Destiny Of The Mountain Man Read Online Free

That’s not so bad,” Harbin replied.
    Carter chuckled. “Not so bad for you. You’re going back East to go to school, so you won’t be making the drive.”
    â€œI’ve never made a drive,” Abbot said. “What’s it like?”
    â€œIt’s like nothin’ you’ve ever done,” Carter said. “You’ll be working seventeen-hour days, seven days a week, on very little grub, with no tents, no tarps, and damn few slickers. The horses will get tired and their backs will get so sore that they’ll fight you when you ride them. And the worst thing is no sleep. Five hours when the weather is nice, maybe an hour when it isn’t. But that don’t matter ’cause you’ll have to do another fifteen miles the next day whether you got ’ny sleep the night before or not. Sometimes you’ll find yourself rubbing tobacco juice in your eyes, just to keep awake.”
    â€œOh, damn, that hurts just to think about it,” Abbot said. He pretended to rub tobacco juice into his eyes, then squinting, squatted down and flailed about. The others laughed at his antics.
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    On the other side of the herd, nearly sixty men rode through the dark of a copse of scrub oak trees. Shadows within shadows, they moved quietly to the edge of the trees, then fanned out into one long flanking line.
    The leader of the group was wearing a Union officer’s jacket of the style worn some fifteen years earlier during the Civil War. The shoulder epaulets had major’s bars on a yellow field, indicating cavalry.
    Jack Brandt, who was no longer in the Army but still insisted upon being called Major, stood in his stirrups to stretch out just a bit, then settled back into the saddle.
    â€œLook at all them cows,” one of the men near him said. “What do you say, Major, that we cut out a hundred head or so, then run ’em across the border and sell ’em down in Mexico?”
    â€œNo,” Brandt said.
    â€œBut to just ride down there and kill ’em seems like such a waste.”
    Brandt glared at the man. “Preston, you knew what you were signing up for when you enlisted.”
    Although Brandt was no longer in the Army, he ran his outfit as if it were an Army unit. Because of that, suggesting that the man had “enlisted” came natural to him.
    â€œYou heard the major’s plans,” Sarge said. Like Brandt, the man, whose real name was Stone, but who preferred to be called Sarge, was wearing a blue Army tunic. On his sleeves were the stripes of the rank he’d once held. “All we have to do is fix it so’s nobody will work for him and he’ll go broke, plain and simple. Then we’ll have our revenge.”
    â€œYeah, well, revenge is good,” Preston said. “But it don’t buy you no whiskey or women.”
    â€œThink about it, Preston. In a few weeks, he’s going to be drivin’ ten thousand head or so all the way to Kansas,” one of the other men said. “If he don’t have nobody to work them cows, they’ll be as easy to gather up as apples that’s fallen from a tree. You are talking about stealing a hundred head. Hell, we’ll be able to take ten thousand head with no problem.”
    â€œYeah,” Preston said. “Yeah, I guess I can see that.”
    Brandt, who had not joined the conversation, pulled his sword.
    â€œIt’s not dawn yet so, like as not, the night riders are still out there. We’ll take them first.”
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    Of the three nighthawks, Noble, who was nineteen, was the oldest. At sixteen, Tanner was the youngest, and he came in for a lot of teasing from the other two.
    Tanner had dismounted and was relieving himself.
    â€œDamn, listen to that boy pee, will you?” Noble said. “He sounds like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock off’n a fifty-foot cliff.”
    Gillis laughed. “Hell, when peein’s the onliest thing