Texicans by Frank Bonham

Book Details

Texicans – Two novelettes of what men will go through to protect who and what they love. Men who don’t want to be kings but want to be free to live their lives as honest men.

The Canyon of Maverick Brands (1945)
They brought their spoils beneath the rim of the Skyline and settled to feast under an Owlhoot moon. But Ross Kirby, riding hand on holster, tallied a double-cross kill and ripped the wolf-pack war wide open.
A seven chapter novelette.

Texicans Die Hard! (1947)
How could a forty-a-month cowpoke rod this huge old Mexican rancho? Charlie Drake listened grimly to the hate-filled whispers in the patio shadows, the gun-hammers clicking back, the thumbs rasping across fresh-honed blades—and felt the answer dragging at his belt.
A ten chapter novelette.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Frank Bonham (1914–1988) wrote a number of stories for the Western and Adventure pulps. In total, Bonham wrote 48 novels, as well as TV scripts for Western series such as Death Valley Days, Tales of Wells Fargo, and The Restless Gun

Texicans has 5 illustrations.

Files:

1. Bonham-Texicans.epub

Excerpt: The Canyon of Maverick Brands

I

THE breath-taking vistas of the trail to Skyline Ranch had always held Ross Kirby, but tonight there was something so poignant about all the old, unforgotten sounds and odors that his throat felt tight and he had to stop at a bend and get his breath.

Two years! he thought. Two years in heaven and hell, but never a spot like this!

They had a saying down in Three Rivers that the man who held Skyline Ranch held the Big Bend. From up here, a quarter-mile above the big ranch-house, you could see why. Not a horse, not a cow, could go down the canyon or across the hills into the badlands without being observed. No one could approach the grim, fortress-like ranch-house without coming under the sights of the man who held the Skyline. There was an empire of water and grass for his cattle; and there was Smoky River Canyon. You could call this an asset or a menace. So long as you left alone the men who called its wild vastness their own, it was an asset, for they paid well for the privilege of privacy.

Ross Kirby listened to the roar of the falls, like wind in the tops of tall pines, rising a sheer half-mile from the juncture of the Blue and the Poverty. Here Smoky River blended their waters and roared down the gorge, as brash and reckless as the men who inhabited it.

Ross Kirby rode on, filled with memories, regrets and a few satisfactions. He came out of the buckrush and juniper growths into the clearing before the ranch-house. It was dark; the windows were shuttered. Skyline Ranch-house was a forbidden block of masonry rooted in the granite ribs of the mountain. There was only one high point to the square structure, and this was the water-tower rising thirty feet from the enclosed patio.

Ross raised his hand toward the tower. “Hello!” he called. “You there, Guss?” Rudy Guss’ voice came from the door of the house, which Ross now saw was slowly opening. He said in that thick, Teutonic speech of his: “Ross Kirby! I never t’ought you’d come back. Come in, my boy.”

The shade was raised from a hurricane lantern. Ross went up the heavy plank steps and crossed the solid puncheon porch. The rancher barred the door, went around the living-room lighting wall lamps. Ross Kirby stood with his hat in his hand, letting the smell and the look of the room go into him, stirring something deep and strong. It was as though he had walked out of here a week ago and only now come back, for not a thing was different.

The same Indian rugs hung on the walls. The same bear- and lynx-hides covered the floor and the furniture on it was the handmade, juniper and goat-skin furniture of his boyhood. The mounted lynx over the great fireplace, with its eyes shot out by Ross’ father.

“Live alone up here?” Ross asked.

“Who else would I be trusting, but myself?” Guss laughed. He was a big man, as full of years as he was, his belly big with eating and drinking and his long, pointed mustaches white. His eyes were sharp little blue chips, but the lines radiating from them were of worry. “My men live below, in the Falls House, near the work. I see my foreman once a week. You remember Rocky Taylor, ja? You scrapped with him as a boy.” Rudy Guss laughed as he put a log on the fire.

“Maybe we’ll scrap some more,” Ross said, smiling. “Is he still courtin’ my girl?” Ross let himself into one of the deep chairs before the fire. He was a big, solid-looking man with full lips and a jaw to break a man’s fist. He had brown eyes guarded by heavy, dark brows. His face was sunburned and pleasant, except for a certain deep restlessness that showed through.

Rudy said: “Ja, that Rocky courts every girl in T’ree Rivers.” He poured two big glasses of elderberry wine, and as he handed one to the other man he said: “Why did you leave, Ross?”

“Why not? I had a two-bit stake in Hooligan Canyon and a lot of travel in my feet. I’ve seen a lot of country in the last two years and hugged the señoritas from here to there. So now I’m back.”

HE did not add that the thorn that had made life unbearable here was still just as sharp—his love for a girl who was so far above a Hooligan Canyon ruffian that she could not see him for contempt. Nor that he had some plans that would raise him farther than any man from Poverty Creek, in wild Hooligan Canyon, had ever climbed.

“Where did you go?” the German asked.

“Mexico. I reckon I’ll go back some time.”

Guss leaned forward, his old eyes shining. “Tell me about it,” he said. “You know, Ross, I was always one to travel. But now I’m old and fat, and all I can do is talk about it.”

“I was in Tehuantepec most of the time,” Ross Kirby said. “I got mixed up in railroads and politics. Everybody had a knife in everybody else’s back and the other hand in his money-bag.”

He talked on, telling of high adventure and danger, of steaming jungles and blizzard-swept plateaus, and the cattleman listened with greedy ears, his eyes full of the remembrance of escapades of his own youth.

The stories, the wine, and the fire made him sentimental. He reached over and patted Kirby’s knee. “Always I have liked you, Ross,” he said. “You wass different from them other Hooligan Canyon cutthroats.”

The dark-skinned man from below the border blew smoke at the ceiling. He said, musing: “Hooligan Canyon. Her men are looked down on more than anybody in the Bend. And so they’re the proudest men in Texas. They drink and steal cattle and kill a man if they don’t like him. But they do it openly, so they’d never make out on Blue River. And they aren’t far enough across the line to ride down the Smoky.”

Guss lit his big calabash pipe. “Ja,” he said. “Most of them ain’t worth hanging, Ross. But you—you’re different. Maybe it’s the blood. You were born in this house, weren’t you?”

“Lived ten years in it. You’re the third man to hold it since the old man died.” He stood up, abruptly.

“Do you want to sell Skyline Ranch, Rudy?”

The cowman started. Then smiled. “My boy,” he said, “on forty dollars a month, would you be buying ranches?”

“On thirty thousand dollars I might.”

Rudy Guss regarded him narrowly. “Then it was true, about Tehuantepec! Whose money bag was you into, Ross?”

“I gambled,” Ross said. “With my money and my life. And I came out with a stake. I can pay you cash. You can’t hold it forever, you know. And when you go, it will be like Dad did—a shot in the night.”

Excerpt From: Frank Bonham. “Texicans.”