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

Spanning Jordan’s swelling tide;
You behold the union depot
Into which your train will glide;
There you’ll meet the superintendent
God the Father, God the Son;
With a hearty, joyous greeting
Weary pilgrim, welcome home—
The buck stepped clear of the tree.
The eyes of a Pronghorn can detect motion three miles distant. The Old
Cowboy took a shallow breath and remained dead still.
In ’98 he had been a muleskinner for Teddy and his Terrors—the
Roughriders some newspaper fellow named them—but he’d come down with
malaria before they shipped him and his mosquito-riddled compadres off to
Cuba.
That was where he met Tom. They both missed the war and went back
to busting broncs for $60 a month.
They later joined Pinkerton’s and gunned down outlaws, which they
themselves had surely been, without reproach or dangling from a rope for the
doing of it, but it was a distasteful business, although Tom stayed on a while
longer, after the Old Cowboy sauntered off.
Their paths never crossed again until he’d heard about the trial and made
the long ride to Cheyenne.
Too long a ride, as it turned out. He arrived the day they dangled Tom.
The buck was in the open now. Enough food for a month. He would
skin it and jerk the meat this very day.
Maybe it was three hundred yards, after all.
It only took one shot. Direct to the heart. The rifle’s report was
swallowed by the empty land, just like the Old Cowboy would one day be,
just like the world he used to know already had been, just like the fate of
everything born.
The buck dropped, never knew what hit it.
The Old Cowboy cranked the empty .45 casing out of the Henry’s
chamber and caught it before it hit the ground.
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY