“You ridin’ the grubline?” he asked. “Or lookin’ for work?”
That surprised me. By thunder, just seeing a trail herd this time of year and in this economy had belted me like bad whiskey.
“Ain’t you heard that the market’s dead?” I asked.
“We ain’t sellin’, son. This beef is prime stock, bound for the Double Diamond-J Ranch in Colorado Ter’tory.”
“This late in the year?”
“I ride for the brand, son, so I do what the boss man tells me to do, no matter how foolish. And the boss man says take these seven hundred head of mixed longhorns to the Arkansas River, then follow that river west to Las Animas, then twenty-seven miles down the Picketwire. Besides, don’t let this Norther fool you, son. She’ll blow herself out come the morrow, and we’ll have fine herdin’ weather.. He paused long enough to swallow some coffee. “Now, five days back, I had a cowhand quit on me on account of a toothache.”
“A toothache?. I chuckled. “Weren’t much of a cowhand.”
“Yep. He won’t work for me again. So you see, I need a good hand, and you look like one. I can tell by your saddle and spurs. Pays thirty a month and found, and, if me and the boss man likes the looks of you, might be we could hire you on at the Double Diamond-J.”
Rising, he held out his hand: “Name’s Ben Wallis.”
I took that hand, and quickly thought up a name. “You got yourself a hand, Mister Wallis,” I said. “I’m Perry. Perry Star.”
Epilogue
That’s the name I used during the next three years that I spent on that ranch in southeastern Colorado, till, homesick, I decided to risk a venture into Texas. I sneaked home one night to see Mama, who had been forced to move into town, having lost our place to thieving carpetbaggers. She cried a lot, said for months people—Rangers, cowboys, detectives, bounty men—kept coming to the old homestead, looking for me. I told her not to worry, that I was fine, and that I hadn’t murdered anyone.
It turned out, I’d been posted for two killings: Major Canton’s and Perry Hopkins’s. They said I killed Perry even after he’d helped me get out of that jam in the Lone Star Saloon, but what could you expect from a ruthless killer named Mad Carter MacRae. I don’t know to this day who got blamed for lynching André Le Fevre.
That was the last time I saw my ma, though I wrote to her from time to time. Worn out, she died of heartache and heart failure in 1879. I couldn’t risk going to the funeral. I don’t know what became of my younger brothers and sisters.
So I drifted, usually using Perry Star as my handle but sometimes other names, working mostly in the Texas Panhandle and over in New Mexico Territory. In 1898, when, old as I was, I joined up with those Rough Riders to fight in Cuba, I decided to chance my own name, and enlisted as Madison C. MacRae. By then, nobody remembered Mad Carter MacRae, or June Justus, or Major Canton. Most didn’t even recollect there had once been a wild and woolly cow town in Kansas called Ellsworth.
We trained for a spell in San Antonio, the first time I’d been back near home in years. After I mustered out, I kept drifting and cowboying, back to the Panhandle, into Colorado, over in New Mexico, even saw Arizona a time or two. Never, though, did I return to Kansas. By then, those trail days were over in Kansas, and, besides, returning to that state seemed like a good way to get my neck stretched.
Ellsworth held on for a few more years but was pretty much finished as a cow town after the 1873 season. Wichita took over, then Dodge City. I heard a lot of wonderful lies about Dodge City, and wish I had my own lies to tell, but, well, I never set foot in that burg.
In a saloon in Tascosa, Texas, I overheard some drunk saying how Texas Rangers had caught Billy Thompson, and turned him into the Kansas law for the killing of Chauncey Whitney, but he got acquitted. Billy wound up in more scrapes with the law, more shootings, killing, I think, four or forty men (depending on who you ask; I figure four’s aplenty) before he died in Houston in the late 1890s. His brother Ben, of course, was murdered in San Antonio back in 1884. I shed no tears over either’s passing.
Nor did I feel any remorse after learning that Deputy Ed Crawford, who murdered Captain Pierce, was found shot to death in some Ellsworth crib late in ’73, or how Acting Sheriff Tracy Grace got strung up from a thick cottonwood branch along the Smoky Hill. I don’t know who killed Crawford, but think the Masons dished out justice to Tracy Grace.
I often thought about Nellie Whitney, hoping everything worked out for her, and I try to picture what her daughter Bessie would look like now. Why, Bessie would be, what, forty-something years old?
Mr. Justus, I heard, wound up selling his herd to Jim Reed, a one-armed cattleman about as rich as Shanghai Pierce. By that time, Justus had no crew to pay off, so I reckon he made out all right. Anyway, he had enough money to fend off those money-grabbing carpetbaggers for another year, but I don’t think he ever sent another herd to Kansas. Or anywhere else. In 1903, I read his obituary in a San Antonio Express-News that I happened to find in a barbershop in Roswell, New Mexico Territory.
Which is where I was working for the Burnt Well outfit when the foreman, Bucky Max Crook, brought in a string of new hired hands.
I stood to shake their hands, but froze at the sight of a pudgy, balding Negro in a straw hat. He recognized me, too, but he didn’t say anything other than his name.
“Fenton Larue.”
We shook, and I said: “Madison MacRae.”
Next morning, Bucky sent Fenton and me to haze some cattle out of the most miserable country a body could find in southern New Mexico. We gathered twenty-seven, and were moving them back north, stopping for the night in Bonney Cañon.
As I filled Fenton’s cup with coffee, I said: “You look like you expect me to kill you, Fenton.”
“I don’t think that at all, Mad Carter.”
I squatted across the fire from him. “I didn’t kill Perry Hopkins. Phineas O’Connor shot him. I didn’t kill anyone, except Major Canton. And you know why I did that. Besides, he was trying to kill me.”
“Yes, sir, I believe that. Believe that as much as I believe in the Good Book.”
Stretching out, I finished my coffee, and laid my head against my saddle, staring at an endless sky of stars. You could see the Milky Way. You could see forever.
“Did you ever get back ...?. My question trailed off.
“To Ellsworth?. Fenton Larue shook his head. “No, sir. No, sir. Went to Chetopa the next year, though, and Wichita the followin’ two. Workin’ for trail boss Will McLeod all them times. But you know what I found. In Wichita, I mean. The Star Mercantile.”
I drew a deep breath.
“They’d moved ... Miss Star, I mean, and her pappy. Doin’ mighty fine, seemed to me. Mighty fine. She seemed happy, Madison. That would have been the second time I went to Wichita, so, June, I guess ... no, July. July of ’Seventy-Six. I just saw her as I was passin’ by, you see. She was comin’ in, and she smiled at me, and said ... ‘Good day, sir.. Real happy. Reckon she didn’t recognize me, though. And I wasn’t about to introduce myself, stir up them bad memories about ... about ... well, I just tipped my hat, and said ... ‘Yes, ma’am’... and went on to wherever it was I was goin’.”
Staring at those stars, picturing Estrella, tears filled my eyes, and I heard myself saying, though I didn’t know why: “None shines as bright as you.”
Fenton Larue gave me a curious look. “Huh.”
What else could he have said?
the end
Author’s Note
Although this is a work of fiction, many events—the tension between cowboys and Kansans; the killing of Sheriff Chauncey Whitney; the abusive Ellsworth police force; the murder of Cal Pierce; the shooting of Happy Jack Morco; the white affidavits—are based on fact. There was, of course, no Star Mercantile, and all of the trail drovers for June Justus’s herd are my own creations. Morco, Brocky Jack Norton
, and most of the other police officers actually existed, although Sheriff Tracy Grace is fictitious.
Many thanks to the staffs at the J.H. Robbins Memorial Library and the Hodgden House Museum Complex in Ellsworth, as well as Ellsworth historian Jim “The Cowboy” Gray, who was always willing to point this novelist in the right direction and whose book, Desperate Seed: Ellsworth, Kansas on the Violent Frontier (2009, Kansas Cowboy Publications), proved a handy reference.
Other sources include Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries by David Dary (Avon Books, 1982); Wild, Woolly & Wicked: The History of the Kansas Cow Towns and the Texas Cattle Trade by Harry Sinclair Drago (Clarkson N. Potter, 1960); The Cattle Towns by Robert R. Dykstra (University of Nebraska Press, 1983); The Chisholm Trail by Wayne Gard (University of Oklahoma Press, 1954); The Trail Drivers of Texas, compiled and edited by J. Marvin Hunter (University of Texas Press, 1992); Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the Southwest by Joseph G. McCoy and edited by Ralph P. Bieber (University of Nebraska Press, 1985); and Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns, 1867-1886 by Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snell (University of Nebraska Press, 1967).
Oh, yeah, I must also thank Paden’s Place Restaurant in Ellsworth for that filling chicken-fried steak dinner.
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of the few Western writers to have won six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford, in 2006, Doubtful Cañon, in 2008, and Hard Winter in 2010, Legacy of a Lawman, West Texas Kill, both in 2012, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing”, in 2002) and the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel, Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (Five Star Westerns, 2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (Five Star Westerns, 2002) is an historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (Five Star Westerns, 2002) and Ghost Legion (Five Star Westerns, 2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (Five Star Westerns, 2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (Five Star Westerns, 2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (Five Star Westerns, 2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’s narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.. Boggs lives with his wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe. His website is www.johnnydboggs.com. His next Five Star Western will be Wreaths of Glory.
SUMMER OF THE STAR
A Western Story
Summer of the Star Page 21