Ralph Compton Drive for Independence (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.

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Chapter One

Saturday, April 5, 1873

Waking to early-morning daylight and a rooster crowing, Arthur Catlin had to take a moment and remember where he was.

A bunkhouse on the Bar X spread, with ten men on adjoining cots, all stirring into wakefulness. Another ten would just be rousing in a second bunkhouse on the property, some forty feet from where Catlin was reaching for his clothes and boots.

Their boss, Bliss Mossman, occupied the big house with his wife, Gayle, and their late-life son just coming up on seven years old. The Bar X foreman, Sterling Tippit, had a three-room house off to himself, and Jared Olney-Mossman's horse wrangler-lived in a smaller one behind the barn, adjacent to the paddock, so he'd hear if anything was troubling the stock at any hour.

The last thing Catlin had in mind when he rode into Santa Fe was joining a cattle drive. He had some limited experience with livestock from his youth, working around his parents' farm in southern Illinois, but nothing on the scale of driving some twenty-five hundred steers from Santa Fe northwestward across Kansas, to be sold at Independence, in Missouri.

Thinking of it now, as fellow drovers started filing out to breakfast, Catlin wondered whether he had gone and lost his mind.

The route they meant to follow didn't put his mind at ease.

Travelers called it the Cimarron Trail, cimarron being "wild" in Spanish. In theory, it spanned seven hundred and seventy miles between Santa Fe and Independence, with traffic passing both ways: herds trudging to market from New Mexico Territory, wagon trains of would-be settlers reversing that process westward. Part of the way was a "dry" route, sixty-some miles without potable water between the Wagon Bed Spring, which fed the Cimarron River, to the Arkansas River outside Wichita. Conestoga wagons carried barrels filled with water while it lasted, but a herd on foot would have to tough it out for up to five days without drinking anything, getting moisture-what there was of it-from grass and shrubs along the way.

And if Wagon Bed Spring was dry when travelers arrived, that made things even worse.

Catlin had never traveled over the Cimarron trail, but he'd heard stories of abandoned wagons, sun-bleached bones that might be cattle, horses, even humans. And not all of those who died along the way had passed from thirst.

Hostile Indians were found along the way, as were mixed bands of Comancheros who sold guns and liquor to the native tribes illegally. When they were short on inventory or desired a bit of sport, those low-life raiders sometimes preyed on wagon trains, although they tended to prefer a solitary stagecoach or a smaller group of immigrants-one wagon, say, or maybe two-proceeding without company and poorly armed.

If drought lay heavy on the land, or Indians were on the warpath, travelers each way might take a longer route, adding another hundred miles to their journey, thereby requiring more food, water, ammunition, and the like to make a go of it.

A wild trail any way you looked at it.

A trail herd and a wagon train moved at the same pace, roughly, covering on good days twelve to thirteen miles. "Good" days were those without a skirmish to be fought or rampant Mother Nature to be dealt with, wielding storms of sand, rain, lightning, snow, or sleet, depending on the time of year.

While a herd spent no fewer than sixty-two days traveling, they could expect warm weather all the way, from mideighties through April to the high nineties or hundreds during May and June. That dropped at sundown, possibly as low as freezing, though in record years the mercury had plummeted to ten or twelve degrees. As far as normal rainfall, that might range between three-quarters of an inch per month to double that, but squalls could blow up out of nowhere, bringing thunder, lightning, or cyclonic winds that spooked the steers into stampeding.

Always something new and different, the foreman had advised Catlin when he'd signed on. Not so much an adventure, he suspected, as a trial for men and animals alike.

How many, man and beast, would manage to survive, it was still anybody's guess.

The Bar X hands had lined a trestle table in the farmyard well before full light encroached upon the spread. Catlin did not consult his pocket watch to check the time precisely, satisfied to know that it was earlier than he normally rolled out of bed to face another day.

Two cooks-one from the house, named Sherman Toole, and Piney Rollins, who would man the chuck wagon once they departed, backed by teenager Tim Berryman, called "Little Mary" in his present role-served up breakfast to the hands. The menu they'd prepared included ham and bacon, biscuits and gravy, fried eggs, and tin mugs of steaming black coffee. No one complained about the fare or how much they'd received upon their metal plates.

While he ate, Catlin surveyed the other hands who would be going on the drive with him, their boss, foreman, and Jared Olney. He'd been introduced to all of them over the past two days while they were getting ready for the trek to Independence, and he'd always been a quick study with strangers' names.

Beside him on his left sat Danny Underwood, roughly Art Catlin's size but balding, though it was often covered by his hat. He had a port-wine birthmark on his jawline but pretended that he didn't know it; he likely caught hell for years from other kids while growing up. He wore no pistol at the table but possessed a Springfield Model 1855 rifle that he carried in a saddle boot when mounted on his palomino stallion.

Next to Underwood and to his left sat Zebulon Steinmeier, five foot six or seven, red hair graying at the temples and a paunch hanging over his belt. From seeing him around the spread, Catlin knew that he had a matching set of rifle and six-gun produced by the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. He rode a rose-gray gelding when at work on horseback.

Next in line to Catlin's left was thin Job Hooper, who pronounced his given name the way a preacher would on Sunday, reading from the Bible book of that same title, not confused with any ordinary job that Mr. Mossman or his foreman might assign. A First Model Schofield revolver rode his left hip, holstered backward, and when riding on his liver chestnut mare, he kept a Springfield Model 1871 rifle sheathed securely in a saddle scabbard.

The next in line, still to the left, was Merritt Dietz, armed with a Colt Walker revolver and an Arkansas toothpick to balance out his pistol belt. He owned a seal-brown bay stallion and handled it with skill, despite his relatively hulking size at six foot five, pushing two hundred fifty pounds.

The last two drovers on his left were Mike Limbaugh and Julius Pryor. Limbaugh was the youngest hand at table and the shortest, maybe five foot seven, with a Beaumont-Adams revolver on his hip. Rebels had favored that pistol, produced in England, during their revolt against the Union, though it hadn't saved them fighting at close quarters. Limbaugh's backup weapon for the trail was a Bridesburg Model 1861 rifled musket, used by both sides in the same conflict. His horse, a piebald mare, made Mike look even more diminutive than usual when he was saddled up.

Pryor was tall and thin, with whipcord muscles and a weathered hide resembling tanned buckskin. His sidearm, a Remington Model 1858 revolver, resembled a Colt at first glance, but its cylinder included "safety slots" milled between chambers, preventing the six-gun's hammer...