Ralph Compton Drive for Independence

Informationen zum Autor Ralph Compton stood six foot eight without his boots. He worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist. His first novel, The Goodnight Trail , was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was the USA Today bestselling author of the Trail of the Gunfighter series, the Border Empire series, the Sundown Rider series, and the Trail Drive series, among others. Lyle Brandt is a Spur Award-winning author and the recipient of the Life Achievement Peacemaker Award from Western Fictioneers, in addition to many other awards. He is the author of The Lawman series, including White Lightning , Reckoning , Blood Trails , and Avenging Angels . Klappentext In this brand-new Ralph Compton Western, the drovers of the Bar X ranch will face sandstorms, renegades, and outlaws along the historic Cimarron trail. After a child is accidentally killed in a shootout, Art Catlin decides to give up his life of bounty hunting and finds a new career as a drover, working for the Bar X ranch. The trail is 770 miles from Santa Fe to Independence, Missouri, and Art isn't fool enough to think it'll be an easy journey. As they head east, they seem to come upon countless threats, from environmental to personal. If they're to make it all the way with the herd intact, Catlin will need to use all of the skill and knowledge he's acquired over his long and violent career. Leseprobe Chapter One   Saturday, April 5, 1873   Waking to early-morning daylight and a rooster crowing, Arthur Catlin had to take a moment and remember where he was.   A bunkhouse on the Bar X spread, with ten men on adjoining cots, all stirring into wakefulness. Another ten would just be rousing in a second bunkhouse on the property, some forty feet from where Catlin was reaching for his clothes and boots.   Their boss, Bliss Mossman, occupied the big house with his wife, Gayle, and their late-life son just coming up on seven years old. The Bar X foreman, Sterling Tippit, had a three-room house off to himself, and Jared Olney-Mossman's horse wrangler-lived in a smaller one behind the barn, adjacent to the paddock, so he'd hear if anything was troubling the stock at any hour.   The last thing Catlin had in mind when he rode into Santa Fe was joining a cattle drive. He had some limited experience with livestock from his youth, working around his parents' farm in southern Illinois, but nothing on the scale of driving some twenty-five hundred steers from Santa Fe northwestward across Kansas, to be sold at Independence, in Missouri.   Thinking of it now, as fellow drovers started filing out to breakfast, Catlin wondered whether he had gone and lost his mind.   The route they meant to follow didn't put his mind at ease.   Travelers called it the Cimarron Trail, cimarron being "wild" in Spanish. In theory, it spanned seven hundred and seventy miles between Santa Fe and Independence, with traffic passing both ways: herds trudging to market from New Mexico Territory, wagon trains of would-be settlers reversing that process westward. Part of the way was a "dry" route, sixty-some miles without potable water between the Wagon Bed Spring, which fed the Cimarron River, to the Arkansas River outside Wichita. Conestoga wagons carried barrels filled with water while it lasted, but a herd on foot would have to tough it out for up to five days without drinking anything, getting moisture-what there was of it-from grass and shrubs along the way.   And if Wagon Bed Spring was dry when travelers arrived, that made things even worse.   Catlin had never traveled over the Cimarron trail, but he'd heard stories of abandoned wagons, sun-bleached bones that might be cattle, horses, even humans...

About the author

Lyle Brandt

Product details

• Authors: Lyle Brandt, Ralph Compton
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.11.2020
• EAN: 9780593100790
• ISBN: 978-0-593-10079-0
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 108 mm x 173 mm x 20 mm
• Series: A Ralph Compton Western; The Trail Drive Series
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature