volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

He opened to the first page and peered into the blue curlicues of an old
woman’s handwriting. He ran a finger along the genealogy his mother
had troubled herself to preserve. It always ended the same, with him and
his brother and sister. His sister had long ago been torn from life by the
Hostilities, that same war that took his mother and father and destroyed his
boyhood and turned his brother into a killer.
He riffled to the back of the book, where a small envelope lodged. His
face assumed a gloomy expression as he opened it and poured out a lock of
coppery hair. He held the strands to the light and studied their refracted
color at length before returning them to their repository and replacing it inside
the Bible.
He leaned back and reflected.
Sherman’s army, in its march to the sea, had traveled through the sunbrowned
countryside of Georgia, devastating the land for miles in its passing.
The Old Cowboy’s father, an impulsive Irishman, had volunteered to
enlist with the Confederate army, an act that was to be his undoing, leaving
behind a desperate and destitute widow with three children to feed.
Upon the occasion of his enlistment, their father had left them with work
stock that consisted of two yoke of oxen and three cows.
Nearby where they lived was a wild canebreak in which the cattle fed,
several hundred acres in extent, and about a half mile from their farm so that
it was necessary to bell the cows to locate them easily. His mother had been
alerted to the advance of Sherman’s troops and, since a soldier can hear a bell
as well as anyone, she had her children remove them from the animals, save
for one ox that was belled each evening.
It was appointed to him to set off into that canebreak each day before
dawn to find the bellwether and remove its bell, lest advancing troops hear it
and deprive them of their livestock.
He would spend the remainder of the day keeping watch over them as
their shepherd.
In the beginning, when mounted foraging parties passed their one room
cabin, they were left unmolested, the poverty of their farm being all too
apparent.
Meanwhile, by day and by night, cotton gins and plantation houses were
given to the flames.
His vigil had been trying for one so young, barely ten years old, but the
importance of his job was thoroughly impressed upon his mind by the fear
in his mother’s eyes. Food was secretly brought to him and, under cover of
20 ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY