In this western cowboy novel, six Old West cowboys and a 10-year-old boy meet one rainy afternoon in 1954 at the Albuquerque Matador Hotel for their weekly cribbage game. While the old men spin tales of days gone by on the trail, a real life adventure stirs around them...
In this western cowboy novel, six Old West cowboys and a 10-year-old boy meet one rainy afternoon in 1954. It’s their weekly cribbage game at the Albuquerque Matador Hotel. While the old men spin tales of days gone by on the trail, a real life adventure stirs around them. The 10-year-old boy narrator with the red straw cowboy hat, cap gun and leather bullet belt with silver-painted wooden bullets recalls it much later. Maybe he wasn’t born 100 years too late. He listens while the cowboys pass down a way of life and western tradition that seems to quickly become extinct.
Many years later, the boy looks back and remembers when he became a cowboy for a rainy afternoon with an adventure of his own to tell.
The Matador Hotel died on July 5, 1965, but they didn’t bother burying it until last fall. New Mexico heat blanketed Albuquerque that July like too many covers in a stuffy cabin. The kind of day you sweat from the inside out and feel sticky dirt in places you don’t ponder much except in the shower.
I reckon the four-bladed, overhead fan that squeaked like an unfed cat failed to console Shorty McGuire. Doc Boyce said he passed on durin’ the night. No one discerned it until they observed the empty back table at the Round-Up Cafe.
For the last nineteen years of his life, Shorty lived in a second-floor room at the Matador. At straight up 6:00 ever’ mornin’, he ate two eggs fried hard under the faded picture of Theodore Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. As a boy, I calculated Shorty McGuire and friends must be pushing a hundred-years-old when I met them for the first time in 1954. I reckon I surmised wrong.
For Granddaddy and his cowboy pals, history was real. You could see it in their cowboy eyes. You could hear it in their stories. You could touch it when you brushed against their Colts or Winchesters, chaps or Stetsons. You could taste history’s find dust ever’ time a dirt devil swirled off the hills and down Central Avenue. And on that day in 1954, I could smell history in the 2nd story hallway of the Matador Hotel.
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Review:
“Bly offers a kinder, gentler Western that should appeal to fans of Louis L’Amour…” –Library Journal
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