"ROWDY RIDES TO GLORY" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

He's the wealthiest man in the whole South Rim country, and has the biggest ranch,
so why he should worry about you, I wouldn't know."
There was an undercurrent in jenny's voice that stirred Rowdy's resentment. He glanced
up, studying her carefully. He had been in love with jenny Welman for a long time,
and had been going around with her for almost a year, yet some how of late he had
been experiencing vague doubts. Nothing he could put his finger on, but little things
led him to believe that she placed more emphasis upon whether a man had money than
how he got it.
"If you'd like," she suggested, her eyes brightening, "I could see him for you."
"No." Horn shook his head stubbornly. "I won't ask him, and I don't want you asking
him. He knows exactly how I feel about him, and he knows I think there was something
wrong about that Bar 0 deal."
"But Rowdy!" she protested, almost angry. "How can you be so foolish? After three
years I was hoping you'd forgotten that silly resentment you had because you didn't
get that ranch."
"Well, I haven't!" Rowdy told her firmly. "If there was one man I knew, it was old
Tom Slater, and I know what he thought of Bart. There was a time when he thought
of leaving that ranch to both of us together, but after Bart Luby left and went to
cattle buying, Slater never felt the same about him. Something happened then that
old Tom didn't like. Why, three times he told me he didn't even want Luby on the
place, and that he was leaving it to me. It doesn't make sense that he would change
his mind at the last minute!"
"It was not at the last minute!" Jenny protested. "He had given Bart a deed to the
ranch-over a year before his death. Why, with that deed he didn't even need the will,
but all the same, the will left everything to him. You heard it read yourself."
Jenny's chin lifted, and in her eyes Rowdy Horn could see the storm signals flying.
This old argument always irritated Jenny. She was just like nearly everybody in the
South Rim: admired Luby's cash and show as well as his business ability. And of course,
the man
had made money.
It was easy to admire Bart Luby if you accepted him from the surface appearance.
He had a dashing way, and he was a powerful man physically, handsome and smooth talking.
He was the one who had the Stockman's Show organized, and for three
3
years now had been featured in it for his fine riding, roping, and bulldogging. He
was the local champion, because for those three years he had won all the major events.
But that will-that was something else.
Rowdy Horn was usually reasonable, but on the subject of that will he ceased being
reasonable. It was flatly contradictory to everything he knew of Tom Slater, who
had been almost a father to him.
Besides that, nobody could work with a man as Rowdy had worked with Bart Luby without
knowing something of him, and Bart had always been unscrupulous in little things.
He had left the Bar 0 to become a rodeo contest rider and a cattle buyer, and there
had been vague rumors, never substantiated and never investigated, that his success
as a buyer was due to his association-suspected only-with Jack Rollick.
Rollick was a known rustler who haunted the broken canyon country beyond the Rim,
and did his rustling carefully and with skill among the brakes south of the Rim.
It was hard to get proof of his depredations-nobody had, as yet-for he never drove
off large numbers of cattle, and never rustled any stock with unusual markings. He
weeded cattle from the herds, or the lone steers that haunted the thick brush, and