The Big Trail

Max Brand

Summary

The boss was a hard man, and he was not at great pains to conceal his hardness. He had waited for a week to fill out his judgment upon the new hand, and now his mind was full.
After supper, he went into the bunk house and stood in the door.
“Fuller!” he called.
Tom Fuller leaned his head out of his bunk—he had turned in early—and lowered the magazine which he had been reading, while the vision of Indians, galloping riders, and rescued heroines slowly faded from his mind and was replaced by the solid image of Pete Stringham in the doorway.
“Here!” said Fuller.
The boss took a few long strides into the room.
“Fuller, you’re a cowpuncher?”
“I’m a cowboy, I guess,” said Fuller.
“Who made you a cowpuncher?” asked the boss.
There was silence.
“It’s a sure thing that nature didn’t intend you that way,” said the boss. “Answer me one thing. Can you handle a rope?”

Available since: 10/15/2023.

Contemporary Fiction

Other books that might interest you

Tender Betrayal

Rosanne Bittner

Stolen kisses and secret reunions lead to a passion that civil war cannot sever in this glorious historical romance from the bestselling author of Caress.   Beautiful, proud Audra Brennan feels like a stranger in a foreign land when she comes north from Louisiana to study music. But when she savors her first forbidden taste of desire in the arms of handsome lawyer Lee Jeffreys, his caresses spark a flame within her that burns away the differences between rebel and Yankee, all objections silenced by the fierce beating of two wild hearts falling impetuously, impossibly in love.   Suddenly cannon fire shatters the country. Principled, impassioned, and committed to a nation united, Lee answers the call to fight against the Confederacy, while Audra hurries home to a plantation shadowed by the darkening cloud of war. But in the most terrible of circumstances, can either afford to surrender their heart?   “Power, passion, tragedy and triumph are Rosanne Bittner’s hallmarks. Again and again, she brings readers to tears.” —RT Book Reviews

Show book

Hogg

Samuel R. Delany

The narrator of Hogg is a Huck Finn–like youngster caught in society’s most sinister seams—but unlike Huck, he passes no moral judgments on the violence he takes part in . . .Hogg is the story of a man—a depraved trucker named Franklin Hargus, whom the people he works for call Hogg—and of the nameless boy who tells the story of three days of unspeakable sexual violence and devastation, which, together, they initiate in a small seaside American city in the middle of the last century. Hogg is a towering brute who makes his living as a rapist for hire. By the end of a series of vicious attacks, kidnappings, and mass murders, the reader will wonder who is more corrupt: the man or the boy.   Samuel R. Delany completed his first draft of Hogg within a day, if not within hours, of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City and revised it over the next four years, though it was not released until 1995.

Show book