Ralph Compton Comanche Trail Read Online Free

you please. That being said, I’ve got something I want to ask you about.”
    â€œAsk away.”
    â€œI’m wondering why it is that in his letters, your daddy has never once mentioned you, good or bad. He’ll always say something about your sister and how pretty she is, but nothing about you.”
    Thad smiled. “I guess he don’t think I’m pretty.”
    â€œI take it you and he don’t exactly get along.”
    â€œThat’s a kind way of putting it. Truth is, me ’n him have never had much to do with each other, least not since I got old enough to talk back when he was scolding me.”
    â€œYour daddy mean?”
    â€œNo.” After a brief silence, he added, “Mostly, he’s just sad. Folks who know him say he’s been that way since my mother passed.”
    Dalton tapped the ashes from his pipe. “And you’re thinking that all these years he’s blamed you for what happened, I suppose. An angry man has to have someone to hold responsible for his misery, and it sounds to me like you got elected.”
    Thad didn’t respond. He stared toward the road, where someone’s dog was hurriedly trying to beat the darkness home.
    â€œI knew your mama, even back when your daddy was courting her,” Dalton continued. “She was as fine a woman as you could ever hope to meet. She made every day of your daddy’s life a pleasure. When she died, more than a little of him did too, I expect. Being a bachelor all my life, I can’t claim to be an expert on the love shared by a man and a woman, but what I saw between your folks was special.
    â€œIt’s no wonder that he changed once she was gone. But, boy, none of that was your doing. That she didn’t survive giving birth to you was no fault of yours. Call it the course of nature or the will of the Almighty, but don’t go blamingyourself like he’s done all these years. No need for you to be as unfair as your daddy’s been.”
    Thad pulled the small photograph from his pocket and handed it to his uncle. Dalton studied it carefully for several seconds. “A happy time,” he said. “Unfortunately I fear that the days ahead might not be.”

Chapter 3
    For adventuresome settlers dreaming of a better life, the Osage Trail, extending westward from Missouri through Kansas and into New Mexico, was the route increasing numbers followed in search of prosperity. A steady caravan of wagons, loaded with meager belongings and high hopes, traveled the rutted and dusty pathway originally blazed by massive herds of migrating buffalo.
    Now, with the Indians moved westward or onto the Indian Territory reservations to the south, the spacious plains of Kansas had become a new and welcoming frontier, offering pioneers free plots of land simply for the claiming.
    Among those staking claim to a hundred-and-sixty-acre plot in an isolated region of Labette County was a large, bushy-eyebrowed German immigrant named John Bender. Older than most who had made the hard journey, he had arrived with his son and set about building a small cabin and barn, dug a water well, and planted a small orchard and garden before summoning his wife and daughter from the Michigan mill town where they had waited for word that their new home was ready.
    Bender’s wife, Kate, a lumbering, overweight woman who spoke little English, had immediately recognized that the untilled land her husband had claimed would hardly yield a living for the family. And it was she who soon devised a plan to improve matters. With the help of her grown daughter, Kate Two, she set about rearranging the interior of the small cabin, stretching the canvas from her husband’s wagon across the middle and placing a table in the front half of the room, leaving only a small area in back for the family’s living quarters. She instructed John to build a small row of shelves across one wall, and began canning the produce from the