. The Colonel dropped him, broken, to the ground.

Excerpted from Fallen Land by Taylor Brown. Copyright © 2016 by Taylor Brown. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.