TEXAS BLOOD FEUD
DUSTY RICHARDS
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
I want to dedicate this book to the late “Doc” C.L. Sonnichsen, a great historian who took me under his wing when I was a rank novice writer at some of my first Western Writers of America Conventions, and told me story after story about the great Texas Feuds. They must have stayed with me for they are still vivid today. Doc was such a realist. He once told a writer friend of mine, John Duncklee, when John sold his first article back in his college days at the University of Arizona, that it was wonderful— “Just don’t quit your day job.”
“Doc” had an eye for Western fiction, too. He worried a lot about political correctness interfering with writers telling a good story. I moderated a panel at the Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock, Texas, with Elmer Kelton, and they asked Elmer about that. Mr. Kelton smiled and said in his best Texas drawl, “I sure don’t think about that writing my books.”
Neither do I.
Dusty Richards
www.dustyrichards.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 1
The acrid smoke from the blazing live oak fire swirled around his batwing chaps when Chet picked up the branding iron. He headed across the pen for the bawling calf stretched out on the ground by Chet’s cousins, Reg and J.D. Bending over, Chet stuck the hot iron to the calf’s side, and it let out an ear-shattering bawl. Chet left a smoking—C on its hide. It was a good enough job of marking the animal. The letters stamped on the dogie had the color of dark saddle leather. Chet nodded for the two boys in their teens to turn the critter loose.
“You made a swell earmark on that one’s ear,” Chet said to them, then went back to the fire and set the iron’s face back in the red-hot coals,
Chet’s thirty-year-old brother, Dale Allen, came dragging in another protesting calf to the fire with his reata around the dogie’s hind legs. The entire Byrnes clan busied themselves working cattle. Catching the late calves they’d missed in the spring, cutting the bulls, ear-notching, and branding ’em. There’d be plenty of fried mountain oysters for supper. The old man, Rock, and Dale Allen’s oldest boy, Heck, held the herd on the flat. Good cool mid-October day to work them—and maybe the last screwworm flies had gone south for the winter. Not taking any chances, they painted all the surgical cuts with pine tar.
Chet made a note with a pencil in his logbook about the newest steer in the herd. “Steer—black, white spot on his neck right side—Summer 1872 crop.” He kept the records on all the cattle in the herd. Shame someone else had had the “bar-B” brand in the Texas Brand Registry when his dad had sent off for it over thirty years earlier. C stood for Cooney, his grandfather’s name on his mother’s side. Grandpa Abe Cooney and Chet’s father, Rock Byrnes, had brought their families out of Madison County, Arkansas, and settled in the Texas hill country on Yellow Hammer Creek twenty years before the war.
In those early years, the fierce Comanche made raids on them in the fall under every full moon. The Byrnes men farmed and worked cattle with loaded rifles and powder horns slung over their shoulders while they held plow handles or reins. Every night they slept lightly with their cap-and-ball pistols under their pillows. Womenfolks kept shotguns ready beside the front door, and the shutters on the windows at the rock house still bore the bullet holes and arrowheads embedded in them. Over the course of years in the long-running Comanche-Byrnes war, three of the Byrnes siblings were carried off by those red savages and never found or heard of again. Two boys and a girl. Keeping a life-long grudge, Chet’s father, Rock, never saw an Indian, man or woman, he didn’t stop and spit in their direction.
Chet checked the sun time and hollered at Dale Allen as he brought another calf up to the fire. “Better break for dinner after that one.”
His brother nodded to him as the boys took control of the calf, and coiled up his rope. “About a dozen left to work in this bunch.”
“Leave them in this trap. We’ll get them out after dinner,” Chet said as he fetched the book and pencil out of his shirt pocket.
“Good. I’ve got to fix my girth anyway,” Dale Allen said, and headed for the shade of some spreading live oaks.
“Go ahead. We’ll work the rest of them this afternoon,” Chet said over his shoulder.
“Red heifer—scar on right leg—summer 1872 crop,” he wrote in the tally. The two boys flanked the calf and Reg, seventeen, the older of the pair, notched her left ear on the underside. His fifteen-year-old brother painted
