The Diary of Jerrod Bently, J.W. Osborn [the false prince series TXT] 📗

back. I took a step backward. He looked as mean as a snake and like he was more than willing to stomp me into the dirt floor of his stall if he had a mind to. I decided to stand my ground, like Sam had done, and stepped forward, forcing a nervous “hello.” Suddenly his ears cocked forward and he moved up to the stall door, looking expectantly at me. Was this some kind of a show down? Then, he backed up and snorted. I jumped at least fifty feet into the air. If horses could laugh, I know this one would. At that moment, I thought I heard someone snickering behind me. I looked over my shoulder and there was Sam Dodge coiling up a length of rope at the end of the barn about two stalls away.
“What’s so funny?”, I asked, feeling a little defensive.
“You.”, Sam replied, hanging up the lasso on a wooden peg. “Green as prairie grass.”
“That may be so, Dodge,” I defended, “But I am willing to at least try.”
“Then do it, Bently,” he said, “ if you have the guts to get on that horse.” Sam was pushing me and I did not like it.
“Where did you come from?”, he asked, as he picked up a rag and began dusting off a dark leather saddle on a stand under the ropes. I was a little annoyed “Back East,” I answered, “What about you?” Sam was quiet for a moment “From everywhere,” came the reply and then he walked off in the direction of the front door. Dodge paused and looked back at me as I stood by the red horse’s stall. “Tomorrow, Bently,” he said “Be here by seven o’clock in the morning. The boss says I have to teach you to ride.”
“All right,” I replied, knowing I would be awake all night worrying about riding this horse who was staring at me, as though he too was sizing me up. “Hey Dodge?”, I called out as he was about to walk out of the barn. “Does this horse have a name?”
“Trouble,” Sam replied, “His name is “Trouble.” Oh, this could not be a good thing at all and suddenly I felt as if my blood had turned to ice. I wanted to be a cowboy and I would do what ever I had to become one. Then, when I got back to New York, (after enough time had passed for Bart to own up to compromising Alva Jane O’Donnell and marrying her,) I had every intention of rubbing my adventures in Bart Reed’s face. Yes, that would be a good day, somewhere in the future. Bart would be doomed to a life of working for his father-in-law on the docks and going home to a whining, spoiled wife and screaming child. I would be a person who had experienced the golden west and my former best friend could just be envious. I may have been what the others called a “green horn” or a “city slicker,” but I was willing to work hard. I would try to stay out of trouble and not repeat the mistakes of my past that led me to Texas in the first place. After all the years that passed since then, I have to say that was probably one of the biggest lies I ever told. I tried to avoid trouble, but it always found me, I did become a cowboy and I did marry and was happy as a rancher for over fifty years, but that had not happened yet and I was in Grants Creek Texas facing “Trouble,” who was a cyclone on four legs and I was more than a little nervous.
Well I did not learn much about Sam Dodge that day, except he was quiet, young and a very experienced wrangler and on my way back to the seedy hotel I had been staying at, I caught a glimpse of him, his hat pulled down, shading his eyes as he spoke with Scrub Pot outside the Grant’s Creek General Store. I never saw Sam with the other cowboys unless they were doing something with the horses, but I didn’t figure anything by it. It was none of my business. It seemed that Sam only talked to Scrub Pot and I had never seen him in or around the saloon. Maybe he was too busy. Or perhaps like me, he wanted to avoid trouble. Like I said, it was none of my business so I headed for the hotel to think about my seven o’clock in the morning meeting with that red heathen and Sam Dodge. From what I read in the dime novels that J. W. Titus wrote about cowboys, I understood they were brave, fearless men who rode like the wind on the best of horses and always shot straight and true and always got the girl at the end of the story. “Fiction,” I said to myself as I climbed the creaky steps to my hotel room. I pushed open the door and walked in. The room was nothing to write home about, but at least the sheets had been changed recently and the chamber pot emptied. The window was open to let in smell of horses and dust from the street. As stale smelling and lumpy as that old mattress was, it was still a bed to sleep in, and I figured I had better take advantage of that. In a little while, I would be sleeping on the ground under some wagon. The idea did not seem all that appealing as I sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off my boots, then lay down, hoping for sleep as the sounds of horses, drunks and gunfire erupted from outside the hotel. “I will get used to this,” I told myself as I closed my eyes.

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“ Samantha Ann, if your Aunt Lillie knew where you were and what you are about to do, she would skin both of us with a dull knife. ,” Scrub Pot scolded. “You were supposed to be going back to school and learning how to be a lady.”
Samantha Dodge gave her long dark hair a toss as she finished brushing it. “Aunt Lille’s ideas and mine are two different paths, Grandfather,” she replied “my place has always been with you, Doc and the horses.”
“I know what you want, Granddaughter,” Scrub Pot said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“You want to raise good horses of you own.”, the old man said “Trouble will make many fine foals.”
“Yes, that is what I want and what I will have once we get Hinkley’s cattle to market, and he is finally paid off. I have already given him the down payment he asked for the ranch.”
“You will have to marry, Sam,” Scrub Pot said sternly “Women can’t own property without a husband, and no one will be selling to a single woman, let alone one who is one forth Blackfoot. Mark my words, girls, there will be trouble ahead. Hinkley is no good. I do not trust him.”
“So you think I need a husband, to get my ranch for me, do you?” Sam replied.”And I am not afraid of Roger Hinkley.”
“For the purpose of buying The Flying S Ranch, yes,” Scrub Pot suggested. “There are laws against women owning property without a husband.”
“ So I marry some cowboy and I end up like Ma did, alone with two children barely out of their nappies and in an early grave. ,” she stated bitterly.
“Sam, your father did not desert you,” Scrub Pot stated firmly, ‘ He died trying to save the three of you.
“He was a fool,” she spit angrily “He trusted the wrong people.”
“Maybe he did, Sam, “Scrub Pot answered reassuringly “but he loved you, Brian and your mother more than his own life. He was my son and I will always be proud of that. All your life, you have been angry about losing your parents so young. Think like that sorrel stallion you love so much. He wants his freedom, but he yields his will to the rein because you trained him and he loves you. You want your freedom just as much as he does, but sometimes the reins have to be used, Samantha. ”
“I have my freedom, Grandfather,” she answered “And I intend to keep it.”
“What about Bently?” Scrub Pot asked as he stirred the rabbit stew he was cooking over the open fire between them.
“Bently?” , she snickered “ he’s a green horn and I expect I will be seeing him head for the hills or on the first stage going East by tomorrow night.”
“He has will and grit.” Scrub Pot replied “He is a good man.”
Sam leaned back against her saddle and relaxed as she watched her Grandfather’s weathered face. “How would you know if he is a good man or the devil himself?”, she asked.
“I am Blackfoot through and through, Sam,” Scrub Pot answered “I read a man like I taught you to read horses.”
“He’s a green horn,” she said as she rose to her feet. “And soon he will be heading back to wherever it was he came from.”
“I think you like him,” Scrub Pot replied as he added salt to his steaming kettle. “That is why you push him like you do.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” she