Ralph Compton The Badlands Trail (The Trail Drive Series) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Compton stood six foot eight without his boots. He worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist. His first novel, The Goodnight Trail, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was the USA Today bestselling author of the Trail of the Gunfighter series, the Border Empire series, the Sundown Rider series, and the Trail Drive series, among others.

Lyle Brandt is a Spur Award-winning author and the recipient of the Life Achievement Peacemaker Award from Western Fictioneers, in addition to many other awards. He is the author of The Lawman series, including White Lightning, Reckoning, Blood Trails, and Avenging Angels.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Breakfast came early, as the foreman had promised: bacon, beans, and bread. It wasn't gourmet fare, but Toby Bishop had survived on worse.

From time to time, he had survived on nothing much at all.

The other hands seated along the outdoor trestle table, ten in all besides Bishop, spared time to introduce themselves, most of them shaking hands. Toby was good with names and filed them in his memory, matched up with faces, guessing that he'd find out more about them on the trail.

The only one who stuck out, for a start, was Graham Lott, a sometime preacher, likely self-ordained. A rangy man with thinning ginger hair, left eyebrow interrupted by a scar, he advised that those who felt inclined could call him "Pastor." He said grace over their tin plates piled with food and claimed that he'd be offering a Sunday service in the evenings, for anyone who felt the need after ten hours herding beef.

For Toby's part, he couldn't picture spending any downtime on his knees.

It wasn't that he spurned religion altogether. He'd been "raised right," as the folks in Cairo used to say-meaning brought up to be a rock-ribbed Baptist, though in Toby's case it felt more like a superficial coat of paint that weathered down with time.

When Illinoisans spoke of Cairo as the lowest city in the Prairie State, they mostly meant geography. It was the farthest south, as far as Toby knew, located at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, also with the lowest elevation in the state and prone to flooding, ringed around with levees in a bid to hold back nature's inundations. But there was a certain meanness to the place as well, and throughout Alexander County as a whole, particularly when it came to white folks versus blacks. People of color in the neighborhood kept to themselves whenever possible, free state before the Civil War or no, and on occasions when a young man might forget "his place," he sometimes wound up stretching rope.

That was one reason Bishop hadn't gone back home since lighting out at seventeen, the better part of sixteen years ago. But if he'd been expecting other states or towns to demonstrate more tolerance, they'd come up short so far.

While Toby cleaned his plate, he glanced around the table, firming up the link between faces and names. Foreman Bill Pickering was absent, busy elsewhere, but that still left ten hired hands besides himself and Pastor Lott.

On Toby's left sat Boone Hightower, forty-something, with a weathered air of weariness about him, focused on his food without contributing to conversation. Close on Bishop's right, Deke Sullivan was roughly half Hightower's age, maybe three-quarters of his weight, and wore his pistol holstered for a cross-hand draw that struck Toby as awkward.

Moving on from Sullivan, he came to Leland Gorch, the oldest drover in the bunch, somewhere on the high side of fifty, with a permanent black smudge at his jawline, which looked to Bishop like a gunpowder tattoo. It wasn't close enough for an attempted suicide, more like a remnant of some long-ago near-death experience.

To Gorch's right, down at the table's end, sat Curly Odom, obviously named in jest. He wore a slouch hat now, but if glimpsed without it, he was bald on top, with long hair down below the arid pate that draped his collar all around. He smiled a lot, maybe too much, and had no qualms about intruding on a conversation if he spied an opening.

Facing him sat Paco Esperanza, sole Latino riding for the Circle K on this trip, traces of his breakfast clinging to a handlebar mustache he'd cultivated to enhance his narrow face. To his right was Isaac Thorne, their only black companion on the trail, full-faced and sporting a goatee shot through with flecks of gray. Scarred knuckles marked him as a brawler at some bygone time, and maybe not that long ago.

To Thorne's right, facing Bishop, Estes Courtwright kept his head down, shaded by his hat's brim, fully focused on his food. He hadn't spoken yet in Bishop's presence and appeared to be a slacker when it came to making small talk. That was fine with Toby, since he hadn't joined the drive to pad his scanty list of friends.

That still left two. Beside Courtwright sat Abel Floyd, the Circle K's horse wrangler, who would keep and care for their remuda on the trail. That meant the blond late-twenties cowboy would be watching over thirty-odd replacement horses day and night, instead of babysitting some two thousand steers.

Across from Floyd, to Boone Hightower's left, sat Whitney Melville, tallest of the lot at six foot five or six, tipping the scale at around two hundred pounds. To that weight, add a fancy gun belt holding up a Colt Dragoon that had to measure nearly fifteen inches overall, more than four pounds of steel, together with a Bowie knife protruding from his boot.

Bishop felt sorry for his horse.

Bishop had finished his breakfast when a clanging racket echoed from the main ranch house. All eyes turned toward that direction to behold the foreman beating on a metal triangle suspended from a porch rafter, demanding their attention.

"Rally round!" he called. "We're burning daylight!"

Some of the hands were grumbling as they got up from their benches, but they clearly didn't mean much by it. Young or old, raring to go or halfway broken down, even if you'd done it all a dozen times before, there was a certain energy about the start-up of a trail drive that no free spirit could ignore.

At forty-seven, coming up on forty-eight that autumn, Gavin Dixon knew that he could stand to lose some weight. His wife had mentioned it in passing and he couldnÕt argue with her, tried to make his peace with smaller portions at some meals and cut back on his alcohol intake, but so far he had nothing much to show for it.

That was the thing about prosperity. When he and Maryanne had started building up the Circle K-named for their daughter, Katherine, who'd died before she reached her second birthday-it had been hard work from dawn to dusk, with little in the cooking pot but prairie stew. Once they had made a decent go of it, the spread still made demands, but they had help around the place, the number of their hands increasing as the herd grew and their bank account kept pace. Dixon wasn't retired, by any means, but there was marginally less to do that forced him to complete each job himself.

Now he was older than his father ever lived to be, and it occurred to him that most folks-in Atoka, anyway-regarded him as wealthy. Sometimes, facing his reflection in the mirror, Dixon reckoned it was mostly true.

Which didn't mean that he could stay home, rocking on the porch, and let Bill Pickering command the trail drive to St. Louis. Dixon wasn't that old yet, and when the time came, if he lived that long, he just might sell the spread and find a city place, maybe in Dallas or its new neighbor Fort Worth.

But not just yet.

He scanned the upturned faces of the drovers ranged before him, wishing he could pick out anyone among them who was likely to go sour on the trail. He'd trusted Pickering to hire them, but that didn't mean that all of them would go the distance without problems. Every drive he'd been on, there were quarrels that had to be resolved and some that couldn't be, so that he had to part with badly needed hands. He hoped there would be less of that, this time around, but Dixon never liked to bet on human nature to come shining through.

You could have heard a pin drop when...