Yesterday was the book birthday for my novella The Broken Man, which is the first book in the series The Travels of Jacob Wolf. I’ve already talked about it a couple of times here, so instead of yammering on, here’s the synopsis, followed by a little excerpt.
After being sent away by the girl he thought he was going to marry, young Jacob Wolf is ready to throw his life away in a blaze of glory at the first opportunity. However, his death wish gives him nerves of steel and he finds himself unscathed after his first deadly encounter. A local sheriff teams him up with an experienced bounty hunter and now Jacob is on the trail of outlaws, but hiding the fact he only wants a death that will make the papers and fill his old girlfriend with remorse.
“Do you really think my gun looks too new?” I asked, and clumsily pulled it from the shiny black leather holster. The clumsiness was less of an act than I would have liked, but I was as young and green as my unwanted company said I was. I’d done some practicing with that gun and I got to where I could shoot a tree trunk from about fifty paces if I took careful aim and a few deep, calming breaths. Tree trunks don’t shoot back, though.
Kepford laughed and mockingly held up his hands, the reins dangling between the fingers of his left. “Don’t shoot me, pardner,” he teased.
I pretended to study the blue-black barrel of my revolver. “I haven’t shot it much,” I confessed. “I grew up in Kentucky. There was a girl, and her folks decided to move west. I thought we were going to get married, so I left my ma and pa and followed her.” I looked up from the gun to meet Kepford’s dark, laughing eyes.
“She die?” he asked.
“To me she did,” I answered. “You make me remember a lesson from my schoolhouse days back in Kentucky. Miss Laura was teaching us something about the slave days, and she told us about something called ‘moral ambiguity.’ You ever heard of that?”
“Nope,” Kepford said, and now he openly looked over my shoulder at his partner in the distance. “What’s it mean?”
“Well, you plan to rob me and probably kill me with your friend, but so far you haven’t threatened me,” I told him. Now his dark eyes were hard on me. “You haven’t made no threat yet, but …”
I shot him then.
The book is available in paperback and e-book, with the audio coming soon. If you like short Westerns, I hope you’ll give it a try.
Steven E. Wedel 
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