Reading from The Last Ride, Berkley, 1978, pages 93-103 unpublished in Howard’s lifetime

The Sonora Kid returns as a conflicted hero that barely fits the modern definition, but stays truer to the ancient tragic type, such as Timocreon, Milo or Polydamus. Not a physically imposing man, but quick to act, fast and ruthless, Steve Allison is played for a practical joke by an unarmed man who drops a harmless snake on him in a saloon. The Kid guns the man down and is now pushed to one side of the gunfighter line, in a world that demands a gunfighter be a law man or a criminal, not an individual striving to walk his own coded line. Modern readers who think this prejudice against the private armed citizen and the heroization of cop and criminal is something new, take note.

Ironically, The Kid is terrified of snakes, suffering a dread of the symbol of evil that Howard so often used to infuse a sense of terror into his Conan stories, where the Egyptian god Set was transformed into a serpent deity. The horror of reptilian intelligence slithered through many a Howard tale, most notably in Worms of the Earth. This base primate fear, carried down from the trees by our earliest ancestors, which infuses much of Howard’s horrific settings with dread, takes away The Sonora Kid’s honor, which haunts him. The Sonora Kid is perhaps my favorite Robert E. Howard character, as conflicted and stubborn as Kane, as impulsive as Conan, and as quick as El Borak but without their imposing powers.

The quotes below represent some of the insights on characterization the author brought so strongly to the writer’s table:

“…a fear that had haunted him since babyhood had made him momentarily loco.”

“Right or wrong, the noose ain’t wove for me, yet.”

“The Kid was human enough to desire not to decorate the end of a rope.”

Upon taking up with an outlaw band;

“They were a wolf-pack, banded together for mutual protection, wary of each other as the rest of the world. These men were untamed, not amenable to the rules governing the mass of humanity.”

“He seemed to glimpse the implacable hand of Fate driving him inexorably to a life of crime… He determined to play out the hand Life had dealt him to its red finish.”

The Kid swears to himself rather than making public oaths, knows doubt and remorse, and yet struggles impulsively with the uncaring world that has him in its grasp.

The Sonora Kid is a likable hero in unlikely circumstances.