The Texans by Brett Cogburn

Author:Brett Cogburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The moon was so bright and low in the sky that it almost felt as if Odell could ride his horse right up and touch it. It was as if it was no moon at all, but rather something unreal hovering in the dark night. He had slipped away from his second camp with the Prussian’s war party to ride out upon the expanse—looking for something and finding another thing altogether. He sat Crow in silence and felt small upon the face of the earth. The white light lay gently on the land and the silhouettes of brush, cacti, grass, and the dry waste of the plain were lit in soft, glowing black—all somehow made alien and magical under the illumination of the strange moon. He had only intended to be alone with his thoughts and not to ride into a different world.

Trouble rode Odell’s soul with sharp spurs, and the nights could be especially bad. Often, when sleep wouldn’t come and doubts and frustrations crept in on him, he went out alone to do nothing more than sit his horse in the dark. The quiet and the emptiness surrounding him calmed him like a lullaby, and his thoughts came clearer.

The wind had lost the day’s heat, and it touched his face like a cool kiss. Crow was still beneath him and the weight of his rifle lay heavy across his thighs. The months on the trail had left him wild and unkempt, and hard living and loss had left his heart equally ragged. He removed his broad hat and bowed his head and ran a hand up his forehead and back through the tangled mop of his hair. He did so more out of weariness than anything else, but anyone watching would have thought him some pagan bowing before the white orb of the heavens. But truly, there was something in the wide land of his wanderings that spoke to him.

Red Wing was somewhere out there, and his eyes inadvertently made a search of the distances for the glow of a fire, as he did almost every night, but there was nothing to make him feel any closer to her. He wondered if she too saw the big moon, and he swore for the thousandth time he wouldn’t quit. He had lost everything dear to him but her, and no matter how long and how far he had to ride, he was going to find her.

He was lost in his thoughts and the buffalo came very near to him on the upwind side before he even knew they were there. It wasn’t a large herd, just stragglers from the massive yearly migration north. They passed before him single-file like phantoms. Their humped shadows, bovine grunts, and the brush of their hooves in the grass were all that connected them to the earth. Although the herd was just an old bull and a half dozen cows and calves, he swore that he could feel the heat off of them and smell the musky earth matted into their wooly heads.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.