The Pastures of Beyond by Dayton O. Hyde

Author:Dayton O. Hyde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I WORE MY UNIFORM WITH RIBBONS AND BATTLE STARS for a couple of days around the ranch just to remind my uncle that I had been away to war and he’d better not treat me as a kid anymore. He didn’t seem to be impressed one whit. If I’d come home a general instead of a lowly private first class, it would not have mattered. All he needed was a hand who could take care of ranch emergencies and ride with him to open gates.

The first chance I got, I went to town and bought some western clothes. As to boots, I was too bound by tradition to tolerate store-boughts. I sent in the outline of my feet to Blucher Boots in Olathe, Kansas, and ordered some new boots, knowing that two years of marching in the army had altered the shape of my feet.

My feet weren’t the only things around that had been altered by the war. So many of the old horses I’d come home to see had aged out during my absence. Sleepy, BK Heavy, Yellowstone, Roany, Spade, Badger, even the cranky colt I’d broken and named Brown Bomber after Joe Louis, every one of them was gone. Paddock told me they had all died of old age, but I suspected he had sent them down the road to be made into chicken feed. Had I not gone to war, I’d have fought for them, made damn sure they lived out their days on the ranch they loved. Whingding and Bright, the King Ranch horse Paddock had given me, were still around and were fixtures at Yamsi. Bright came up to the fence and nickered to me, but Whingding snorted, which was about all the real welcome I got. I hadn’t been home ten minutes when Buck drove up in a new Chrysler and wanted me to open gates for him. The routine was the same, but I learned from the old man just how much the country itself had changed, although I had come home hoping things would be the same as I had left them.

For one thing, the Indians had sold out their reservation to the government for a national forest. It would not be long before the traditional grazing permits would be crowded out in favor of the recreationists. Down in California, folks were selling out their homes in an inflated market and paying such high prices for Oregon ranches that ranch kids had no chance of buying out their parents and were moving to town in record numbers.

And wages! When I’d left for the war, I was getting thirty dollars a month, thirty-five if I rode colts, and forty if I rode spoiled horses. That was more money than I knew how to spend. Now if I took a job with some absentee Californian, I could get four hundred or even more, but a good Visalia stock saddle would cost me over a thousand. What disturbed me more was that the out-of-staters

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