Back in East Texas, where it rained, Walter’s homestead would sound like an empire up against the farms that were common. Walter was the only one of the Calloway clan, what little Hewey knew of it, to own land. It was only at Hewey’s insistence after Pa died that the two brothers went west looking for cowboy jobs that were said to be plentiful in the Pecos River country, and the brothers found the job situation to be as advertised.Ī decade and a half later, in 1904, Hewey had earned a reputation in West Texas and eastern New Mexico as a top hand, and Walter was back behind a plow, but this time it was his own, and he was turning back native sod on his own land. Brother Walter, a year younger, took to farm work like he was born for it. They were an ill fit for his hands from the beginning, and Hewey chafed to be somewhere else, doing something else. As a boy, Hewey drug a cotton sack for miles before he was big enough to put behind a mule and a pair of plow handles. The three Calloways-Pa, Hewey, and brother Walter-had drifted constantly within the East Texas region of blackland farms, picking up what work was available to them. Their widowed father had a restless streak that he stamped indelibly on his first-born. So close to his fortieth birthday that he could hear it taunting him in quiet moments, Hewey was the older of two sons. Hewey had a month’s worth of C.C.’s stingy pay in his pocket, a brown horse that would watch a cow, and he was gloriously unemployed. Tarpley displayed a more severe case than most. Parsimony was a common condition among the ranch owners Hewey had known, though C. C. valued that, even if he didn’t value it enough to pay well. Hewey had even quit once or twice himself, but the two always came to an accommodation eventually Hewey was a good cowboy, and C.C. It wasn’t the first time Tarpley had fired Hewey, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Tarpley, who had just fired Hewey at the chuckwagon that morning. These were Two Cs cattle and belonged not to Hewey but to ranchman C. C. Hewey was on horseback, taking it all in with the pride of ownership, but without the headaches or expectation of reward. The cows without calves were pig fat and would soon be cut off and sold as freeloaders that wouldn’t earn their keep this year. Most of the cows he saw had babies by their sides, full udders, and a thin layer of fat beginning to show on their ribs and over their hip bones. Green shoots had appeared in the few clumps where grass grew, and much of the rest of the ground boasted tallow weed and other plants Hewey knew but couldn’t name. The morning sun was warm, the effects of earlier rains beginning to show. It was spring, and West Texas had on her Sunday best. The Mass Market edition of The Unlikely Lawman will be available on July 26th, 2022. Steve Kelton’s The Unlikely Lawman will transport you to an Old West full of duplicity, gunfights, and the often-unforgiving hardships of frontier life. Never known for his skill-or lack thereof-with a pistol, he can only pray that he and retired Texas Ranger Hanley Baker will be enough to put an end to this trail of dastardly deeds. After the plot is foiled, the fugitive horsehand is on the run and leaving bodies in his wake.ĭeputized to help bring the criminal to justice, Hewey is bestowed with a weight of responsibility that he’s long avoided. Hewey Calloway is heading north to Colorado, on a horse drive for an old friend, Alvin Lawdermilk, when he gets word that one of his hired hands is planning to rob him. Elmer Kelton’s Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his middling years, as he looks for work-but not too much work-in 1904 West Texas.
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