From Hide and Horn (A Floating Outfit Book Number 5)

Other States were carved or born,

Texas grew from hide and horn.

There were problems to be solved
before that became true. Where to sell the cattle which swarmed
across the Texas ranges and how to get them to the market; also
whether suf
ficient longhorns could be delivered at one time to make a
long journey to a market profitable.

Charles Goodnight thought he had the answers
and aimed to prove it. Backed by Ole Devil Hardin’s already
legendary floating outfit, he set off with three thousand five
hundred head of cattle for distant Fort Sumner. With Dusty Fog as
his segundo, Goodnight meant to deliver his herd and so pave the
way for Texas to grow from hide and horn.

THE FLOATING
OUTFIT 5: FROM HIDE AND HORN

By J. T.
Edson

First published
by Transworld Publishers in 1969

Copyright
©
1969, 2016 by J. T. Edson

First
Smashwords Edition: July 2016

Names,
characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons
living or dead is purely coincidental.

All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the author,
except where permitted by law.

This is a
Piccadilly Publishing Book

Series Editor:
Ben Bridges

Text ©
Piccadilly Publishing

Published by
Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

The events recorded in this book
follow on from those in
Goodnight’s Dream
, and tell how he made it come
true.

COLONEL GOODNIGHT’S TRAIL CREW

Charles Goodnight, trail boss

OD CONNECTED

Dusty Fog, Segundo

Mark Counter, Point Rider

The Ysabel Kid, Scout

Red Blaze, Trail Hand

Billy Jack, Trail Hand

SWINGING G

‘
Rowdy’ Lincoln, Cook

‘
Turkey’ Trott, Cook’s
Assistant

‘
Boiler’ Benson, Trail Hand

Eddie Quinn, Trail Hand

‘
Spat’ Bodley, Trail Hand

‘
Austin’ Hoffman, Trail
Hand

Eph Horn, Horse Wrangler

D4S

Dawn Sutherland, Trail Hand

Vern Sutherland, Trail Hand

Josh Narth, Trail Hand

BENCH P

Tod Ames, Trail Hand

‘
Jacko’ Lefors, Trail Hand

LAZY F

Solly Sodak, Trail Hand

‘
Pick’ Visscher, Trail Hand

DOUBLE TWO

Swede Ahlen, Trail Hand

Burle Willock, Trail Hand

FLYING H

Shermy Sherman, Trail Hand

Alex Raymar, Trail Hand

Bearers of bad news are rarely welcome and
the tall, lean man clad in travel-stained range clothes shuffled
his feet uncomfortably as he finished his tale of misfortune and
failure. Seated at his desk, Joseph Hayden glared coldly at the
man.

Rooms in the small hotel at
Throckmorton, Texas, did not usually offer such facilities. Nor,
especially since the end of the War Between
the States, did they normally house
guests of wealth and social prominence. So the manager had
willingly complied with Hayden’s requests. Small, dapperly attired
to the height of current Eastern fashion, Hayden had a hardness of
face and cold eyes. He invariably spoke in a clipped voice which
showed an expectancy of receiving instant obedience.

‘
So Goodnight’s managed to regather his
herd, has he?’ Hayden said at last.

‘
That’s what the feller I
met on the way here told me,’ the westerner, a typical
cattle-
country hardcase, replied. ‘He allowed that Mr. Wednesbury
had just got to the cabin when about thirty Swinging G cowhands
jumped them. Your partner and all but one of the others went down
in the fighting ’n’ the feller allowed he was lucky to get away
alive.’

‘
I’ll
just bet he was,’
Hayden sniffed, having no illusions about the quality of the men
his penny-pinching late partner had insisted on hiring. ‘Goodnight
hasn’t got thirty men, counting his ranch crew and the extra help
he hired for the trail drive.’

‘
He’s got Cap’n Dusty Fog backing him,’
the man pointed out, his tone indicating that he was giving a
perfect explanation for Wednesbury’s defeat and death.

Maybe Hayden had never worn a uniform, and
spent the War years building up a sizeable fortune, but he had
heard the name mentioned by his hired man.

During the last years of the
War, Dusty Fog had risen to a prominence as a military raider and
fighting cavalry commander equaled only by Dixie’s other two
experts, Turner Ashby and John Singleton Mosby. At the head of
Company
C,
Texas Light Cavalry, Dusty Fog had caused havoc, loss and despair
among the Yankee Army in Arkansas. In addition to his excellent
military record, he was rumored to have twice helped Belle Boyd,
the Rebel Spy, to accomplish dangerous assignments.
ⁱ
With the War ended, he had returned
to Texas and taken over as segundo of the great OD Connected ranch.
Circumstances soon sent him into strife-torn Mexico on a mission of
international importance, which he brought to a most satisfactory
conclusion.
ⁱⁱ

In addition to his past military glories,
people spoke of Dusty Fog as a top hand with cattle. They told many
tales of his ambidextrous prowess, lightning-fast way of drawing a
pair of 1860 Army Colts and wonderfully accurate shooting. Also
frequently mentioned was his uncanny barehanded fighting skills,
which rendered bigger, heavier, stronger men helpless in his
grasp.

Hayden did not know how many of the legends
about Dusty Fog might be true. Nor did he particularly care. Except
that Dusty Fog was Goodnight’s nephew and so a factor to be
reckoned with when plotting the downfall of the stocky, bearded,
trail-blazing rancher from Young County.

‘
Is
the man with you?’
Hayden inquired.

‘
Nope,’
the hardcase
answered. ‘He allowed that he wasn’t staying anywheres close to
Goodnight in case somebody was took alive and talked. Last I saw of
him, he was headed East like the devil after a yearling.’ Then,
feeling he ought to express his condolences, he went on, ‘I’m real
sorry about Mr. Wednesbury, Boss.’

‘
So am I,’ Hayden
replied.
‘I’ll put a mourning band on for him. What did you learn
around Mineral Wells?’

‘
Not much at first. The Sutherland gal
come in with Mark Counter and the Ysabel Kid, trying to talk some
of the ranchers’ wives to get up a herd and send it to Goodnight.
They weren’t getting any place, then Wardle, Hultze and the others
got back from chasing the cattle Chisum stole. Seems like
Goodnight’d offered to let them send cattle and men on his drive to
Fort Sumner. So’s they’d have hands who knowed how to trail cattle
and money enough to pay for another big drive.’

‘
Where to?’ Hayden demanded.

‘
I heard up to the railroad in Kansas,’
answered the hardcase and made a deprecatory gesture. ‘Only I
figure somebody’d been joshing the gal who told me. Hell! They’d
never take cattle right up there.’

Although Hayden did not show it,
he disagreed with the speaker. Conditions were sufficiently bad in
Texas for men to take desperate chances in the hope of improving
them. Having supported the Confederate States during the War, most
people in Texas found themselves left with a worthless currency
following the South’s defeat. Texas had no major industries capable
of competing on the national market, nor mineral assets which might
help its people to return to solvency.
ⁱⁱⁱ

All they had was cattle. The longhorns grazed
in enormous herds on land capable of supporting them and many more;
a potential source of wealth if they could only be sold. At first
there were only the hide-and-tallow factories willing to take the
cattle—at three or four dollars a head, calves thrown in free. They
bought by the herd, killing, stripping off the hide and tallow,
then dumping the meat and remains of the carcasses into the Brazos
River.

Charles Goodnight and Oliver
Loving found another market. With something like
eleven thousand
Indians on reservations needing to be fed, the U.S. Army in New
Mexico wanted all the beef they could buy. So the Texan partners
had decided to make a stab at supplying that need. They had made
two successful drives, pioneering a trail and learning many
valuable lessons, before word of their efforts leaked
out.

No cattleman, Hayden had
recogni
zed
the potential source of profit offered by delivering beef to the
Army. Longhorns could be bought for less than five dollars a head
in Texas and sold at Fort Sumner for eight cents a pound on the
hoof. With an average-sized steer—the Army wanted neither cows nor
yearlings—weighing about eight hundred pounds, there would be a
very fair return on his outlay.

Along with his partner,
Wednesbury, Hayden had gone to Fort Sumner in the hope of obtaining
contracts to supply the cattle. Although Loving had died from a
wound gathered in a Comanche Indian attack, Goodnight had put in a
bid to deliver three thousand steers by early July; relying on
rancher John Chisum to fill the number for him. There would still
have been
a
good opening for Hayden, but he wanted much more than that. Before
him lay a vision of enormous wealth. By buying cheap from the
impoverished ranchers of Texas, he hoped to make a vast
fortune.

Figuring Goodnight to be a
threat to that vision, Hayden had tried to remove him. With the aid
of the unscrupulous Chisum, Hayden had hope
d to plant eleven hundred head of
stolen steers into Goodnight’s shipping herd and have their owners
find them. By bad luck, Goodnight had learned of the thefts in time
and turned the stolen cattle away. Although Hayden’s men had
managed to stampede the Swinging G herd, the attempt was only
partially successful and the losses had been made up. Determined to
attend to Goodnight’s ruin himself, Wednesbury had taken some men
to Young County and died with nothing achieved. Not even the loss
of the eleven hundred head stolen by Chisum had slowed Goodnight
down, it seemed. In some way the rancher had not only made his
peace with the irate owners, but persuaded them to make good the
missing cattle.