The Raid at Crazyhorse

Начало книги

wide shoulders carried all the pressures of a ruinous year that fall night in 1886. What he wanted to do was get drunk and forget the whole stinking mess; the effects of the big dry were that bad. The range was brown and brittle and the streams dry. Cattle bawled for lack of water. The long dry spell had put a kink in the whole country.

But it wasn't all the fault of the weather, the events at the tail end of that disastrous year. It was, in the terms of an earlier generation, the way the stick floated. Looking back, an old-timer remarked simply, "They just had to happen. That's all."

The accidents of fate happened, as they will. All these meshed and the wheels began turning the night Sam Harden came to town, all unaware of forces working outside nature itself. He was of the Flag Hardens, big through the shoulders and chest, flat-bellied, lean-hipped, all dark of hair and eye and high-strung and touchy as the wild mustangs roaming the hills. The Flag spread wasn't the biggest—nor the smallest—though most admitted it was the best run in the Territory of Montana; some went so far as to say in the whole western range, from Canada to Mexico.

Читать дальше →