"Elmore Leonard - cuba libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leonard Elmore)

the stock handlers saying you didn't want a horse to eat much out at
sea. Tyler stepped aboard with his saddle and gear to mind the animals
himself. That was fine with the stock handlers; they had the cattle to
tend. They said the trip would take five days.

It was back toward the end of December Charlie Burke had wired: FOUND

WAY TO GET RICH WITH HORSES.

He came out on the train from East Texas and was waiting for Tyler the
first day of the new year, 1898, on the porch of the Congress Hotel in
Sweetmary, a town named for a copper mine, LaSalle Street empty going
on 10:00 A.M." the mine shut down and the town sleeping off last
night.

Charlie Burke came out of the rocking chair to watch Tyler walking his
dun mare this way past the Gold Dollar, past I.S. Weiss Mercantile,
past the Maricopa Bank--Charlie Burke watching him looking hard at the
bank as he came along. Tyler brought the dun up to the porch railing
and said, "You know what horses are going for in Kansas City?" "Tell
me," Charlie Burke said. "Twenty-five cents a head."

They hadn't seen each other in almost four years.

Charlie Burke said, "Then we don't want to go to Kansas City, do we?"

He watched Tyler chew on that as he stepped down from the dun and came
up on the porch. They took time now to hug each other, Charlie Burke's
mind going back to the boy who'd come out here dying to work for a
cattle outfit and ride horses for pay. Ben Tyler, sixteen years old.
and done with school, St. Simeon something or other for Boys, in New
Orleans, this one quicker than the farm kids who wandered out from
Missouri

 and Tennessee. Charlie Burke, foreman of the Circle-Eye at the time,
as many as thirty riders under him spring through fall, put the boy to
work chasing mustangs and company stock that had quit the bunch, and
watched this kid gentle the green ones with a patience you didn't find
in most hands. Watched him trail-boss herds they brought down in Old
Mexico and drove to graze. Watched him quit the big spread after seven
years to work for a must anger named Dana Moon, supplying horses to
mine companies and stage lines and remounts to the U.S. cavalry.
Watched him take over the business after Moon was made Indian agent at
White Tanks, a Mimbrefio Apache subagency north of town. The next
thing he saw of Ben Tyler was his face on a wanted poster above the
notice:

$500 REWARD