Longhorn Country by Tyler Hatch Read Free Book Online Page A

come. Morg won’t see you. You just have to come with me.’
    Startled, she mouthed the question: where?
    He shook his head. ‘He hasn’t told me yet – but a long way. Don’t make it harder for yourself, Kitty. He’s hurt real bad and he doesn’t really know what he’s doin’. Just come along and I’ll do my best to try and get things straightened out when I come back.’
    Her eyes widened and he knew she realised this was going to be a lo-oo-ong journey. She felt the flutter of her weary heart within her, the sickness churning in her stomach. Her dry lips mouthed the word and he understood.
    ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Blaine, girl – Fernie and me went to pick him up in the buckboard but he was gone. No tracks that I could read – we searched the river over and over. I was afeared he must’ve …’
    Then he stopped in mid-word. She was shakingher head vigorously. No, she was telling him. He didn’t go into the river ….
    How could she know that? he wondered.
    But more than that: she was smiling.
     
    After another week of intense searching, even calling out men from town to help, Morgan O’Day ordered the whole thing scaled down. Hardesty and Rendell had left town, too, so no one could shed any light on what had happened to Blaine.
    ‘He’s pulled some sort of vanishin’ trick, damn him!’ the rancher growled and the men had the notion he was more angry at having been outsmarted than he was worried about Blaine’s welfare. ‘Him an’ his Injun ways! Well, to hell with him! I never want to clap eyes on him again … Nor her !’ he added and the men knew he was still hurting badly, deep and powerful….
    At the end of the second week he said they couldn ’t delay the trail drive any longer and he ordered Lucky Kinnane to choose his men and to get the herd on the road to the railhead.
    ‘You drive ’em carefully, don’t run off the fat – I need – want the highest price I can get. If it means waitin’ around a few days for Alamo to turn up, then you wait. He’s the one to do the dickerin’ with the meathouse agents. OK?’
    Lucky said it was but he wasn’t all that happy about it. It was plain Morgan didn’t trust him altogether. He was a good cattleman, had worked the big herds in north Texas before heading down here after the War. That was when he had got his nickname – andhe had been lucky. For a spell. A run of winning hands in trail camps and saloon back rooms, the cards falling just right. That small spread he often dreamt about looked well within reach when suddenly his luck deserted him.
    Foolishly, like the desperate gambler he had become, he began doubling-up, then tripling, his bets in a frantic attempt to recoup his losses. All he did was go broke more quickly.
    But the tag of ‘Lucky’ stuck and it had worked for him now and again – like the day he found the job as top hand with Broken Wheel. He loved working with cattle and he liked this place and the men O’Day employed at the time, including Alamo Ames. He’d stayed on and had no real complaints – but this thing about waiting for Alamo to do the haggling over selling price stuck in his craw and took the edge off things a little for him.
    Still, he was content here, mostly, and didn’t aim to kick up a fuss.
    So the herd of fifteen hundred head and a few hundred steers from smaller spreads in the valley, moved out from Broken Wheel’s rich canyon country just past sun-up next morning, and within an hour were trailing a dust cloud that made the washerwomen and wives on the ranches spit a few words they normally would never even think, let alone utter.
    The long bunched stream of cows caused a traffic jam and a major panic amongst shopkeepers with windows and displays fronting Main in town. Sheriff Marsh Kilgour hobbled out to his office door,rubbing an arthritic hip, and spat a stream of brown tobacco juice across the worn boardwalk.
    ‘Must have a word with Morg about this,’ he murmured. Though when