The Ogallala Trail Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Path of Peril

  “Looks like us little ranchers are going to sink or swim over a cattle drive,” Jason Burns said.

  “Yeah,” came a mixed chorus accompanied by bobbing heads.

  “I know the colonel asked you, as well as several of us, Sam, so will you take our cattle up that western trail to Nebraska for us?”

  The other men had Sam cornered and were playing on his conscience by acting as if he was their only chance for success—a weighty load on the back of a man in the midst of a feud. Sam had his own troubles to worry about. Besides, bad memories of his last, ill-fated drive still haunted him. Over and over, he saw those two boys dying on their backs in the dust of Front Street in Dodge City. . . .

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, June 2005

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2005

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  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  Chapter 1

  In a cloud of dust, slapping the road flour off his clothing with his goatskin gloves, he headed for the bat-wing doors of the Tiger Hole Saloon. One more cold beer before all the ice melted. Marty O’Brien usually ran out of the cold stuff by midsummer. From then on, his customers drank warm brew. On Sam Ketchem’s last trip to Frio Springs, the supply of cold had still not all evaporated.

  After a wave to some familiar faces sitting around at tables in midmorning, Sam stepped up to the long bar and ordered a cool one. The burly red-faced owner, Marty, nodded and put a large glass mug under the tap to draw him one. Sam tucked his gloves in his gun belt and hitched his .44 around on his hip to be more comfortable. Mouth watering, he wet his sun-cracked lips in anticipation of the delivery coming toward him.

  “There you are, Ketchem! You no-good sum bitch!” someone shouted from behind him.

  Sam turned, looked mildly toward the doors and blocking the bright glare from outside stood Harry Wagner. Broad-shouldered as a bear and dispositioned like a sore-pawed one, he waded inside the Tiger Hole.

  “I don’t know what’s got your tail over the dash, Wagner, but you better spill it out.” If that bully thought for one minute Sam was backing down from him, he had another think coming.

  “I’m talking about you cutting my bull, Ketchem.” The big man came like a bulldog down beside the bar, with his elbows at his side and his fists clenched.

  “I don’t recall cutting any bull that didn’t need it recent like. Which one was yours?”

  “A red pinto longhorn.”

  Sam shook his head, deep in recall. “Don’t remember doing that one, but last spring at roundup, everyone agreed the longhorns had to go. Any bull on the range wasn’t at least half white face or durham was to be cut.”

  “Well, by Gawd, I never agreed to that.”

  “Your brothers were there re
presenting you. They agreed to it.”

  Wagner was standing so close, Sam could smell his sour body odor and see the curly black hair on his chest between the lacing on his faded blue shirt.

  “Boys, I ain’t having any trouble in here,” Marty said.

  “You ain’t having any trouble in here. I’m going to kick his ass for cutting my bull.” Wagner flashed his tobacco-stained teeth and roared.

  Sam threw up his right arm in time and blocked the first blow, but Wagner’s second one knocked the wind out of him. Staggered backward, he tried to recover his breath and defend himself. No time. Wagner closed in on him with hard blows. Lefts and rights were coming at him like a battering ram.

  A surge of knuckles hit the side of Sam’s face, and his head bounced off the rim of the bar. The last thing he could recall seeing was Marty O’Brien in his white apron coming over the top of the bar, billy club in hand, to end the fight.

  “You coming around?” Marty asked, looking him in the eye.

  A shake of his head didn’t clear the fuzzy vision, so Sam closed his eye lids and wished his body didn’t hurt so bad. Sprawled in a chair, he knew he was surrounded by concerned faces.

  “Where did he go?” he managed to ask.

  “I put him out the door with me club. Guess he’s long gone, the worthless piece of shit.”

  Good. Sam rubbed the back of his neck and tried to piece things together in his mind. He’d come to Frio Springs for a few supplies and a cold draft beer or two. Whatever had come over the eldest of the Wagner boys to set in on him, he wasn’t certain about. But castrating some cull bull, even if he had done it, wasn’t the real cause. Harry Wagner had something else on his mind. Sam couldn’t recall doing anything to any of the Wagners to make the man that mad at him, but somewhere out there something festered. From here on, he’d have to keep an eye open for all of them.

  This incident might be the start of a Texas feud. Didn’t take much to start one, but they never ended nice. Folks got shot in the back and innocent ones, too. He’d have to speak to his brothers, Tom and Earl, and warn them about it.

  “Here’s chunk of ice,” Marty said, handing Sam the piece wrapped in a bar cloth. “Put it on the right side of your face. He really worked you over. Sorry I didn’t move fast enough to stop him.”

  “Hey, you sprung over that bar like a kid.”

  “Well, I was a wee bit angry at him for causing trouble in a respectable place like mine.”

  The half dozen friends standing around in the half circle laughed and clapped the bartender on the back.

  “You going to be all right? Might ought to have Doc Sharp look at you,” Oscar Mott, a silver haired rancher, said, looking Sam over.

  “Aw, I’ll be fine.”

  “Next time, you better watch out for that bully. Someone sure needs to teach him a lesson,” Oscar said, and the others agreed.

  The cold compress held tight to his sore cheek, Sam nodded. There wouldn’t ever be any next time. He’d put a couple of bullet holes in Wagner’s worthless carcass before the other man got in close enough to even swing a fist.

  Marty went to the bar and brought back a bottle of bonded whiskey and a glass for him. “Drink some. It’s the best medicine I’ve got in the place.”

  “What the hell was the ruckus about?” Everyone looked around to see who’d come in. Dressed in a boiled white shirt and a shoestring tie, and with galluses holding up his high-waisted pin-striped pants, the law in Frio came striding across the bar room. Whit Stuart served as the town marshal and deputy sheriff. With his wavy black hair and trimmed mustache, he cut a fancy figure with the womenfolk in the county—those on both sides of the street.

  “Fine time for you to finally get here,” Mott grumbled. “Fight’s all ready over, and one man was near beat to death.”

  “Who did this to you?” Stuart asked.

  “Harry Wagner, out of the blue,” Sam said.

  The lawman took a seat. “Want to swear out a warrant?”

  Sam shook his head. “Wouldn’t be worth it.”

  The lawman slapped his palms on the table, ready to get up. “All right, if you won’t swear out a warrant, there is nothing I can do here.”

  “You could keep riffraff like that run out of town,” Mott said.

  “Mr. Mott, if Sam Ketchem won’t swear out a warrant against the man, there ain’t a blessed thing I can do about it.”

  “Do you have to wait till a stray dog bites someone to shoot him?”

  “No, the city council gave me the power to do that beforehand. But not on the rest.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt anyone one damn bit to shoot him and a few more like him.”

  “Good day, gentlemen. You require my services, call me.” Stuart straightened his tie and strode out of the Tiger Hole.

  “Now that fancy Dan is some lawman. Bet he’s going off on a picnic with Etta Faye Ralston,” Bobby Barstow said and went to the front window to see. “Sure enough, boys, she’s sitting out there in the buckboard under her little umbrella all set to go on a picnic. Why, that old maid must be thirty years old.”

  “And she ain’t getting hitched to no one. Not even to our well-dressed, supposed legal protection,” Mott put in.

  “No, she might get some sweat dropped on her,” Marty said. “Try some of that whiskey, son. It’ll make you forget the pain anyway.”

  Sam still couldn’t clear all of his vision. In the end, he downed the glass Marty had poured for him; then he settled down in the chair, trying for a comfortable place. “I’ll be fine, boys. But I would like that cold beer I came in here for in the first place.”

  “Coming up.” Marty threw the bar rag over his shoulder.

  “You shipping your cattle next spring with the colonel?” Mott asked, scrapping a chair up close to him.

  “I hope to,” Sam said. “I sure can’t afford these railroad-car charges. They wanted twenty-two dollars a head to ship mine from San Anton to the Kansas City Stock Yards.”

  “And you pay the same whether they die or get there.”

  “And they might not even be worth that when I get them there.”

  “Right. These railroads springing up all over ain’t been all that big a deal for ranchers. High-priced bandits is what I call them.”

  Sam agreed. “ ’Course with the Dodge City market closed, the colonel’s going to have to take them around through Colorado and up.”

  “They say there’s a good market for heifers and cows up north there, too,” Mott said.

  “Yeah, they’ve opened lots of that grass north of there for grazing. But the colonel ain’t said yet if he’s taking the stock, has he? Mixing steers and cows coming in heat can sure be a headache on the trail.”

  “Yeah, and you generally lose several from being rode to death by them steers.”

  “Right, it’s a pain. What were you thinking of sending?” Sam winced at a new pain in his side.

  “I’ve got over three hundred Durham-cross heifers coming twos that are open. If they’d bring thirty bucks up there, I could be out of debt,” Mott said.

  “Be nice to say that. Out of debt, I mean.”

  “I’m not getting any younger. Be sixty-seven this fall. Maude and I only got one daughter. Silva’s up at Fort Worth with her man. So we ain’t got anyone to look after us. If I was out of debt, that old place of ours ought to bring in enough to get us by.”

  “I savvy that,” Sam said.

  “I plan on sending my steers up there with him,” Carl Brunner said, joining them. “What’ve you got, Sam?” Brunner was a man in his forties. A saddle-tanned face with a white forehead when he pushed the felt hat on the back of his head. His blue eyes were crinkled in the corners from squinting against too much sun.

  “Two fifty or so two-year-old steers.”

  “How many could he drive up there?” Carl asked.

  “Fifteen hundred would be a big herd for that far. It can get awful dry out there and finding enough water for even that large a herd could be t
he kicker.”

  “Why don’t you make a drive?” Mott asked. “You been up and down the trail a dozen times.”

  “Let the colonel do it.” Sam shook his pain-filled head to dismiss their asking. “I’m simply burned-out on trail drives. I went to Abilene when I was fifteen with Gus Price. Then later with Mark Stinger and Hall Brett to Wichita, Dodge and then Nebraska with the Carp brothers. It’s a long, dusty road up there and even a drier one coming back. I grew up on the deck of a mustang chousing steer tails, trying to sleep in a wet bedroll, plus eating gritty frijoles and fighting flies over the title to the rest of my grub.”

  “Well, you’d sure have my cattle to drive if you wanted them,” Mott said.

  “Thanks, but besides that, I’m too sore to drive anything anywhere,” Sam said.

  “What did you come to town for anyway?” Carl asked.

  “This mug of cold beer. In another thirty days, all that ice he’s got out back there in his shed’ll be gone.”

  “Hmm.” Mott snuffed out his nose. “Folks up north cut that stuff out of rivers and sell it to us rebs. No wonder we lost the damn war.”

  Carl frowned in disbelief at the older man’s comment. “What else did you come after?”

  “I needed some baking powder. Ten pounds of shingle nails. Raul and his sons are coming to roof the newly completed horse shed next week. What else? Guess that and this beer’s all I needed.” The beating from Wagner had been thrown in no doubt for good measure.

  The longer Sam thought about what he still considered an unprovoked attack, the madder he became. He had no recollection of ever cutting a pinto in recent months. Harry had his facts twisted. He’d have more than that if he ever came at Sam again.

  “I’ll go get that stuff for you,” Carl said. “Have to go get some new nippers. Mine broke and I need to shoe some horses. Just rest awhile. No trouble. See you boys later.” The rancher went out to a chorus of goodbyes.

  “I need to get home too,” Mott said. “Got all my business done.”