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

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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 Riders series, and the Trail Drive series, among others.

John Shirley was born in Houston and now lives in Vancouver, Washington. He is the author of numerous novels and books of short stories, and won the Bram Stoker Award for his collection Black Butterflies. His novels include the Specialist books (under the name John Cutter), The Brigade, Bleak History, the A Song Called Youth trilogy, and a novel of Wyatt Earp as a young lawman, Wyatt in Wichita. He has also written television, movies, and songs.

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CHAPTER ONE

Central Texas, April 1874

The ranch stretched out near far as the eye could see, flat and sun warmed below them, green with springtime, in places dappled light brown by the herd of longhorn cattle. Mase and Katie Durst sat astride their horses, poised on the bluff overlooking their ranch. The bluff was set amongst the San Vincente hills, just about the only elevation hereabouts, and Mason "Mase" Durst could see most of the 2,340 longhorns. He gazed upon them with considerable satisfaction, for they'd been hard-won. Years back he had hired Crane Williams, young Lorenzo Vasquez, and Pug Liberty to help him "scrape" the start of the herd from the underbrush around the Brazos River. There were said to be a hundred thousand such cattle, descendants of strays, free and legal for the taking in that wild region of Texas. Most of the cattle on Durst Ranch were the offspring from those captured by the Durst hands. It was dangerous work, driving the wild longhorns from the brush-choked oak mottes around the river into the ramshackle pens they'd set up to contain them. Herding the feral cattle back to Durst Ranch carried its risks, too. Mase had gotten badly gored in his right leg from one of the longhorns-but once the cattle were contained on his medium-small ranch, he'd bred them and built up his herd. For some years he'd sold off part of his herd every spring, but for the last four, he'd simply built it up.

They'd lived lean these last years, but Katie never complained. Not even when he'd signed on for other ranchers' trail drives, to be gone for months at a time for a hundred dollars and a chance to learn the trails. He glanced at her affectionately now. His wife was a sturdily attractive woman, the kind people called handsome due to the strong planes of her face, her piercing dark blue eyes, her strong chin. Her shoulders were wider than most women's, her hands a little bigger. He was six feet one himself, and she was five eight. An armful and a sweet one-but tough as leather when she needed to be. She wore buckskin riding breeches today, cut for a lady, and a tan top, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She had smooth, flawless skin, a contrast to his own craggy, weather-beaten features.

"There's Jim and Curly," Mase said, pointing to the south.

They could see their son, Jim, riding his small cow pony on the flatlands below and doing a good job of it for a nine-year-old boy. Riding alongside him on a quarter horse was the only full-time hand the Durst Ranch had, Carlos "Curly" Chavez. He was a kind of unofficial uncle for the boy, as well as a ranch hand. Curly lived with his family in a sizable cabin in the hills beside the ravine through which ran San Vincente Creek.

Katie grinned. "Look at Jimmy waving that lasso!"

"He's driving a cow back into the herd. Not that she needs it. She's just looking for sweeter grass."

"We're lucky we got those early rains," Katie remarked. "Gave us the good grass, the extra grazing."

"Lucky in some ways, darlin'," Mase said. "But it's flooded a good deal of the trails north. And that's not all we'll be facing. . . ."

"You're still fixed on driving the herd up north this month, Mase? There's that trouble with the Comanches. Railroad north of Dallas is cut by the Indians-won't be running for another month or so . . ."

He nodded. "The Chisolm Trail's so overrun with Apaches and Comanches and Comancheros, the Army's shut it down for a good while. Same with the Shawnee Trail. Anything west of that's a long distance out of our way. Was I to wait for those trails to open up, we'd be competing with the big herds for grazing, for trail headway, and they'd get the jump on me with the buyers."

"You already have that buyer. Mr. Osgood seems a decent sort. He said he'd buy every steer you've got if you could get 'em to the railhead-and I believed him. Why not just take his word for it?"

"I do believe he's reliable. But he's practical, too. He's got only so much money to spend, and if the other herds get there first with good beef, he'll buy from them. He's offered me top dollar-I want to get that herd to him."

"We've got no choice but to wait, Mase, unless you want to herd them east to Louisiana."

"Wouldn't get as good a price there. No, I'm for Wichita. You know, Crane Williams found another trail a couple years back. I'm going to talk to him about it. . . ."

You make this work for me, Fuller, and IÕll cut you in,Ó said Tom Harning. ÒHell, that ranch should have been mine all along. Mase Durst horned in and moved in with the help of his Yankee friends!Ó

Ralph Fuller squirmed in his chair. He was sitting behind a small desk in an office that was barely larger than the desk, in the back of the Clinton Bank, the only bank in the county. He was a man whose pallid, round-cheeked face was softened even more by indoor living, whose small mustache twitched from side to side as he considered his reply.

"I don't know about that, Tom. The government men did say the land was his, but the way I heard it, Durst got there first and legally staked his claim."

"That's what they tell you-but they're lying!" Harning said, standing up and leaning vulturelike over the desk. He was a wide-bodied man of forty-five, with a square-cut beard to hide his jowls and bristling eyebrows that seemed to bristle even more when he was angry. His small gray eyes got smaller as he narrowed them at Fuller and went loudly on. "I'll not have you naysaying me on that or anything else, Fuller! I know what you did, and you know what you did!"

Fuller winced. "Now, these allegations-they come from a man who drinks too much, and we had to let him go-"

"You let Barney Kaper go because he saw you pay that gambling debt off with the bank's money!"

Fuller licked his lips. "That's . . . I have sat over the books with the accountant and-"

"Oh, you juggled things around and made it work, and I hear that you put that accountant in for a raise! But your boss, Mr. Gaffell, will be interested to have a closer look-if I give him the clue!"

"He'll just misunderstand it all, Tom, if you go putting a bee in his bonnet-"

"You will do as I say, or that bee will be buzzing right in his ear!" With that, Harning slapped his right hand flat and hard on the desk, making the bank manager recoil in his chair.

Fuller gulped and spread his hands. "I can't just call in the loan on that ranch when it's hardly in arrears! Why, we give all these folks a good while to sell their beef so's they can pay us, Tom! That's how it's understood! It pays off, too."

"Doesn't have to be that way! You call it in-and you see the bank sells that place to me!"

Fuller looked desperately at his blotter, as if it might offer some way out. "It's not that easy to get people out of a place they've been rightfully established in-"

"I'll deal with that, Fuller! Now"-Harning stood up straight and crossed his arms over his chest-"are you going to do it, or am I going to get in touch with Mr. Gaffell?"

Fuller closed his eyes and let out a long breath. "I . . . Yes, all right. Very well. I seem to have no choice."

Mase Durst and Crane Williams sat out on the broad farmhouse porch, drinking hard cider and watching the moon rise over the flowering Texas plains. A biting breeze was sweeping down from the north, making Mase shiver. The Williams farm was eighteen miles south of the Durst...