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    Ralph Compton the Palo Duro Trail
    Ralph Compton the Palo Duro Trail
    Ralph Compton the Palo Duro Trail
    Ebook242 pages2 hours

    Ralph Compton the Palo Duro Trail

    By Ralph Compton and Jory Sherman

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    About this ebook

    A thousand-mile journey begins with a single step in this Ralph Compton western...
     
    Some think he’s crazy. But Felix Dagstaff has signed on to drive 4,000 head of wild longhorns from his ranch near Quitaque, Texas, up the Palo Duro Canyon to Cheyenne, more than a thousand miles away. Even if the passage were flat, you couldn’t pay most men enough to take on such a job. But poor odds have never stopped Dag before… 
     
    He’ll have to drive his cattle through blinding storms and swollen rivers. But the setbacks of Mother Nature pale in comparison to the sedition of his own men: one drover’s not who he claims to be; another tries to make off with part of the herd. With months of heat and hardship stretching before him like the treacherous but impossibly beautiful canyon, the chances of getting ahead are slim. But if he fails, Dag will lose everything he has fought for…

    More Than Six Million Ralph Compton Books In Print!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateDec 7, 2004
    ISBN9781101097823
    Ralph Compton the Palo Duro Trail
    Author

    Ralph Compton

    Ralph Compton stood six-foot-eight without his boots. His first novel in the Trail Drive series, The Goodnight Trail, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was also the author of the Sundown Rider series and the Border Empire series. A native of St. Clair County, Alabama, Compton worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist before turning to writing westerns. He died in Nashville, Tennessee in 1998.

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      Book preview

      Ralph Compton the Palo Duro Trail - Ralph Compton

      Chapter 1

      There it was again, that black pit in his gut, roiling with a nameless fear. It happened every morning when Jimmy shook him awake, bringing him out of the dark dreams, in which he was always riding in an unknown land, chasing after senseless cows in every shape and color imaginable, and being chased by nameless men with mangled, twisted features that defied identification. Men with guns and knives riding dragon horses with scales and talons, calling out his name, hunting him down to take away his life, to take away his soul.

      Come on, Dag, Jimmy said in his slow, deep drawl. Horses are under saddle and the coffeepot’s burpin’ like a fartin’ colt.

      I’m awake, Jimmy. It’s my bones that are still gettin’ shut-eye.

      You ain’t gonna like sunrise, Dag. The sky, I swear, is bloodred.

      Felix Dagstaff had been plagued by bad weather all spring. It had been the wettest he had seen since coming to Texas fifteen years before. It was hard enough getting a herd together in rugged country, without battling water, mud, lightning, and the flurries of flash floods that roared through Palo Duro Canyon.

      Dag cursed softly as he sat up, then shoved the blanket into a puddle of wool at his feet. When he stood up, both of his knees cracked, and a needling pain shot through cartilage and bone. The knees would be all right after he walked a few steps, but they stiffened up on him every time he sat or lay down for a spell.

      He felt the chill right away. A fresh breeze was blowing out of the northwest, and when he turned to the east, he saw the crimson sky Jimmy Gough had warned him about. The horizon over toward Quitaque glowed like the coals in a banked furnace. It was cloudless yonder and Vulcan’s flames spread as far as the eye could see from horizon to horizon, north to south.

      Damned red sky in morning, Dag muttered as he walked toward the smell of coffee and the blazing fire Jimmy had made with green mesquite and whatever dry wood he had been able to find the night before.

      Gough stood silhouetted against the fire, tall and lean as a buggy whip, his battered hat the only indication that he was human and not a torn-down split-rail fence. Jimmy had a steaming tin cup in his hand, and the vapors floated up to his face like steam rising from a creek on a brisk morning.

      Here’s your cup, Gough said, stretching out a long, lanky arm.

      Dag took the tin cup and poured coffee into it, almost to the brim. He liked his coffee hot and strong. They always used Arbuckle’s, which had a cinnamon stick in it. He didn’t know if he could taste the faint cinnamon flavor, but he imagined he could, and that was good enough.

      I saw mares’ tails in the sky yesterday evenin’, Gough said.

      Yeah, I saw ’em too. Won’t rain today, though.

      No, not today. Might be a gully washer tonight, though.

      You can damned nigh bet on it, Jimmy. The coffee burned Dag’s mouth and warmed his throat and stomach. The fire helped lessen the hurt in his knee joints. He flexed his legs, pumping each up and down in place. The joints no longer creaked, anyway. One knee felt like it was going to give out before the day was done, however. Coffee’s right bad, Jimmy. What’d you make it with, horse apples? Tastes like it’s got some tar mixed in it.

      You like it strong, Dag. You can float a ten-penny nail in this batch.

      Any sign of Little Jake? The minute he asked, Dag knew he was whistling in the wind. If Little Jake had ridden in last night, he’d be out there with him and Jimmy, cracking his lame old jokes.

      Nary, Gough said. Maybe he went on home.

      Dag blew on his coffee, drank a sip. It was still boiling hot.

      No, not Little Jake. He don’t even go home to get a whuppin’ no more. He cut them apron strings last year.

      Yeah, the ornery rascal, Jimmy said. He done made our bunkhouse his kip. The boys keep runnin’ him off, but he turns up every evenin’, just the same.

      Little Jake was a homeless boy who wandered from ranch to ranch, looking for work, looking for his mother. He was bewildered most of the time and some of the hands thought he was addled. But he was a hard worker and good with cattle. He was better with cattle than he was with people, Dag thought, even though he was fond of the boy. He felt sorry for the boy, too.

      Big Jake had gone off to war and gotten himself killed. Little Jake’s ma had taken up with Big Jake’s brother and then they up and left one day, the both of them, without saying a word to Little Jake. They just left him, saying they were going to San Antonio and would be back in a month. Neither of them ever returned, and Jake had been waiting for them for two or three years. His family name was Bogel. His ma’s maiden name was Sandora Lovitt. Jake’s uncle, Dan Bogel, was a worthless piece of shit if ever there was one, Dagstaff thought.

      Well, we got to get back down into that gully this mornin’, Dag said. I know I heard calves bawlin’ down in there.

      I didn’t hear nothin’, Jimmy said. The damned wind howlin’ down the Palo Duro, maybe.

      Maybe you heard your own asshole singin’, Jimmy. You ‘bout gassed me to death down in that gully.

      Them beans we had yesterday mornin’ must have been refried more’n once or twice.

      Dag kept at his coffee, lest it should get cold on him. He felt the liquid warm him from the center of his stomach outward, seeping into his extremities. He turned away from the fire because his pants were getting hot; he looked again at the dawning sky, that deep scarlet rash on the eastern horizon. The last whip-poor-will broke off its leathery song with a snap as if a steel door had slammed shut and the silence rose up with all the dawn scents as the fragrances of the prairie were released by some mystical force before the dew evaporated from the wildflowers and the prickly pear cactus.

      Even Jimmy seemed to revere the silence that sprang up between the two men, and Dag could hear him draw in a breath through his nostrils as if to inhale all the aromas of morning. Somewhere, far off, a cockerel crowed and the moment passed. The carnivorous maw of the sky bled out, turning to a paler crimson, and where the stars had been moments before, a yellow sky built momentum like some encroaching desert reflection in a celestial mirage.

      You still set on doin’ this, Dag?

      I am.

      It’s not goin’ to work. None of it.

      Look, Jimmy, we been all over this coon. I rode it last year. I got a buyer. I know the way I’m goin’, and I got others throwin’ in with me.

      You didn’t ride it with four thousand beeves, Dag—all of ’em hungry and thirsty and a whole hell of a lot more.

      Dag wasn’t tired of dreaming of the trail drive. He was tired of talking about it, though. He had made up his mind. He knew it would work.

      What more, Jimmy?

      You goin’ up the Palo Duro still?

      All the way to Amarilly, Jimmy. Purt nigh.

      Comanches still own the Palo Duro. A lot of it. The Rangers ain’t drive ’em out and no one else neither.

      We’ll handle that if it comes up.

      You’re leavin’ way too early, Jimmy said.

      We may be gone a year or two. I don’t know.

      That’s just it. You don’t know. This time of year, them rivers are goin’ to be swolled up like a plantation mammy’s black belly. You’re goin’ to drown beeves and drovers and wind up with nothin’ but an empty skull with long horns.

      Dag sucked in a breath. Jimmy always sang the same old tune. He was a horse wrangler and didn’t know much about cattle. And he hadn’t ridden up to Cheyenne with Dag last year.

      Abilene would be better. Closer. Or even Sedalia up in Missoura. You’d get top dollar either place.

      The buyer in Cheyenne’s offerin’ me more.

      He won’t buy cattle what ain’t there, Dag.

      Dag sipped more of his coffee. He was beginning to itch inside. Impatience. That was something he always had to fight against. He had been over the whole drive in his mind so many times, it often seemed as if he had already driven a large herd up to Cheyenne and come back flush with cash.

      Let’s finish the coffee up and get after it, Jimmy. We should finish the count by noon and then I can call in the other hands for the gather.

      That’s another thing, Dag. You can’t count on nobody. Nobody round here, leastways.

      I got commitments from a bunch of good hands.

      I’m not talkin’ bout them so much as Deuce. That hombre’s got greed writ all over him. And he don’t trust nobody ’cept hisself.

      Deuce will fill out the herd with his own cattle. We’ll meet the requirements of the Cheyenne buyer.

      He wants thirty-eight hunnert head, right?

      Right.

      Well, right now, you’ll scrape the brush from here to the Rio Grande to come up with thirteen hunnert head.

      Deuce says he wants to run up twenty-five hundred. I plan on rounding up another four or five hundred head. We’ll drive over four thousand head up, and wind up, maybe, with the number the buyer wants.

      Ha! Jimmy snorted. You could lose that extry five hunnert in one little old stampede. Not to mention them what drowns or gets snakebit, breaks their legs in prairie dog holes and such.

      I’m mighty grateful for your optimism, Jimmy. It really warms the cockles of my heart.

      Your heart ain’t got no cockles, Dag. And your head ain’t got no sense, neither. You watch. Deuce is a-goin’ to put the boots to you, one way or another.

      Dag had thought about that too. Adolph Deutsch was a hardheaded German who had built up a pretty fair herd of nearly ten thousand head of cattle. But he was a suspicious man and difficult to deal with. The cowhands had trouble with his last name and called him Deuce, but there was another reason of the appellation—one that said something about Deutsch’s character, perhaps. Adolph ran a mercantile store, a kind of trading post. He carried supplies for a lot of the outlying ranchers, but his prices were on the high side. People who bought from him said if something was marked a dollar, he would say the price had gone up and double it. He deuces everything, the ranchers and cowhands said, and they weren’t far off, Dag admitted.

      The sun was edging up over the eastern horizon when Dag finished his coffee. He set his cup down. Jimmy took a final swallow and tossed the rest of his on the ground, next to the fire ring.

      We’ll come back and maybe cook some breakfast, Dag said, starting toward his saddled horse.

      Then the silence was shattered by a high-pitched scream that curdled the air and lifted the hackles on the backs of both men’s necks.

      That was when both Jimmy and Dag stopped dead in their tracks.

      Egod, Dag, that sounded like Little Jake.

      Shit, Dag said, and then he was running toward his horse.

      Chapter 2

      The scream came from somewhere to the west of their camp. Dag was in the saddle first, and he dug smooth-roweled spurs into the flanks of his sorrel gelding, heading for one of the gullies that marked the land and left humps of earth in low mounds as if some giant burrowing animal had dug below them. The scream lingered in his brain like a tattered ribbon of sound, chilling, gut-wrenching.

      Dag knew Jimmy was right behind him. He could hear the pounding hooves of the other man’s little buckskin pony, the crack of dry branches breaking, the thud of iron shoes on hard pan. The sun had cleared the horizon; horse and rider cast a long, eerie shadow in front of Dag, a dark horseman riding through a dream, through golden sand, racing, racing, but never catching up.

      He saw something waving, something bright and white, white as bone, caught in the glare of the sun just above the ground. But as he rode up, Dag saw that someone was in one of the gullies waving a shirt to attract attention. He drew his six-gun, a converted Remington New Army .44 that took cartridges instead of percussion caps, and rode into the gully.

      Little Jake was standing near something dark and ugly on the ground. His face was drained of blood and Dag could see that the kid was scared. His shirt—the one he had waved above his head like a flag of surrender—was off.

      Dag, it’s Little Jake, Jimmy hollered behind him.

      Dag reined his gelding to a halt and slid from the saddle as the horse braked. Little Jake, what have you got yourself into? he asked as he ran up and grabbed one of the youth’s arms, the one waving the shirt.

      God amighty, Dag, just look at him. I tried to bandage him up, but the blood just kept . . . kept . . .

      The young man broke down in tears, crumpling to Dag’s feet.

      Dag looked at the shirt, saw that it was spattered with blood. The blood was still wet.

      You just take it easy, Little Jake.

      Jimmy ran up then and hunkered down to see what was wrong with Little Jake.

      Dag stepped over to the dark shape and saw that it was a man’s body slumped over a rock, an arrow sticking from his back and another through his neck like a skewer.

      Jesus, Dag muttered and knelt down beside the body. Something about it looked familiar. The pale blue chambray shirt, the faded duck trousers, the worn boots, heels rounded, the battered spurs with one rowel missing on the left one.

      Jimmy got up, leaving Little Jake to sit there, holding his head in his hands, all slumped over, and shivering like a dog passing peach seeds.

      Do you know who it is, Dag?

      Yeah. Luke Pettibone from the Box M, Barry Matlee’s spread. Christ.

      Egod, Luke. Ah, boy. Barry won’t like it none. Luke had him a wife and kid.

      Jimmy was right, Dag thought. Matlee would have to provide for the widow and her little girl. It wasn’t the law, just the custom.

      "Jimmy, you pull that Sharps out and keep

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