The Rocking R Ranch Read online

  THE ROCKING R RANCH

  TIM WASHBURN

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 Tim Washburn

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4567-9

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4568-6 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4568-X (e-book)

  Dedicated to

  Isabelle Kathleen Chandler

  and

  Graham Karson Snider

  The second wave of the next generation.

  CHAPTER 1

  There was no hint of the approaching dawn when Cyrus Ridgeway pulled his rifle down from where it hung over the door and made his way outside, dropping wearily into one of the half-dozen rocking chairs that dotted the long front porch of their two-story home. He leaned the rifle against the house and sat back. Now at sixty-four, Cyrus had spent a majority of those years outside and on a horse and he didn’t sleep well anymore. Too many aches and pains and something else—an ever-present worry that gnawed at Cyrus like a lingering toothache. And more than once he had cursed his ancestors for staking a claim to this land that, over the years, had absorbed a river of Ridgeway blood.

  It’s not that the ground under their feet wasn’t fertile, because it was, the grass growing knee-high during the summer months and fattening the Ridgeways’ ten thousand head of cattle. And it wasn’t the climate, either. The area received adequate rainfall and most days were sunny and warm. No, what irked Cyrus was the location. Set hard against the Red River in northwest Texas, the Rocking R Ranch spanned for as far as the eye could see across more than forty-five thousand acres of relatively flat terrain. If it had been any other river it would have been acceptable. But not this river. And his contempt didn’t have anything to do with the quality or quantity of water that flowed through her banks. In fact, it didn’t have much to do with the river at all. No, his annoyance, disgust, and loathing stemmed from what was on the other side of the river—Indian Territory.

  The Territory was home to a conglomeration of Indians, many of whom would rather slit your throat than look at you. And Cyrus thought he probably could have tolerated that if it was just the Indians he had to worry about. But it wasn’t. There was more, much more, that kept him up at night. A lawless place, Indian Territory was also home to a large assortment of cattle rustlers, horse thieves, murderers, robbers, and would-be robbers, con men, swindlers, scoundrels, crooks, and many other nefarious no-gooders with evil on their minds. If Cyrus had a dollar for every stolen cow or horse, he would be rich—or rather—richer than he already was. His children and their families who lived on the ranch insisted the occasional losses should be chalked up to the cost of doing business. But that didn’t sit well with Cyrus, who was a firm believer in protecting what was theirs, no matter the cost. And he’d gotten most of the stolen stock back over the years, with the thieves often paying a steep price for their transgressions when they found themselves at the end of a short rope that was tied to a tall tree.

  Cyrus heard someone stirring around inside and listened to the footfalls, trying to decipher who was about to horn in on his quiet time. With a big family and four other homes on the place, it was difficult to know who was sleeping where on any given night. Most nights, a grandchild or two would slink up to his house after dark, well after Cyrus had already turned in. He didn’t have to listen long to identify the footsteps as belonging to his wife, Frances. The door squealed when she opened it and stepped outside.

  “What are you doing sitting out here in the dark, Cy?” she asked as she took a seat next to him.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  Frances reached out and put her hand on his back. “What’s worrying that noggin of yours so early this morning?”

  “Nothin’ but the usual worries.” Cyrus glanced in her direction. The moon glow was bright enough to see her profile and hints of her gray hair but not her individual features. And that was okay because Cyrus had them memorized by now, especially her blue eyes.

  “That shoulder bothering you again?”

  “Nah. Just can’t sleep.” Cyrus was a bear of a man at six-three with strong, powerful shoulders from a lifetime of hard work. He’d packed on a few extra pounds over the years and his once-dark hair was now mostly gray. With a full beard and mustache, he had started trimming it shorter after Frances teased him about looking like Santa Claus.

  Frances removed her hand from his back and leaned back in her chair. “It’s about time you let the boys carry some of the load.”

  “What about the girls, Franny? They not get a say in it?”
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  Cyrus and Frances had produced seven offspring, four of whom made it to adulthood—two sons, Percy and Elias, along with two daughters, Abigail and Rachel, the youngest. All now had families of their own and lived on the ranch.

  “That’d probably be up to Percy. Shouldn’t he get more say in who does what since he’s the oldest?” Frances asked.

  “Maybe,” Cyrus said. “But I don’t reckon any of it’s writ in stone. And you’re liable to stir up a passel of trouble if you ain’t careful.”

  Frances clucked her tongue. “Decisions need to be made, Cy. We’re not getting any younger.” Tall at five-eight, her once-red hair was now gray and, lithe and lean as a teenager, her body was a bit stiffer but, remarkably, she still wore the same size dress as back then and still filled it out in all the right places.

  “I ain’t dead, yet,” Cyrus said, a surly tone in his voice. “Besides, might be best to let the kids figure all that out when we’re gone.”

  “Talk about stirring up trouble,” Frances said. “I won’t have my family ripped to pieces over this cattle ranch. We need a plan.”

  “What do you care? You’ll likely be dead, too, fore it comes to that.”

  Frances sighed and pushed to her feet. “I’m going to put on some coffee.”

  Cyrus watched his wife’s silhouette disappear into the house. His preference was to keep the ranch intact for the future generations, but Frances had mentioned a couple of times through the years that they should divvy it up and give it to the kids. “Over my dead body,” Cyrus grumbled as he thought about it. Every time he pondered the situation, he ended up with a stomachache. The original Spanish land grant the ranch was founded upon had been in his family since Texas was still called Mexico, and Cyrus had added to their holdings over the years, buying up the farms and ranches of those who grew tired of fighting the Indians and the outlaws that drifted across the river. He’d worked too hard to make the ranch what it was and if the children wanted the land divided, they were going to have to wait until he was dead.

  Cyrus wiped the sweat from his brow. August in this part of the country was hot, muggy, and miserable and those were the nighttime weather conditions. The same conditions existed during the day but were intensified about tenfold. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and Cyrus was already damp with sweat. Thinking about the heat, a weariness crept into his bones. It didn’t matter if it was scorching hot or finger-freezing cold, there was always work to be done—horses to be broken, cattle to be branded, corrals to be fixed, and on and on, all while keeping a watchful eye for marauding Indians, cattle rustlers, or others who might want what wasn’t legally theirs. Sometimes Cyrus wished he had listened to Frances and moved to San Antonio when they were younger. And they might have if his two older brothers who were set to take over the ranch hadn’t been slaughtered by a roving pack of Comanche savages while Cyrus and his new bride had been on a horse-buying trip to Saint Louis. Their deaths sealed Cyrus’s fate because he was the last of the Ridgeway boys. But all that was years ago—time that had slipped away, year after year, and, once Frances started having kids, leaving the ranch hadn’t made any sense at all. Now here it was, 1873, and Cyrus knew his dead carcass would be buried up on the little knoll where they buried his brothers and all the children who had died way too early.

  Frances returned a while later, handed her a husband a cup of coffee, and retook her seat just as the first rays of the sun stretched across the landscape. They sat in silence for a few moments as the orange orb peeked over the horizon. They had positioned the house so that they could watch the sunrise on the front porch and the sunset on the back porch. Hearing the clop of horses, Cyrus sat up and reached for the rifle he’d brought outside and then relaxed when the night riders rode past on their way to the bunkhouse.

  “Good thing they weren’t renegades,” Frances said, “or they would have been on us before you could lever a shell into that rifle of yours.”

  “Hearin’ ain’t what it once was,” Cyrus mumbled. “Maybe you ought to be the lookout since you still got all your faculties.”

  Frances chuckled. “Oh, Cy, you’re doing just fine. Don’t you think I’d have told you if trouble was headed our way?”

  “Don’t need my wife to tell me when there’s trouble a-comin’. My damn eyes still work just fine.” Cyrus turned to look at his wife. “We eatin’ breakfast sometime today?”

  Frances chuckled again. “Don’t get all riled up, Cy. We all have our shortcomings.” She stood and leaned over to kiss her husband on the cheek. “You’ll always be my protector. What are you planning for the day?”

  “Me and Percy and a few others are gonna track down them rustlers who stole them two steers yesterday afternoon.”

  “Aren’t you getting a little old to be traipsing off after outlaws?”

  “Like I said, I ain’t dead yet. ’Sides, can’t let them rustlers go unpunished or word would get out and we’d be robbed blind.”

  “And if you find them?”

  Cyrus took a sip of his coffee then said, “Hang ’em, I reckon.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A short distance down the road from the main house, Abigail Turner walked through her dark house and into the kitchen, trying to recall the dream she’d just had. She struck a match and lit the coal oil lamp and stoked the fire, adding more wood from a small stack beside the stove. The dream involved a carriage, a man, and a large city, possibly Saint Louis. But try as she might, she couldn’t recall any of the details of who was involved or what she might have been doing. And the last time she had been in Saint Louis was years ago, before she’d met her husband, Isaac, and settled down.

  As the last fragment of the dream frustratingly faded from memory, Abby stepped out the back door and walked to the outhouse to relieve herself, then filled a pan with water from the well and returned to the kitchen, the sweat already running down her back. Wetting a dish towel, she wiped her face and under her arms and then gathered up her long, red hair and used a strip of fabric to fashion a ponytail. Abby was tall like her mother and had also gotten her mother’s red hair and blue eyes, but that’s where the similarities ended. She had her father’s larger frame with wide shoulders, larger hands, and she wore a size nine shoe. Abby wasn’t chubby or fat although she looked larger than an average woman. She called it being big-boned. With her hair off her neck, she already felt cooler. After putting on a pot of coffee, she grabbed her sourdough starter from an overhead shelf and began making biscuits.

  Over the years a succession of cooks had paraded through the Turner home, yet none ever quite lived up to Abigail’s expectations. So now, much like her mother, Abigail was responsible for a majority of the cooking duties and usually begged for help only for special occasions or holidays. Her sister, Rachel, however, had run through a long line of cooks before she got tired of that and settled on the last person she’d hired and she rarely, if ever, ventured into the kitchen of her house next door. Abigail couldn’t decide if her sister had a less discerning palate or if it was just plain laziness. Knowing Rachel as well as she did, Abby suspected it was the latter.

  In addition to the main house where her parents lived, she and her three siblings had constructed four other three-room homes that formed a horseshoe-shape with the main house at the center. Although they all shared a huge backyard, there was a good deal of distance between the houses and that allowed for a modicum of privacy while also creating a fairly strong defensive position. If marauding Indians rode up to the rear of the homes, they’d face the cold steel of a dozen rifle barrels. And around front, the semicircle arrangement allowed a single shooter at the main house an almost unlimited field of fire to keep any intruders at bay.

  Her husband, Isaac Turner, walked into the kitchen, pulling his suspenders over his shirt. “Biscuits ready?”

  Her hands covered in flour as she mixed the dough in a bowl, Abigail said, “Do they look ready?”

  “You don’t gotta bite my head off.”

  “Why’re you a
sking if you can plainly see they aren’t ready?”

  Isaac poured himself a cup of coffee. “I got work to do.”

  “Work your butt up the ladder and roust the kids.”

  “You wake up mad?” Isaac asked before taking a sip from his cup.

  “Yes, and I’m likely to stay that way.”

  “One more reason to get out of the house,” Isaac mumbled as he stepped out of the kitchen. Rather than crawling up the ladder to the sleeping loft, he shouted upstairs for the kids to get up.

  Abigail pursed her lips and blew a stray strand of hair off her face “You tryin’ to wake up everybody on the ranch?”

  “I expect they’s already up. What’s got you so riled up? Cookin’? I tole you to hire another cook.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you none to learn how to make biscuits.”

  “Okay, I’ll make biscuits and you go traipsing after your pa all day.” Isaac had sandy blond hair and he and Abby were the same height. Wiry and lanky, he might weigh 140 pounds if he put on his coat and stood in the rain for an hour. Being about the same size as Abby, they had often argued about who would win if they ever got into a real fight.

  A clatter arose from overhead as the three children climbed out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” Abigail asked.

  “Hunt down them rustlers that stole them two steers.”

  “Does two less steers really matter?”

  “It surely does to your pa.”

  “If he says jump do you ask how high, too?”

  “Don’t start, Abby.” Isaac pulled out a chair at the table and sat.

  “Have the law take care of it.”

  “What law? You know there ain’t no law round here except your pa.”

  Raised voices interrupted their conversation when an argument erupted upstairs. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and shouted, “Hush up and get down here.” She turned back to her husband to say something else but was interrupted by footsteps pounding down the ladder. Their oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Emma, appeared first. “Emma, you and your sister go gather the eggs,” Abigail said.