Ralph Compton The Badlands Trail

Informationen zum Autor Lyle Brandt Klappentext In this thrilling new installment in bestseller Ralph Compton's Trail Drive series, Toby Bishop and the drovers of the Circle K ranch will have to battle the elements, wild animals, rough terrain, and dangerous people to get their longhorn herd to their destination. The drovers of Circle K ranch have to drive the herd of beautiful longhorn cattle five hundred miles northwest to Missouri if they hope to make it through the next year. Toby Bishop, a jack-of-all-trades and drifter, will have to work with the mixed group of drovers, whether they are white, black, Hispanic, lifelong cowboys, drifters, or shamed preachers. On the trail, drovers must set aside their differences in favor of a common goal. As they go north, Bishop finds himself tested: physically by the rigors of the trail; and mentally, by the grim memories evoked by the violence necessary to protect the herd. But if they are to make it all the way to St. Louis, he'll have to call on every skill and ounce of knowledge he's acquired in his checkered and violent past to overcome the unexpected obstacles threatening the drive. Leseprobe Chapter One   Breakfast came early, as the foreman had promised: bacon, beans, and bread. It wasn't gourmet fare, but Toby Bishop had survived on worse.   From time to time, he had survived on nothing much at all.   The other hands seated along the outdoor trestle table, ten in all besides Bishop, spared time to introduce themselves, most of them shaking hands. Toby was good with names and filed them in his memory, matched up with faces, guessing that he'd find out more about them on the trail.   The only one who stuck out, for a start, was Graham Lott, a sometime preacher, likely self-ordained. A rangy man with thinning ginger hair, left eyebrow interrupted by a scar, he advised that those who felt inclined could call him "Pastor." He said grace over their tin plates piled with food and claimed that he'd be offering a Sunday service in the evenings, for anyone who felt the need after ten hours herding beef.   For Toby's part, he couldn't picture spending any downtime on his knees.   It wasn't that he spurned religion altogether. He'd been "raised right," as the folks in Cairo used to say-meaning brought up to be a rock-ribbed Baptist, though in Toby's case it felt more like a superficial coat of paint that weathered down with time.   When Illinoisans spoke of Cairo as the lowest city in the Prairie State, they mostly meant geography. It was the farthest south, as far as Toby knew, located at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, also with the lowest elevation in the state and prone to flooding, ringed around with levees in a bid to hold back nature's inundations. But there was a certain meanness to the place as well, and throughout Alexander County as a whole, particularly when it came to white folks versus blacks. People of color in the neighborhood kept to themselves whenever possible, free state before the Civil War or no, and on occasions when a young man might forget "his place," he sometimes wound up stretching rope.   That was one reason Bishop hadn't gone back home since lighting out at seventeen, the better part of sixteen years ago. But if he'd been expecting other states or towns to demonstrate more tolerance, they'd come up short so far.   While Toby cleaned his plate, he glanced around the table, firming up the link between faces and names. Foreman Bill Pickering was absent, busy elsewhere, but that still left ten hired hands besides himself and Pastor Lott.   On Toby's left sat Boone Hightower, forty-something, with a weathered air of weariness about him, focused on his food without contributing to conversation. Close on Bishop's right, Deke Sullivan was roughly half Hightower's age, ma...

Product details

• Authors: Lyle Brandt, Ralph Compton
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 07.07.2020
• EAN: 9780593100776
• ISBN: 978-0-593-10077-6
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 105 mm x 169 mm x 19 mm
• Series: The Trail Drive Series
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature