Gambling Man Read Online Free Page A

I'll go after Bessie, like always.”
    “You mind if I ride along?”
    It was then that Jeff saw his pa's black hitched at the watering trough. Beside the black there was a sleek bay mare, her coat recently brushed and gleaming like a new dollar. “I got the mare at the public corral,” Nathan said. “She's yours for the rest of the day, son—if you feel like ridin', that is.”
    Jeff found that he could not speak. Of course he had ridden horses, but not very often. Just enough to whet his appetite for it, and he had hardly ever seen a horse, even Phil Costain's old dray nag, that his thighs didn't ache to feel a saddle between them. He looked quickly at his pa to make sure that he wasn't joking.
    Nathan smiled. “Climb up, son. We'll ride to the pasture together.”
    There was nothing in the world, Jeff thought, like riding a good horse to make a man feel like a man! He felt the saddle, cured by sweat and by a hundred soapings to a rich tobacco brown. He climbed up on the mare and felt nine feet tall as he surveyed the town from his lofty position in the saddle.
    Nathan Blaine said nothing, but laughed quietly. He reined his black into the street, and Jeff put the bay around and rode beside him.
    Jim Lodlow, a scholar at the academy with Jeff, was standing in front of Baxter's store as they rode past. Jeff felt a bubbling inside and had a crazy impulse to giggle. Look at Jim Lodlow bugging his eyes!
    But Jeff only nodded as they rode past, as though to imply that he was used to riding fine bay mares every day of the week. The fact that his bare feet did not quite reach the stirrups didn't bother him at all.
    They reached the pasture in practically no time, and Jeff guessed that they could wait a while before calling Bessie. Besides, he was just getting the feel of the saddle and hated the thought of climbing down and letting down the barbed-wire gate.
    His pa had a curious, faraway look in his dark eyes as he looked out at that cleared, fenced land.
    “I can remember,” Nathan said slowly, “when there wasn't a foot of barbed wire in this part of Texas. Blackjack corrals and a few rawhide branding pens were all the fences we had.”
    Jeff had not thought of his father as an old man, and still didn't. Things just happened fast in Texas. It seemed that the squatters had come overnight, almost, and had hemmed the big outfits in and pushed them back toward the hills to the north.
    But Nathan Blaine remembered when Sam Baxter's store was the only one around. The dry run to the east of town had been a flowing stream then, and a man from Kansas had put up a water wheel and ground flour on the shares. Those two buildings and a blacksmith shop had been all there was to Plainsville in those days, before the big outfits began coming here and the town started to grow.
    Jeff found himself listening with interest to what his pa had to say. It gave him a funny feeling to remember he was twelve years old and knew practically nothing about his own father.
    Jeff said, “That must have been a long time ago.”
    “Yes, I guess it was. I was about the age you are now, I guess, when my family started down from Missouri to settle in Texas. Not much more than squatters we were, if the truth were told. My ma was set on getting the family a piece of land and living on it. She never did get the land, though, that she had wanted so much.”
    “Why not?” Jeff wanted to know.
    Nathan Blaine turned his head slowly and gazed to the north. “Osages,” he said. “White trash had them stirred up and they were raiding settler wagons coming through the Territory.”
    “Your ma was killed?”
    “And two brothers. Me and my pa were the only ones to get to Texas, finally. Not that it did us much good.”
    “Why not?”
    Nathan looked at his son. “Never mind. It's not important now.”
    Man and boy, they sat their horses proudly and gazed thoughtfully into the distance.
    “Would you like to ride a piece down the fence?” Nathan asked.
    And