Floating Outfit Western Series

His father was Sam Ysabel, a wild Irish Kentuckian who’d come to Texas in the early days and rode as scout to Jim Bowie. His mother was the daughter of Chief Longwalker and his French Creole squaw. That dangerous mixture of bloods produced a son who inherited the sighting eye of an eagle from the sure-shooting, rifle-toting Kentuckian stock. His full name was Loncey Dalton Ysabel. Most men knew him as…the Ysabel Kid.

The Flores brothers thought they were very smart. Vicious, evil bandidos, they laughed at the law. They laughed, too, when they first saw Colin Farquharson, for they had never come across a kilted Scotsman before. “What is it, a man or woman?” one of them whooped. Seconds later Adàn Flores lay dead, and though he escaped immediate retribution, from then on the Flores gang had one idea in mind—the killing of Colin Farquharson.

When Colin Farquharson refused to sell the horse called Mogollon to Beatrice, Vicomtesse de Brioude, her husband swore to make him change his mind. To help him enforce his will upon the Scot, the Vicomte had a bunch of hired killers and a dozen cavalrymen commanded by an ambitious lieutenant besotted by the voluptuous Vicomtesse. Against them, the Scot had ten Mexican mesteneros and three Texas cowhands not yet twenty years of age.

The cities of the Eastern states were hungry for beef. The problem was how to get it to them. Colonel Charles Goodnight had a plan that might work—if he had all the luck he needed. Things seemed to be going well, especially with the Floating Outfit on his side—Mark Counter, the Ysabel Kid, and Dusty Fog, the small Texan who walked tall. But what Goodnight didn’t need was an enemy like John Chisum....

There were problems to be solved before that became true: where to sell the cattle which swarmed across the Texas ranges and how to get them to the market; also whether sufficient longhorns could be delivered at one time to make a long journey to a market profitable. Charles Goodnight thought he had the answers and aimed to prove it. Backed by Ole Devil Hardin’s already legendary floating outfit, he set off with 3,500 head of cattle for distant Fort Sumner. With Dusty Fog as his segundo, Goodnight meant to deliver his herd and so pave the way for Texas to grow from hide and horn.

Colonel Charles Goodnight believed that cattle could be driven to the railroad in Kansas and sold for high prices to supply people in the East with beef.Not everybody approved of Goodnight’s idea. The owners of hide and tallow factories could buy all the cattle they wanted at between one and four dollars. If he should succeed, their vast profits would be brought to an end.