Single Tree by Gary D. Svee

Author:Gary D. Svee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480487079
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER 9

… Billy Blue whirled and shot Snaky Pete in the gut, knowing that the outlaw would be a long time dying. Billy Blue didn’t like back shooters, especially when they were trying to shoot him in the back.

He stopped then, dropping his empty shells in the street and reloading his Colt .44. In the Far West, a cowboy had to be ready for all eventualities.…

SIMON HARDIN CLOSED the book with a sigh. He was a thoughtful young man in love with words. He longed to be a writer, and he had studied the classics, searching between the lines for the subtleties and nuances that tell the real stories. He had picked up his first dime novel of the true West as a lark but it had taken no time for him to become enthralled.

First there was the land, rugged, unsettled, and boundless. The land put men and women in perspective, left them soft-spoken and steel-spined. They “doctored” snake bites by soaking the wounded appendage in a bucket of coal oil or resorted to some other home remedy, and when someone broke the rigid code that ruled the land, they “doctored” that, too.

Courts and sheriffs and the government in Washington were more concepts than realities on these western plains. Keen-eyed men rendered justice with .44 Colts hanging like Excalibur from their hips. These were men who respected men with honor and despised those without it. These were men who placed their women on pedestals worthy of Maid Marian.

This was a land as large as Simon Hardin’s imagination.

The young man turned to stare out the window of the jolting train car. The train was speeding, at an incredible twenty-five to thirty-five miles per hour, across country controlled no more than eight years ago by the Sioux and Cheyenne, the Crow and Arapaho. He wondered if he would see any of these fierce warriors racing across the prairie on their war ponies to stare through the train windows at their white adversaries.

The country was immense. He had left his home near the Boston Harbor to come west, to write about this exciting new world with clarity and perception so fresh his readers would marvel.

Simon looked out the window at the Yellowstone River winding beneath the cottonwood trees in the afternoon sun. Soon Simon would be in the new town of Billings, and then he would head north to Uncle Obadiah’s.

Simon reached into the vest pocket of his jacket, pulled out the letter. His eyes went over the words, his mind hearing them spoken in Uncle Obadiah’s rich baritone.

Dear Simon,

I take great pleasure in the anticipation I feel of seeing you once again. Separated as I am from my family by these thousands of miles, I would much appreciate your visit.

I must say that your decision to attempt “cowboying,” as you put it, raises certain apprehensions in my mind. This is hard, dangerous work. One never knows when one of these range horses, usually green broke, will spook at a change of the wind and dump you unceremoniously on the prairie.

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