Tascosa Gun by Gene Shelton

Author:Gene Shelton [Shelton, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pecos Press
Published: 2017-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

LX Ranch

October 1882

Jim kicked the last of the sullen steers from the Coldwater Creek thickets toward the main LX herd two hundred yards away and wondered if this was his last roundup.

There were fewer Longhorns this year than last and more of the red cattle with white faces called Herefords that Bates and Beales had shipped in to upgrade the herds. Jim knew it was good business. The shorthorns fleshed out better, were worth more on the market, and nobody could say they weren’t easier to handle.

But he was already starting to miss the Longhorns. There was something about them that was like the land itself. Tough and stringy and mean most of the time, but they came through droughts and blizzards and took care of themselves. Maybe, Jim thought, the Longhorns were some of Wade Turner’s “dyno-sewers.”

There were already a few bones showing up in the Panhandle. Major George W. Littlefield was gone now, the LIT sold to a bunch of Britons calling themselves the Prairie Land & Cattle Company. Luis Bausman had stayed on at the LIT for about ten minutes after he heard the news.

Tom Emory had told Jim of Luis’s emphatic departure from the LIT. “Ain’t workin’ for no damn Brits,” Bausman had growled as he packed his few belongings. “We whipped them bastards in three, four wars and still can’t cut loose from ‘em. But by God, this mother’s child can.”

Several other LIT hands headed out before Luis’s dust had settled. Bausman moved into Tascosa and made his living gambling and doing odd jobs or ranch day work now and then. Some of the others stayed, switched to different outfits, or just packed up and left the Panhandle.

The LS, with W. M. D. Lee at the controls, had nearly doubled in size. Lee had bought up Ellsworth Torrey’s LS Connected. He also acquired the claims to several smaller spreads and nester shacks and now claimed an area as big as the state of Connecticut. What the LS didn’t own outright Lee took simply by declaring the land LS range even though it was technically in the public domain and belonged to no one.

The LX had followed Lee’s lead and now grazed a swath of Panhandle grass that stretched sixty-five miles north to south and thirty-five miles east to west. Now there were rumors that the British were getting ready to make a move to buy the outfit. Jim frowned at the thought. He didn’t agree all the time with Luis Bausman’s ideas, but in this case Bausman was right. Foreign syndicates buying up Panhandle grass rubbed Jim’s fur the wrong way. It would be damned hard to have the same loyalty to the brand when the work was for people who never got their own hands dirty.

The Panhandle Cattleman’s Association hadn’t made life any easier for the cowpunchers. The orders had come down that a cowboy could no longer run a few head of his own cattle or horses on land claimed by the big ranchers.

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