The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1) by Brad Dennison (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

would ride into a nearby town to whoop it up at a saloon, and with some of the women who worked the barroom. Dusty, much too young for such festivities, helped an older woman in the kitchen of a restaurant in the little town, and learned of the magic of cayenne and chili peppers.

Thursday’s hotel customers found Hunter offering a traditional western breakfast of steak and eggs, all they could eat for a reasonable price. Hunter undercut the price charged at the hotel for breakfast, and he included two other items the hotel did not have access to. A pig farmer a couple miles from town owed Hunter for some beers, so Hunter found himself able to include bacon on the menu. And it turned out, Dusty made the lightest, most wonderful homemade bread Hunter had tasted in a coon’s age.

“Reminds me of the bread made by my momma,” he said.

One cowhand in town for the morning, said, “Shit, Hunter. I didn’t know you had a momma.”

“I didn’t. But if I did, her bread would have tasted like this.”

The stage customers at noon found Texas toast on the menu, and slices of Dusty’s bread were included with the steak dinner. The pig farmer also kept a small flock of chickens, so Dusty fried up a basket full of drumsticks and wings to offer the customers some variety.

Hunter was actually able to pay Franklin in cash for the items he had bought Wednesday, including Dusty’s clothes. Franklin chuckled, almost giggled, with delight. “Prosperity is coming. Just around the corner. I know it.”

Saturday morning, while Hunter was savoring a breakfast of steak and eggs, with a thick slice of toasted bread oozing with butter, he said to Dusty, “Tonight will be the start of what I originally hired you for. You ever tend bar before?”

“Yeah, for a short time, down in Nevada. Nothing fancy, just pouring beer and whiskey.”

“That’s all we do here. If someone asks for a beer, you fill a mug from the keg behind the bar. If they ask for a cold beer, you go to the keg in the root cellar. And the bottles of whiskey are all lined up behind the bar. Nothing to it at all.”

Later in the afternoon, after the Saturday stage had departed and Dusty and Hunter had cleared away the dishes and cooking pots and kettles, Hunter suggested Dusty grab a little rest before the evening crowd started trickling in. Dusty carried a straight-backed chair out to the boardwalk and sat in the afternoon sun, rocking the chair back on its rear legs until the straight-back touched the wall. He lowered his hat over his eyes and reflected about what an unusual week this had been. It had been a good week, which he supposed was why it had been so unusual.

He had begun the week as an unemployed cowhand with a gunfighter’s past that he preferred to keep hidden, riding on a fool’s quest to find the father he had never known. A quest that had begun originally in Arizona, and had brought him clear to Montana Territory. He was ending the week with a job as a professional bartender and cook. Now, would you have cared to lay odds on that?

Working for Hunter was giving him a much needed distraction from his troubles. During the long ride from Arizona, he had had each entire day to think about first his mother, and then after he had left Nevada, his thoughts had turned to his father. What would he be like? How would he react when Dusty introduced himself? And there were evenings by a campfire, roasting rabbit, sometimes listening to coyotes howl from somewhere off in the darkness, and he would wonder what the flesh-and-blood Johnny McCabe would be like.

He had seen Wild Bill Hickok once, and remembered how oddly human he seemed, compared with the legendary figure developing in stories told in cattle camps and saloons. Hickok had been tall, with long flowing hair and a buckskin jacket, and a red sash tied about his middle, into which two revolvers were tucked. And he carried himself ramrod straight with his gaze fixed directly ahead, as people watched him ride by. He struck Dusty as being fully aware of his larger-than-life status. But he was just a man, not a god. And when he was putting on a shooting exhibition, which he charged admission for, he was accurate enough, but he was not particularly fast with his guns. Dusty could have easily equaled his shooting feats, and done so much more quickly. Dusty remembered feeling a little disappointed. He wondered how Johnny McCabe would compare to the stories told about him.

Hunter’s job had given Dusty a week’s worth of distractions from the original reason he was in Montana, and he thought he might indulge in these distractions a while longer, while he decided what to do. Whether he should ride out to the ranch and introduce himself, and risk the disappointment if things didn’t go well. Or just head on out to Oregon.

His long trail had begun a year earlier, when he had written to the family of an elderly couple he had lived with for a short time, before he had gone to live with Patterson. He had written to learn if anything had ever been mentioned of his mother.

Actually, he mused, this had all begun twenty years earlier, with a saloon woman named Rosie giving birth to a bastard child. According to the bartender Lewis, Rosie had given the child to a family of traveling missionaries, who were returning east. It wasn’t that she did not love her son, but rather it was that she loved him too much to see him grow up in a saloon. He had then been delivered to a family named Stowell - Methodist missionaries who were living in Missouri.

Sam Patterson had gone west and settled in Texas, and had spent a little time riding with the Rangers, fighting Comanches, who were master guerrilla