THE LAST ASSIGNMENT

A United States cavalry officer squares off against a bandit warlord in RLK’s rousing Old West adventure.

In 1880, Civil War veteran Maj. Travis Butler finds his impending retirement postponed when the one-eyed, half-Apache marauder Black Patch (motto: “Know enemy first, then kill all”) erupts from Mexico into the New Mexico Territory with his gang of 100 cutthroats, hellbent on murdering every settler he comes across. Butler pursues Black Patch with a company of the Second Cavalry regiment, helped by his longtime assistant Sgt. Noah Stubborn, the valiant but distrustful Navajo tracker Snow Bear, and one Junior Horner, the epitome of drunken Western grunge (“Bath?...It ain’t even spring yet”) who, when sober, proves to be a brilliant scout and logistics manager—and a dead shot with his Sharp Rifle. Black Patch’s trail of butchered homesteaders leads to a pitched battle at Quarter Moon Pass, then back into Mexico to Black Patch’s lair and a confrontation with 3,000 Mexican soldiers, then up north again for more perils on the road to Oklahoma. RLK’s yarn is a gritty, energetic chase narrative in which success hinges on the careful management of supplies, horses, and water rations—Travis decrees that each man can drink just one canteen every three days—as well as clever strategizing over where the enemy is headed or likely to be lying in ambush. It’s set in a tense frontier society seething with suspicion between Anglos, Indigenous Americans, and Mexicans, even when they’re fighting on the same side. RLK’s prose is vigorous and punchy, whether depicting combat scenes (“Those dead or dying were consumed by the flames; bullets from their belts began exploding causing even more chaos”) or Horner’s hard-bitten lyricism (“lately my mind’s been playing tricks with me, be sitting around thinking about the old days and after a while wonder if it really happened or was it just a dream”). The result is a vivid, bracing read.

An entertaining frontier shoot-em-up mixing rollicking action with bleak philosophizing.