It's 1954. In this western cowboy novel, six Old West cowboys and a 10-year-old boy meet for a weekly cribbage game. While the old men spin tales of days gone by on the trail, a real life adventure stirs around them. The boy with the red straw cowboy hat, cap gun and leather bullet belt with silver-painted wooden bullets remembers it well. Maybe he wasn't born 100 years too late.
Cowboy for a Rainy Afternoon
1950s western novel, Cowboy For A Rainy Afternoon by Christy Award winning author Stephen Bly
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 a weekly cribbage game. 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 years 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 is quickly becoming extinct.
Excerpts from Cowboy For A Rainy Afternoon:
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.
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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Check out Stephen Bly cowboy poetry here STEPHEN BLY COWBOY POETRY
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