The Trail Breakers by Paul Lederer | eBook

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The Trail Breakers

By Paul Lederer

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

Glen Wycherly owned the Broken W Ranch his father had staked out in the 1840s. He had a herd of 2,000 mixed longhorns and Herefords grazing on the 10,000 acres of dry grassland he claimed down along the Sabine River. That was the problem – in that country he was in danger of overgrazing the voracious steers.

The Broken W had two neat white houses, one for the boss and his family, the other for any relations who might happen by. None ever did in this remote country, but the small house, although it remained empty, was well maintained and kept clean. Wycherly's hope seemed to be that one or more of his four children would marry and choose to live on the Broken W afterward. None of them seemed likely to marry any time soon. Lyle Wycherly, or 'Duke' as he preferred to be called, but seldom was except in jest, was twenty-five years old, at the age when you would think he would start considering marriage. There were a few problems with Duke Wycherly – foremost of which was that women ignored him, laughed at him, or gave him the cold shoulder after one meeting. The younger Wycherly was pretty well set up when it came to physical form and of average dark looks. The trouble with Lyle Wycherly was that he dressed like a fop, rode like a sissy and cursed like a navvy, all of which turned feminine hearts sour.

Glenn Wycherly also had three daughters on the ranch. There was the eldest, Louise, who enjoyed playing lady of the manor. She glided around, usually in black dresses, her hair pinned up, issuing orders to which no one paid any attention before retiring to her room around noon to fan her brow, her day's work done. There weren't many men around who were in the market for that sort of woman, and fewer that she would have found suitable for a lady of her position.

The youngest girl, Josie, appeared to be a pretty little pixie, a child actually, although she was nearly eighteen. In truth she was a pocket-sized hellion. Her copper hair was seldom brushed. She liked to ride, and she rode wildly, carelessly. She loved her dogs of which she had six untrained beasts. She had been known to take on a ranch hand in a wrestling match. In short, she seemed like a long project for any man who might care to try to tame her. Not many suitors returned after their first visit with Josie. A minister from the nearby town of Strasbourg had rushed away nearly in tears after one afternoon tea social meeting.

In between these two daughters was the third, Patricia, who was, to put it bluntly, a plain-looking woman, and she knew it. She was dutiful, sincere, a fine cook. She was also gangly and awkward in her movements, uncertain when she tried to speak. She was fearful of men, tongue-tied when she attempted to talk to one, and given to solitary pursuits only. No one had a bad word to say about Patricia; no one, in fact, ever commented on the girl. She seemed to be marked for perpetual spinsterhood.

Lyle Wycherly, sitting his big white gelding like a knight without armor – or a straw man, take your pick – located Ray Hardin out on Cobblestone Creek where he and three other Broken W hands had been gathering strays, working their horses hard to push the halfwild steers out of the hilly brush country on this hot afternoon.

'I think they get themselves up into that tangle on purpose, just to see how long it will take us to push them out,' Wally Chambers said. Chambers and Ray Hardin had teamed together for a long while. Chambers was small in stature, blue-eyed and blond. When the two were on foot, Ray Hardin, tall and lean with dark curly hair, towered over his saddle partner. On horseback they were pretty much the same size, with Wally being the slightly better roper of the two.

'Our lord and master is here,' Wally said, mopping the perspiration from his throat and face with his blue kerchief. Ray Hardin shifted his eyes to the far bank of the ravine where they had been working and saw the erect figure of Lyle Wycherly sitting his big white horse. Lyle waved a beckoning hand at Ray.

'The Duke commands,' Wally Chambers muttered, tying his kerchief back around his neck. 'I wonder what he wants.'

'I don't know. I wish he would just ride down and tell us like any normal man instead of making me ride up the bluff and back down again.'

'Probably wants to invite you to tea.' Wally smiled and turned his tough little dun horse away to return to the brush-popping. Ray turned toward the path leading up to the rim of the ravine. The dry wind slapped his leather chaps around as he rode his oddly marked brown, black and white paint pony up the narrow trail. Lyle Wycherly sat his horse impatiently.

'Took you a while,' the ranch owner's son said. Ray noticed that the man was improving his speech. He had only managed to insert three four-letter words into that sentence.

'Most things do,' Ray Hardin answered. 'What can I do for you?'

'You?' Lyle's look was appropriately scornful. 'Nothing at all, ever, but my father wants to see you at the house. Immediately.' That speech required five profanities. Ray Hardin decided to quit counting. Lyle Wycherly seemed to have decided that talking that way made him appear more manly, though Hardin knew of not a single man in the bunkhouse who cussed like that. They all knew that it only made you sound like a badly brought-up kid.

'Your father didn't tell you what it was about?' Ray enquired.

'No, and I don't have the time to discuss it.' Lyle attempted a sly smile. 'I'm off to see Virginia Dale over at the Bucket Ranch – you know her, don't you? The one with the....' Hardin had already started his pony away from Lyle Wycherly. The man would never grow up, and in his self-structured wonderland he would never even understand that. Ray pitied old Glen Wycherly, who must have made at least an attempt to bring his son up properly.

Ray looked back along the ravine, but could no longer see Wally Chambers, who had reentered the tall screen of chaparral brush to try hazing some of those balky steers toward the grass table. The old longhorns took a lot of encouragement to move, which was why it went better when there was a team of men working the job. But Wally was a top hand, and he knew what he was doing on his own.

Half an hour later with the sun riding high, Ray Hardin found himself on the flat where the two white houses sat amid a clustered group of dusty live-oak trees. He chased his shadow into the yard and swung down in front of the big house, lazily looping the reins to the paint pony around and over the hitch rail. A blood-red roan he recognized as belonging to Josie Wycherly was waiting there impatiently.

He considered removing his scarred leather chaps, but decided against it. Glen Wycherly in his forty years on the range had seen many a dusty man in chaps before now. Ray approached the front door with his once-white Stetson in hand and knocked. Unlatched, the door swung open on its own, admitting Hardin to the interior. He had been there often, but was still struck by the height of the ceiling in the drawing room, which rose all the way to the second-story ceiling. The slate-black native-stone fireplace was not quite large enough to roast an ox, but it was impressive, standing six feet wide, four feet high. Wood for a new fire had been set there, awaiting nightfall.

Ray called out, 'Anyone to home? Mister Wycherly!'

'We don't shout in this house,' a stiff feminine voice answered, and Ray, looking to the first landing of the long curved staircase, saw the queen herself, Louise Wycherly, wearing a black dress of some shiny material, her dark hair heaped atop her skull and interwoven with strands of pearls.

'Sorry, Miss Louise. Your father sent for me,' Ray said. The lady of the manor did not reply, she simply lifted her skirt a little, turned her back and proceeded upward to disappear in the upstairs apartments.

Not knowing how to proceed, Ray went near to the unlighted fire and stood, waiting. A hair-raising shriek sounded through the house. This was followed by an animal growl and yap and the thundering of many footsteps on the staircase. The red-haired Josie Wycherly, all five feet of her, wearing range clothes, ran down the stairs followed by her pack of mixed-breed dogs, who followed their mistress in a yapping, howling, snapping jumble of dog flesh, some tripping and tumbling down the stairs, others halting in mid-run to bite at their brothers. Dogs of all coloration and of all breeding snarled, yipped, barked and whined at Josie's heels as she made a mad dash toward the front door, a quirt in her hand. She saw Ray and drew up short, the dogs leaping at her, on each other.

'Father's in there, second door down the hallway,' Josie told Ray. She swatted down a few of the leaping dogs, rapped one mean-looking, bear-shepherd mix that had fixed its eyes on Ray with her quirt and rushed toward the front door where she leaped aboard her roan horse and started it off at a dead run, her yapping, untamed dog pack behind and beside her.

She had left the door flung open and so Ray crossed the Indian-carpeted floor and closed it. Then, with a sigh and a brief reflection on whether having sons or daughters was more of a trial, he walked to the hall off the room which Josie had indicated.

He found Glen Wycherly next to the desk in his study, hovering over an unrolled topographical map. The old man glanced up.

'Hello, Ray,' he said in greeting. 'I was hoping Lyle could find you out there. Come here; I want you to have a look at something.'

Glen Wycherly was looking his age this day. Tall, but bent over, his white hair in disarray, his blue eyes excited but dim. Long creases were carved into his tanned cheeks by sun, weather and time. His stubby finger tapped the map he had been studying.

'Do you know what this is, Ray?'

Stepping nearer, Ray studied the map. 'Looks like the Pocono country. Those hills are in the Holden Range.'

'You're right, of course. Does anything strike you wrong about this map?' Glen Wycherly asked.

'I don't know if I'd call it wrong,' Ray Hardin answered, 'but it doesn't go very far, does it?' His finger traced the vast empty center of the map. 'Unknown land,' the cartographer had written in neat pen strokes.

'That's exactly it,' Glen said. He walked across the room, his steps a shuffle, went to the liquor cabinet and removed a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. 'The map's fine as far as it goes, but it just doesn't go far enough.'

'I imagine that's because for years that was a Mescalero Apache stronghold,' Ray ventured. 'Until General Crook got serious about driving them to Mexico. Not many men would have ventured deep onto the Poconos with the exception of a few bad men on the run.'

'Yes,' Glen Wycherly said. Returning, he handed a cut-crystal glass with two fingers of whiskey in it to Ray. Wycherly looked satisfied as he settled behind his broad walnut desk. Ray still didn't get it. Why had Wycherly summoned him to his office?

The ranch owner sipped his drink, nodded with satisfaction at the taste, and placed both hands flat on his desk. He looked up at Ray. 'They tell me that you once worked as a surveyor, Hardin.'

Ray had to laugh. 'Not exactly, sir. I was a stick man with the railroad for about six months.'

'A stick man?'

'His job is to stand out in the hot sun holding a stick while the surveyor behind his transit moves him left, right, forward and back while he gets his line right. It wasn't much of a job as far as I was concerned.'

'But you picked up some basic knowledge of surveying – in six months on the job?'

'A fair amount. I was thinking of going to work as a surveyor. The pay was good with the railroads, but I couldn't take the apprenticeship – I prefer working with a horse between my legs.'

'Can you draw a relief map?' Wycherly wanted to know.

'After a fashion, yes,' Ray answered, still not knowing where the conversation was going.

'Fine, fine,' Wycherly said, finishing his whiskey. He went to the sideboard to pour himself another drink and, with his back to Ray Hardin, went on, 'I've got a contract to deliver five hundred steers to Fort Davis within three months. To feed the soldiers and bargain with the Indians.'

This was nothing new. Broken W had been an army supplier for years, Only the year before Ray Hardin had ridden through with a trail herd to Fort Davis, though nothing like five hundred steers were along. He remembered the drive well: dry, arduous, being confronted by Indians and gangs of white rustlers as well.

Wycherly had resumed his seat at the desk. 'Hardin, if a man could cut five hundred miles off that trip, remove the necessity of skirting the foot of the Holden Range, would you not say it was worth it?'

'Of course.'

Wycherly rose heavily to his feet and went again to the map table. 'Straight through the Poconos,' the ranch boss said, drawing a line with his finger. 'It would save an immense amount of time, and we could avoid the various predators who haunt that southern trail and know when we have a drive mounted.'

'But ...' Ray didn't know what to say. 'No one has ever ridden through there, let alone try to drive a herd of cattle through. Is there enough water? Any graze? Are the Indians truly cleared out of the hills? Is that country still infested with thieves and thugs running from the law? Are there passes capable of allowing such a large herd to get through? Is there really any possible trail at all?'

Wycherly was once again seated in his chair. He nodded, sipped at his whiskey and told Ray Hardin, 'Exactly – you have just defined the job I want you to do for me. Find out, Hardin. Get up into that country and use your surveyor's eye to find a trail through – if there is one.'

'But—' Ray began to object.

'I know, "but." I have considered all of them. There is no answer to any of those questions unless someone takes a look. If it can't be done' – Wycherly shrugged – 'then it can't be. But, damn it, Hardin, I want to know. I've been sweating bullets over this contract. A route through the Poconos, if it can be found, might be enough to save the Broken W.'

Ray would never have guessed that the ranch was in any sort of financial trouble, but then again, he knew nothing about the operations of the ranch as a business. Here, too, he was only a stick man, not privy to the decision-making process or the reasoning behind it.

He worked for the brand. Ray said, 'I'll try it, Mr Wycherly. I can't guarantee—'

'Of course you can't,' Glen Wycherly said. Nevertheless he was smiling, appeared relieved. 'You can choose a pack horse from the string and draw whatever supplies you need from our larder. I expect you'll be wanting some help.'

'Since my head is not mounted on a swivel, I'd appreciate having someone along to watch my back. I'd like to take Wally Chambers with me, if you can spare him.'

'Chambers? Has he had some experience surveying?'

'No, sir. But he is reliable, and he is my friend. I don't care for the idea of riding into wild country with someone who is not both.'

'All right,' Wycherly agreed. He stood to shake hands with Ray as a side door to the room opened a bare few inches. 'It's agreed. Patricia!' he called, and the door opened wider to allow Wycherly's third daughter to enter the office.

Wycherly said, 'Patricia will see that you're supplied with paper, drawing pencils, a straight edge and compass – poor tools for what I'm asking you to do, but they're all we have at hand.'

Patricia Wycherly was tall, not so tall as Ray Hardin, of course, but tall for a woman. Her face was pale, her eyes were averted. He noticed that her chin was a little too sharp for classic beauty. Her mouth was drawn tight in what could have been interpreted as a disapproving expression, but Ray, who had met the woman a few times before, knew that it was just her constant fear of human interaction which caused her to appear that way. She was a mouse, looking for a hole in which to escape from the predators of this earth.

Glen Wycherly seemed not to notice, or maybe it was simply familiarity with Patricia's ways. He just said, 'Patricia, Mr Hardin is in need of a few supplies. They should all be found in the library – pencils, paper, compass and straight edge. Do you have all that?'

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Trail Breakers by Paul Lederer. Copyright © 2014 Logan Winters. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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