Once Upon A Time in the Past

Book Three of Once Upon A Time in the Past, subtitled "The Last Of The Logan Boys", marks the end of the infamous Logan boys' Outlaw Trail when all the brothers but one are dead, two by a posse's bullets, one at the end of a rope, and the other to escape to freedom - if freedom is tired, lonely, hungry - with a big lawman named Jake Shaw hounding his trail beyond his juridiction.

Jake Shaw was an old army veteran of the Civil War turned lawman shortly after the war ended. He was just twenty-two years old when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in April of 1865, just twenty-one years ago. He had hung up his uniform for a deputy's badge and later became sheriff of Clayton County.

He been wearing a Silver Star every since.

Jake Shaw had not lost brothers, uncles or cousins in the war as other soldiers he had known and, therefore, he held no drudge toward his fellow man of the Gray. Before the war, it had been just him and his maw. He knew nothing of his paw, only that he had been a riverboat operator on the Mississippi. His maw had traveled with his paw on every route, carrying him, Shaw, in her womb until the day he was born on the river.

She had been there when he left to join the war, standing in the yard waving goodbye. And she was there when he came home four years later.

He had stood over her with his head bowed, his Union hat in hand, to say goodbye to her again. A headstone said Sally Shaw had died in 1863. But her son hadn't learned of her death until he came home from the War of the Lost