Chapter One - My Father's Hat

         Jacob turned his horse into the sunshine. He liked this view over the prairie - this was the largest field on the Texas ranch and you could not see the fences that scarred the landscape from just about any other angle. It was a reminder of the way things were, from before the railroads, the barbed wire fences of the stock farmers and their claims on the land.

         The wind blew irregularly across the tall brown grass drawing dynamic patterns in the pastures. A few sparrows darted and dived chirruping to each other in the Summer sunshine. The only sound was that of the wind and the breathing of the horse beneath him.

         The view reminded Jacob of his father and his words to him when he was only a little boy. It brought back the old days when his father was a ranny running Texas longhorns down the Chisholm trail to the railhead at Abilene.

         "There's a freedom in the journey, son, burnin' the breeze to chase some lost steed down, livin' under them stars lyin' on your velvet couch at night after fifteen hours in the saddle. I miss 'em days when life was as clean as the wind that blows 'hind the rains. Homesteaders are dull music for cowboys but times change and the corral dust blowin' from the east is goin' to bury these lands and drive us cowboys down to the bone orchards."

         Jacob's father saw the changes coming for his friends and his lifestyle years before it hit but he stayed a cowboy to the last. He died in some shootout in the wire-cutting wars when cattlemen and stock farmers fought for the land. The stock farmers won that war and unemployed cowboys found work on the farms or were forced back east to the big towns there. Jacob's mother, with her three young children, became a grass widow dragging her rope for a man, finally lassoing a homesteader who had lost his wife in childbirth the year before. Jacob grew up on one of the largest farms. The barbed wire fences now closed in fields for horses and cattle and even some arable crops. But he loved the stories of the old days.

         His father had loved the freedom of the ride and the endless drifting beneath the blue skies but Jacob reflected the ranch was not that bad. A small church united the ranchers on Sundays, many of these were cowboys once and he loved to hear their tales, especially about his father who they described as the tall hog at the trough before he was killed. Jacob remembered a grey battered hat, strong leather boots and a Colt 45 in a belt around his waist. He remembered his father's blue eyes the color of the sky glittering in sunshine and always filled with a merriment about life and a humor about the things that would have destroyed a lesser man.

         They never saw the body though when he died. They found his boots beside a pile of ashes. The fire had killed most of the cowboys when the artillery shells exploded in the dry grass of the prairie where they fought. But a cowboy would never leave his boots behind so they all thought the father dead.

         Jacob saw a gap in the fence that lay around his stepdad's farm. He rode his horse toward it. The gap was large enough to ride a herd through and poles had been wrenched out of the ground along it. On the first pole when the barbed wire resumed its unbroken demarcation of their lands an old grey, battered hat sat on the pole. Jacob gasped recognizing it instantly, it was his father's hat!

Notes ▼

CONTEST:

FORUM

Chapter One   (18+) Write the first chapter of a book, inspired by the prompt. #2251577 by Cubby

PROMPT: Genre Western and the picture of the cowboy hat on a barbed fence
A COWBOYS PRAYER:
Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow.
I love creation better as it stood
That day You finished it so long ago
And looked upon Your work and called it good.
I know that others find You in the light
That’s sifted down through tinted window
panes,
And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.
I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
That You have made my freedom so complete;
That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
And give me work that’s open to the sky;
Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.
Let me be easy on the man that’s down;
Let me be square and generous with all.
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in
town,
But never let ‘em say I’m mean or small!
Make me as big and open as the plains,
As honest as the hawse between my knees,
Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
Free as the hawk that circles down the
breeze!
Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall and fret;
You know me better than my mother did.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said
And right me, sometimes, when I turn
aside,
And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead
That stretches upward toward the Great
Divide.