A Hundred Miles to Water

2011 Winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Awards for Best Fiction
Two Texas families.
A blood feud.
Prosperity and death.
All found in a cowboy’s journal— After Mr. Charlie died in ’77, Pure took over the ranch and that’s when things began to change. Along the southern scrub, what old-timers called the brasada, the rustlers had banded into large outfits and the Gunn boys were the worst of the bunch. Some folks tell that Mr. Gunn went crazy after losing his oldest son, Ethan, at Antietam in ’62. And because none of Mr. Charlie’s sons fought during the war, terrible stories soon spread through McMullen County that the Restons were nothing but “No-good Yankee” sympathizers. Now it wasn’t any secret who started these untruths, but Mr. Charlie just ignored them. And for years, that’s all there was to it. But after Mr. Charlie passed, old man Gunn took a peculiar delight in stealing -R open range cattle and re-branding them as his own, most times right on Reston land. It was like he was testing Pure. And when Mr. Gunn took off down that trail, well that’s when Pure turned the -R into a gun outfit. I still remember the day that the dust-up with the Gunn clan moved past the name calling. It was a wet April day during the spring round-up. That morning, Pure sent Buckshot Wallace and Billy Green to search for thirty head that went missing after a lightning storm the night before. And things never did get back right after that.