All the Cowboys Ain't Gone Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by John Jacobson

  E-book published in 2021 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Zena Kanes

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

  or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

  publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982600-91-4

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982600-90-7

  Fiction / Action & Adventure

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  To DJJ, DPJ, MPJ, and JKJ—blessings undeserved. SDG.

  There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

  —Mark Twain

  part one

  CHAPTER 1

  As the sun climbed into the dazzling South Texas sky, a young boy sat astride his mustang pony on a low bluff. Looking eastward in the early morning light, he could see a plume of white smoke.

  The boy wore the chaps and spurs of a drover, though the last major cattle drive in Texas had been in 1885, three years ago. His blond hair, which he wore long in imitation of his father, hung out below his “sombrero,” as he liked to call his range hat. Slung over his shoulder were a small Comanche-style bow and quiver. His mother wouldn’t let him take his .22 caliber rifle out by himself until he turned twelve, three long months from now.

  It wasn’t unusual for him to ride out early and watch the new day awaken. If asked why he did so, he would say, also imitating his father, “I like gettin’ out and see what’s stirring with the new day, while it’s still fresh and wild. Before its newness gets marred by the events of the day.” Although riding out early wasn’t unusual for him, this wasn’t a typical morning for young Lincoln Smith.

  He had heard the train even before he saw it, and as the dark iron locomotive came into view, pulling its four cars and caboose, his temper flared. He didn’t know whether to spit or cry. He spurred Rocinante, or “Rosy,” as he called his pony, into a dead gallop toward the train. Directing her with his legs, he nocked an arrow on his bow. When he got within forty feet of the locomotive, he loosed the arrow at its smokestack, then quickly nocked another arrow and shot the iron beast again, reloaded, and shot once more. The engineer and the fireman in the locomotive didn’t know what to think at the first arrow; then they started yelling and cursing at him. Lincoln would have chased the train farther and shot more arrows, but he had made his point. Besides, if he didn’t get back home by eight o’clock, he would have another kind of problem to deal with—his mother started his school lessons then and she didn’t tolerate tardiness.

  Mrs. Rachel Smith, Lincoln Smith’s mother, was just getting up. Leaving her bedroom, she found the fire already burning in the fireplace, and the front door slightly ajar. She walked over to the window and looked outside. On the porch steps, she saw her son sitting with his head in his hands, mumbling something. It wasn’t all that unusual to see him talking to himself, but sometimes his passionate imagination did cause her some concern.

  All of a sudden, he sprang up. Grabbing his bow and quiver, he ran off toward the side of the barn. Rachel leaned over, trying to see what he had run after, but he disappeared around the back of the barn. Then she heard a canine yelp.

  “What have you been doing out there?” she asked him a few minutes later, when he walked into the house.

  “A coyote was sneaking around the barn. It’s the one that’s been trying to get at the chickens. I hit him in the flank, and my arrow stuck. But my bow’s too dern small and I didn’t bring him down. I need a real bow, or else you ought to let me take my rifle out.”

  “What did I tell you about using that word?” his mother scolded, bothered more by his language than by some chicken-filching coyote.

  “Dern isn’t really cussing,” the boy said as respectfully as he could, while still making what he considered a valid point.

  “It’s close enough,” his mother said. “If you can’t think of a better word, you’d best say nothing at all. Speech like that is a sign of a poor vocabulary. And take off your spurs when you’re in my house. I don’t want you scuffing the floor or the furniture.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lincoln said, frowning slightly. He sat down on the chair by the front door and removed his spurs. A gift from one of his father’s old Texas Ranger friends, the spurs were among his most prized possessions. They were compact and light and had silver conchos on the metal heel band, and the polished-steel rowels had seven points. But what Lincoln liked best about them was their age and the experiences they had behind them.

  “And don’t forget to remove your hat while you’re at it,” his mother said as he was hanging the spurs next to the bootjack by the door.

  Lincoln walked over to the table where they would shortly be starting his lessons. He took off his hat and laid it gently on the table, crown down and brim up, the way you were supposed to care for a quality hat. His father had special ordered it for his eleventh birthday, nine months back. This Stetson wasn’t one of the new, fancy models that a dude from San Antonio would wear, but an old “Boss” model made from 100 percent beaver. The crown, higher in the back, was shaped with a fold down the middle, and one on either side—the style of the old Hanna outfit that used to run beef down along the Nueces River, a dozen miles away. Lincoln was almost as proud of his Stetson as he was of those spurs.

  After they had eaten breakfast and cleared the table, Mrs. Smith sat down with the boy to start his lessons. She had brought a small stack of books to the table, and a slate with three differently colored pieces of chalk. She pulled a book of seventeenth-century poetry from the stack but didn’t open it. Instead, she took two small pasteboard-backed books from her apron pocket and handed them to him. She tilted her head down just so she could look reproachfully up at him from beneath arched brows. “I found these on your reading table this morning. You know I have concerns about what you’re filling your mind with.”

  “Yes, ma’am. This one’s about Wild Bill,” Lincoln said, using one of the books to keep the second one covered.

  “I can see whom it’s about,” his mother said. “I like you reading, just not trashy stuff like this.” She was quite proud of her son’s enthusiasm for reading, even though his taste in literature wasn’t yet what she hoped for.

  The book had a gray-and-white cover with a highly imaginative interpretation of Wild Bill with a bowie knife in one hand, fighting off a bear, while shooting a couple of bandits with a six-shooter in the other hand. Lincoln put the books down, and his left eye twitched, as it tended to do when he was concerned or thinking serious thoughts. The twitch was a result of getting launched off his pony while trying a daring new trick that one of his young Indian friends was trying to teach him.

  “Yes, ma’am, but it ain’t trashy,” he said, feeling duty bound to show his loyalty and defend his hero. “Pa was a friend of Wild Bill’s and he says this book’s somewhat accurate. Pa says Bill was one of a dying breed and that there’s not many like him anymore. That’s high words, coming from Pa.”

  James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill, was actually only his third-favorite hero. But third was a lofty position on the boy’s list
of heroes. Had it been a male who used “trashy” in reference to Wild Bill (and said male’s age might not have mattered much), there would have been minor bloodshed. But just as Lincoln didn’t cotton to anyone speaking ill of Wild Bill, neither would he tolerate anyone—himself included—behaving disrespectfully to his mother. He would have said it was “against the code” to speak rudely to any woman, let alone his mother. But no man in South Texas would be fool enough to do that. For he would have had to answer not only to Lincoln but also to his father, Marshal Wesley Smith, Lincoln’s number one favorite hero, who was not a man to be trifled with.

  “I was referring to the quality of the writing, not to Mr. Hickok himself,” Mrs. Smith said. “If what you’re reading teaches you to say ain’t instead of is not, then it most certainly is trash as far as I am concerned. I’m not speaking about the man, but about grammar and vocabulary. I happen to have met Mr. Hickok on a few occasions myself. Indeed, he was gallant gentleman.”

  “It was twelve years and two months ago, on August second, that McCall shot him in the back of the head,” Lincoln said, setting the books down and standing up. “Shooting in the back is about as low-down as you can get. McCall was a coward and a dern weasel.”

  “Lincoln, what did I tell you about saying that word! Your foul language isn’t going bring back Mr. Hickok—or, for that matter, the old times you so long for.”

  Lincoln sat back down, feeling just a little sorry for himself. “This book,” he said after a few moments, “calls Bill ‘a knight chivalric of the western plains,’ ”—pronouncing chivalric properly, with the accent on the second syllable. Lincoln enjoyed the old books of questing knights almost as much as he liked his Western novels, some of which claimed that their heroes were the true heirs of the old knight-errantry. “I admire that,” he went on. “Pa’s like that too, ain’t he? If I could have only been born earlier, I could have been like them too.”

  “Well, you weren’t. It’s 1888, and what you need is a modern education if you’re going to face the changes that are coming, and they are a-coming.”

  “It was the dern railroads that started the decline,” he answered, recalling proudly his attack on the locomotive earlier in the morning. Lincoln detested machines in general and had a particular bitterness toward trains, whose coming had brought the hunters who butchered the buffalo. They had also put an end to the big cattle drives before he ever got the chance to go on one.

  “Now, Lincoln,” his mother said, growing stern, “I’m not going to tell you again. If you don’t stop saying dern, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap.”

  Lincoln sat up straight, realizing he had gone a notch too far. “Yes, ma’am, okay,” he said, “and I won’t say ain’t no more—anymore. I will try harder to talk good.”

  “But it’s not that book I’m most concerned with. It’s that other one you’re trying to hide underneath it.”

  She took up the books, set the one about Wild Bill down, and showed him the other one. On its cover, in gray-and-white tones, was a soldier carrying a rifle, with bandoliers crisscrossed across his chest, a cap with cloth hanging from the back to cover his neck, a long tunic that went almost to his knees, blousy trousers tucked into calf-high boots, and a wide sash wrapped around his waist. The title read, Légion Étrangère: The French Foreign Legion—The Place That Time Forgot.

  “This is not the kind of book a boy your age should be reading. I’ve heard that they’re a bunch of criminals and cutthroats. And there is no place that time forgot. You’re just going to have to get used to it.”

  “Besides jewel thieves, it also says it’s where fallen princes and brokenhearted lovers go.”

  “Lincoln, running away from your problems is not the way to get over them.”

  “But, ma’am, if I might say so, I do wish I could have been a Texas Ranger or even a scout. I would rather have been a scout for the Seventh Cavalry—for Custer, even—than to have been born now.” He tried to smile and give the impression he was keeping a good attitude. But Lincoln wasn’t great at hiding his emotions.

  His mother moved closer to him, smoothed his hair, and looked him in the eye. “There’s a story your pa once told me when I got to complaining about something or other. It’s a little off-color, but I think it’s time you heard it.”

  “What’s off-color ?”

  “It means it’s not all that dignified. But it has an important lesson just the same. I think you’re old enough to hear it now. It’s about a cattle drive, so I’m sure you’ll like it. Some old outfit was taking a herd up to Dodge City, and as I think you know, there was an unwritten rule on cattle drives to always extend the hospitality of a meal to anyone who happened to ride up to the chuck wagon at mealtime—even to stragglers.

  “There was also another unwritten rule that a cowboy on a drive was never supposed to complain openly about the food. Not only was it bad manners”—this manners bit was Mrs. Smith adding her own touch to the tale—“but if he did, the complainer would be bound to clean the dishes and the pots and pans for the whole outfit. And this applied especially to stragglers.

  “So during this drive, at suppertime, up rides a straggler and says, ‘Howdy, boys. Something sure smells invitin’.’ And as was only proper, the boys extended to him a meal. Well, the next day, just as they’re starting to eat, he rides up again and says something like ‘The aroma was just too much for me.’ And for the next three days, he’s there at suppertime, saying something of the same nature.

  “Well, this abuse of their good manners started to get to the cowboys, and they had a discussion and came up with a plan. An hour or so before supper the next day, they gathered a bunch of ripe horse biscuits.”

  “I’ve never seen a horse biscuit. What do they look like?”

  “You have seen them; you see them all the time. They’re, you know, they’re what horses leave behind.”

  “You mean horse turds?”

  “Yes, but I would rather not use the word. That’s why I call this story off-color, and I don’t want you repeating it in mixed company. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Did Pa really tell you this?”

  “Yes, he did. And I took a good lesson from it too, and so can you. The cowboys gathered up a bunch of these fresh horse biscuits and gave them to the cook, and the cook put a little flour on them and some spices and then fried them up nicely. Of course, for cleanliness’ sake, he used a separate frying pan from the one he was using for everyone else’s dinner”—again he suspected this was his mother’s own touch—“and sure enough, in no time at all, up comes the straggler again, looking for a free meal.

  “So the cowboys greet him and are all friendly like, and one of them gets up and says, ‘Friend, here, let me get you a plate of these dumplings. Special recipe—sure are tasty.’

  “They fix him a plate of the special-recipe dumplings, and the straggler digs in and takes a big bite.

  “ ‘Ah, horse biscuits!’ the straggler cried, spitting out the vile concoction. ‘It’s horse biscuits!’ he repeated, spitting again. He looked up and saw the whole crew of drovers with their eyes fixed on him. After a moment, with something less than a smile, he said, ‘But good! If these aren’t the best horse biscuits I ever had, I don’t know what are.’ He thanked them for the meal and rode away, never to bother those folks again.”

  “Ma, that’s a great story! It ought to be in a book.”

  “But what is the lesson you think I want you to learn from it?”

  “I don’t know; there aren’t any more cattle drives. Maybe, don’t take handouts?”

  “The lesson is that real cowboys—and people with character, in general—don’t complain, even if they have something to complain about. And I’d take it a step further: if there is something worth complaining about, do something about it. Applied to you, though things aren’t the way you’d prefer, there are still going to be plenty of ad
ventures; they’re just going to be different. You’re just going to have to use your imagination to find them.”

  It was going to take Lincoln some time to think all this through. He knew that his mother was a smart woman, and he tried to give her opinions a chance. He did like the idea of a person doing something about the things they didn’t like. What that straggler did, for instance, was just to get up and leave.

  The old clock on the brick mantel above the fireplace started to gong; it was eight o’clock. “I’m going to get another cup of coffee,” Mrs. Smith said, “and then we’ll start your lessons.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A few minutes later, they started Lincoln’s schoolwork. Mrs. Smith, a teacher by training, had taken on the responsibility for the “modern education,” as she called it, of her only child. After graduating from Vassar College in New York five years after the end of the War Between the States, she had come to Texas to visit her parents. Her father had been a Union brigadier general in the war and, at its end, was given the command of Fort Sam Houston, outside San Antonio, where former Texas Ranger Wesley Smith had recently become marshal. Though their backgrounds were considerably different, the thirty-year-old marshal and twenty-three-year-old Rachel Clark were quickly smitten with each other. A year later, they married. But it wasn’t for another six years, after a difficult birth, that Lincoln was born, who would be her only child. Now her great passion was the education of her precocious son.

  And Lincoln was demonstrating a certain precociousness, not only in a few of his school subjects, but also in a few areas she wasn’t so excited about. He was developing a tendency to be very protective of the honor of the people, things, and ideas he cared about. His feelings about the hero of the book she had caught him reading was an instance of this. Another was his latest black eye, still visible even though it was a week old. He had received this badge of honor while brawling with five lads of similar age. One of them had made disparaging remarks about the person Lincoln was named after—fighting words.