Elmer Kelton - Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer

SANDHILLS
BOY

Forge Books by Elmer Kelton

NOVELS

Barbed Wire

Bitter Trail

Buffalo Wagons

Captains Rangers

Cloudy in the West

The Day the Cowboys Quit

Eyes of the Hawk

The Good Old Boys

Hanging Judge

Hot Iron

Joe Pepper

Llano River

Many a River

Pecos Crossing

The Pumpkin Rollers

Sandhills Boy

Shadow of a Star

Shotgun

Stand Proud

Texas Rifles

The Time It Never Rained

SONS OF TEXAS TRILOGY

Sons of Texas

The Raiders: Sons of Texas

The Rebels: Sons of Texas

THE BUCKALEW FAMILY SERIES

After the Bugles

Bowies Mine

Long Way to Texas

Massacre at Goliad

THE TEXAS RANGERS SERIES

Badger Boy

The Buckskin Line

Hard Trail to Follow

Jerichos Road

Lone Star Rising

Rangers Trail

Texas Vendetta

The Way of the Coyote

THE HEWEY CALLOWAY SERIES

Six Bits a Day

The Smiling Country

OMNIBUS

Brush Country

(comprising Barbed Wire and Llano River)

Lone Star Rising

(comprising The Buckskin Line, Badger Boy, and The Way of the Coyote)

Rangers Law

(comprising Rangers Trail, Texas Vendetta, and Jerichos Road)

Texas Showdown

(comprising Pecos Crossing and Shotgun)

Texas Sunrise

(comprising Massacre at Goliad and After the Bugles)

The Winding Trail

of a

Texas Writer

ELMER KELTON

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

SANDHILLS BOY: THE WINDING TRAIL OF A
TEXAS WRITER

Copyright 2007 by The Estate of Elmer Kelton

All rights reserved.

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-5428-0

First Edition: May 2007
First Mass Market Edition: May 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to the Lipp family of Ebensee, Austria,
who gave me the finest gift they had

SANDHILLS
BOY

I n Spanish it is querencia, in German Heimat, the place of the heart, the homeland. For me, it is that part of Texas west of the ninety-eighth meridian. In particular it is a ranch in Crane and Upton counties, just east of the Pecos River.

Its proper name is the McElroy Ranch, though cowboys of old called it the Jigger Y, or just the Ys. It is where I grew up, and where I had ambitions to become a cowboy like my father and grandfather. It was where I had to concede, after years of bumps, bruises, and disappointments, that I never would.

This land of my youth lies at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. Its earliest inhabitants were migratory hunters and gatherers, seldom remaining long enough in one place to leave much evidence of their passing. The search for food kept them moving, following a sparse offering of game, collecting what edible plants they could find from an arid soil stingy in its gifts. War-painted horsemen down from the high plains hurried across on the Comanche war trail, bent on raiding settlements farther south in Mexico. They swam the Pecos at Horsehead Crossing, only twenty or so miles as the crow flies from where J. T. McElroy established his ranch.

No stranger seeing the land for the first time would describe it as scenic. It is like the ugly child loved only by its mother. For centuries after venture-some Spaniards first set foot there, travelers pushed across the dry stretches of West Texas on their way to somewhere else. Few saw anything that invited them to stay. Water was scarce, grass was sparse. Most forms of flora and fauna were armed with stickers, thorns, horns, or tusks. Roads were few and distances long. Each seemingly barren horizon, when reached, yielded to another much the same. Prolonged droughts were the rule, punctuated by occasional times of healing rains that never seemed to heal quite enough before the next siege of dry years. It was the last part of the state to be settled, and then only because nothing else was left.

Yet, to one who spent his boyhood there, despite the plainness of its surface it had a wild beauty uniquely its own for those who chose to see it. The lonely expanses offered a liberating sense of freedom I never found in crowded towns and cities, in the tyranny of clocks and schedules and production goals. It encouraged quiet contemplation and appreciation for small and transient pleasures like the smell of greasewood after a rain, the distant call of a calf for its mother, even the mournful wail of a coyote on a moonlit night.

Good things had happened there, and bad things as well. On a lonesome stretch of prairie in a McElroy pasture, I felt a chill as more than once I rode by the unmarked grave of a cowboy killed by horse thieves years before. Growing up listening to eyewitness accounts of the open range and long trails, I saw our part of Texas as a living remnant of a fading frontier. I went with cowboys as they saddled their horses and rode out at sunup to work bawling herds of cattle in the manner of their fathers and grandfathers. Nights, out with the chuck wagon, I looked up at stars crisp and bright, almost within reach of my fingers, and was lulled off to sleep by the pleasant aroma of mesquite smoke from a dying campfire. To me, past and present blended. History was still playing out before my eager young eyes.

It was a land of high blue sky, of wind and dust and little rain. It was a land that constantly tested the fiber of the ever-changing series of people who passed that way. For two generations before my time, it had been the cowboys domain. Except for fences and a few roads, little had changed from the way the Comanche had seen it during his less than two centuries of dominance.

In the years of my boyhood this land came to know a new breed of pioneers, risk-running wildcat drillers and hard-muscled oilfield roustabouts who punched holes into a resistant earth, seeking energy for a nation beset by depression, then by war. Some were kin of mine.

The discovery of oil brought many changes, some good, some not. It brought work to thousands and riches to a few. Forests of derricks arose across the greasewood flatlands and wind-rippled sandhills, creating a new skyline of wood and steel. New roads cut a cobweb pattern across prairies where only cow trails had been. Black smoke became a constant in skies otherwise blue. All too often the wind brought with it a sulfurous whiff of oil.