Savage Texas: The Stampeders Read Online Free PDF

God and everybody.”
    “I guess you are, Johnny Cross. Now step it up! I like to walk fast.”
    “Me, I kind of want to stretch this one out.”
    She grasped his arm and tugged at him. “Come on, pokey. Lively now!”
    “Pretty. But bossy.”
    “Don’t you forget it, Mr. Cross.”

C HAPTER F OUR
    The vehicle moving along the Hangtree Trail was nondescript, a mere plain-sided box enclosing the tail end of a wagon. Equally unremarkable was the man driving it.
    He would have looked at home behind a bookkeeper’s desk, ringing a schoolmaster’s bell in the doorway of a small-town school, or shelving books in a library. Thin, short-statured, he carried on bony shoulders a balding head a little too large for his thin stalk of a neck. He held the leads with hands made to accommodate stubby fingers, but bearing instead long and supple ones. No odder human creature, Mexican, Comanche, or Anglo, had ever traveled through this flat and barren-looking landscape than had Otto Perkins, traveling photographer.
    He’d learned his craft in the hardest school of all: the battlefields of the American South. Blessed with the patronage of a wealthy uncle who was fascinated by the science of photography and freely spent his fortune supporting the development of increasingly better photographic equipment, the Atlanta native Otto had joined his uncle and a local embalmer in a morbid but educational wartime enterprise. They toured bloodied, smoking battlefields and photographically recorded the carnage with unflinching candor, like Confederate Mathew Bradys. They also created much more sanitized and dignified images of the dead whose bodies remained sufficiently intact to allow cleaning and embalming. These they dressed and photographed on portable, collapsible draped biers they carried with them on a wagon. Images of their dead in poses that made them appear merely to be peacefully sleeping, cleansed of blood and grit and with wounds hidden, were welcomed by bereaved families, most of whom were willing to scrape together whatever they could to purchase those final mementos of the lost ones.
    Thus, throughout the war, bespectacled Otto Perkins learned to be perhaps the finest unheralded photographer to come out of the southland. He discovered as well a gift for business, a tolerance for blood and mayhem, and a mounting fascination with death, especially that inflicted by violence. And so, when the war had ended, Otto had created his mobile, wagon-mounted darkroom, and headed west in hopes of building a fortune at best, making a living at least.
    In his many long hours of traveling alone, bouncing along on his darkroom wagon and wincing at the potential of every jolt to loosen some seam or joint and create a light leak in his mobile darkroom, Otto had been forced to admit to himself that it all was easier than he’d imagined it would be. With no plan worthy of the name, he’d traveled from town to town, state to territory and back again, and along the way found plenty of people eager to have images of their lives in a growing country turned into something they could hold in their hands and treasure for their entire lives. Otto photographed newborn babies, barn-raisings, cattle brandings, weddings, funerals (complete with corpses laid out or propped up in their finest clothing with family circled around), and even a few hangings, legal and otherwise. What he’d found himself most interested in, however, were photographs related to criminal violence and the criminals who made that happen. It had become something of a secret specialty of his, taking photographs of the infamous and dangerous. He’d photographed the James brothers and their cohorts, and others who had made their names known in the violence of Bleeding Kansas and the border wars, including Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. He’d taken a photograph of the latter with some of his best pistol fighters, including one young and fine-looking dark-haired fellow whose name Otto