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

Sorrow followed like an old scolding,
as he rode to the trailhead. It was all he could do at times not to turn back.
Mod’s pleading features hung suspended before him, as if a talisman. Her
warm breath as she whispered her devotion was yet in his ears. The soapy
scent of her clean, young skin still filled his nose. Even through rough, gloved
hands, he could feel their fingers entwined.
Doubts crowded his thoughts as he rode. But no matter how he looked at
things, it always came down to money. The young lover inside him yearned
to rein in and head home. But it was the calmer, reasoning side of him that
won the day. He would travel on and finish what he started. That thing
that had seemed from a distance such a romantic longing—to live the life of
a cowboy—was now merely a means to an end. His heart had been pierced
by Cupid’s arrow. He would return to Mod and play out his days raising
children and cattle. He would die in his new Texas home an old man
familiar with the small joys of husbanding and fathering, not as a gunman
with a tin star on his chest, or a lonesome cowpoke, or wandering paladin,
drifting like a leaf on the wind.
It was this determination—to return in triumph with purse enough to
marry Mod—that led him on across the brown, barren plains, accompanied
by a ponderous heart and the sound of his own, croaking voice.
The wind did blow and the rain did fall
And the hail did fall and blind me
As I rode along my thoughts went back
To the gal I left behind me
If I ever get off the trail and the Indians they don’t find me
I’ll make my way straight back again to the gal I left behind
me—
It was late afternoon when he swung down off his gelding before the
Agate Hotel in rowdy downtown Fort Worth. He strove not to appear
unnerved. He had arrived to an orgy of drunken, over-zealous men. Bullet
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY 2