Badlanders by David Robbins Read Free Book Online Page B

just told you about?” He nodded up the street. “Here they come, and they don’t look any too happy. Now, why do you suppose that is?”
    Isolda laughed.

6
    N eal Bonner was a cattleman through and through. He’d been born on a small ranch in Texas and grown up around cows. From an early age he’d fed them, milked them, shoveled the manure of the milk cows in the barn, herded the cattle out on the range, roped them, branded them.
    Anything and everything that had to do with cattle, he’d done, and learned to do it exceptionally well. Which was why, at the unheard-of age of twenty, he’d been offered the job of foreman at a neighboring ranch, the much larger Bar H. He did so superb a job there that two years later an even larger ranch, the Circle T, hired him away. He’d been there three years when Franklyn Wells came calling on behalf of the Portland Whaling Consortium and their newly created Badlands Land and Cattle Company.
    Evidently Wells had gone around asking ranchers all over west Texas who they’d pick as the top three foremen, and Neal’s name had been on many of the lists. But Neal liked the Diamond T. He liked the owner, he liked the men who worked under him, and he liked the land.
    At first Neal had told them no. He admitted he was flattered and thanked them for their interest, but he would stay where he was.
    Franklyn Wells was persistent. He wouldn’t take that no for an answer. He paid repeated visits, six in a span of two months. Each time he offered Neal more money. But when Wells saw that it wasn’t the money Neal loved, but the cattle, Wells shrewdly stressed the things a cowman would care about. How Neal would oversee more cattle than most foremen. How every aspect of their tending was completely in Neal’s care. The ranch manager would run the ranch, but Neal, and only Neal, had oversight of the cattle.
    Gradually, Wells wore Neal’s resistance down. Wells’s crowning argument was the challenge of it all, to make a ranch succeed where none had succeeded before, to wrest a cattle empire from the untamed wilds, as the early Texas pioneers had done.
    Neal gave in and said yes, with one condition. Jericho must go with him or he wouldn’t go. There was no debating the issue. It was Jericho or it was no.
    Wells had been puzzled by the request. He’d assumed it was because Neal and Jericho were friends, and said as much. Neal’s reply had enlightened Wells to the true nature of Westerners.
    â€œJericho is more than my friend. He’s my pard.”
    Only then did Wells see that when a man called another his pard, the bond ran deeper than any except marriage. Men stuck with their pards through thick and thin.
    They did everything together. They shared everything together. Their pard came before everything else, and they’d die for him if they had to.
    Wells had been curious. He’d pried into how the bond between Neal and Jericho came about. And one night, over brandy in the parlor of the owner of the Circle T, Neal Bonner told a story not even the owner had heard.
    Neal was at the Bar H at the time. He’d gone into thenearest town, Benton—or Benton City, as some called it—to pick up the mail. Since he had a few hours to kill before the stage arrived, he’d decided to treat himself to a drink. One and one only. He’d gone into the Longhorn and over to the bar and had no sooner taken his first sip than trouble started.
    Some men were playing poker. One of them was half-drunk, and in a loud and obnoxious manner started complaining about how much he had lost, and how he wouldn’t have lost it if he wasn’t being cheated.
    The accusation froze everyone in the saloon. It was the worst insult anyone could give, short of calling someone a horse thief.
    The bartender hollered over, “That’s enough out of you, Lindsey. You’ve had too much to drink. Go home and sleep it off.”
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