The Third Western Novel
Page 1
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series
FERGUSON’S FERRY, by Noel Loomis
BOOTHILL GOSPEL, by Chuck Martin
HELLGATE, by William Colt MacDonald
GUNSIGHT TRAIL, by Alan Le May
COPYRIGHT INFO
The Third Wstern Novel MEGAPACK™ is copyright © 2015 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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The MEGAPACK™ ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Welcome to another rip-roarin’ westernEnjoy!
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FERGUSON’S FERRY, by Noel Loomis
Copyright © 1962 by Noel Loomis.
CHAPTER I
The late June sun was blazing in Nebraska. The wind that rolled across the interminable leagues of tightly-curled buffalo grass drove before it a smothering heat that made the horned toads rest in the scant shade of dust-laden sagebrush or sun-shriveled prickly pear. But the white-topped wagons kept lumbering from the East. They came from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania. The long lines converged at Omaha City, at the eastern edge of Nebraska, to cross the Missouri River. A few of the bearded, booted emigrants took a second look at the black soil of Iowa and decided they had come far enough, but more of them had that absent look of the far distance in their eyes, and were not deterred by the long, long miles that lay ahead, by the prospect of bone-dry prairie and burned-out grass, of buffalo chips for fuel and rattlesnakes for food, of Indians grimly determined to take scalps, of babies conceived and babies delivered in the jolting wagons, of brutal fights, of tragic deaths, of graves marked only by the tears of those who could not stay to mourn—graves obliterated by the rolling wheels of heavy wagons to hide the bodies from the Indians.