Sample Saturday: Cottonwood Cowboys

Welcome to Sample Saturday! This snippet is from Cottonwood Cowboys, an Arizona story, in which Slim and Curly's plan for the school house dance get sidetracked by a rotted cottonwood tree..
~~~

The week ran along fine until Thursday night.

Then the big cottonwood came crashing down on the corral.

It about ruined my weekend.

I guess I didn’t mind so much that I was stuck on the two-man saw with Curly, but Saturday afternoon working toward evening was a poor time to pull tree clearing duty, especially this Saturday, with the dance all laid out at the school house, and a new schoolmarm to gaze at.

I reckon it wasn’t Curly’s fault; there wasn’t a finer hand than Curly, except maybe for me, on the whole Four Rivers, Arizona, spread. It was just that I was itching to get to that dance, having caught a beforehand sign of that schoolmarm when last I was in town.

The trouble was, Curly was just as anxious to get duded up and out to the school house as I was, and I didn’t want him to get an edge on me.

I guess it weren’t Amos Ramsey’s fault neither. But I sure cussed him some under my breath while I worked that saw back and forth as fast as I could stand. Old Amos owned the Four Rivers Ranch, and I thought sure he was going to leave that old, rotten tree for another day or two, seeing as how it had been laying there since the storm brought it down on Thursday night, and he hadn’t seen fit to give orders to clear it away.

Old Amos changed his mind along about Saturday noon, and decided he surely could use some firewood from that stringy tree, and while Curly and me were at it, we might as well clear the whole mess from the corral. And after that, if we didn’t mind, we could fix the section of fence that got mashed with the tree atop it.

“Tarnation,” I said, along with a few other little things, once Old Amos was safely out of earshot. “I reckon I hired on to do just about anything, as long as it could be done from the back of a horse.”

Curly growled something in reply, and yanked on the handle of the saw.
~~~

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Cottonwood Cowboys (An Arizona Short Story) is available at the following online retailers: 
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