The Path Less Taken: A Western Short Story

By Tony Masero

THE PATH LESS TAKEN traces the journey of James ‘Buddy’ Boyd and his devotion to his upright elder brother whose moral attitudes that are a leading light in young Buddy’s development.
The Boyd family arrives at a lonely way station set in the desert and Buddy watches the gradual development of the place from fortress to town. One by one his siblings depart until it is Buddy who is left alone in the town and is obliged to track down his older brother’s journey into an ambiguous life as a Texas Ranger on the southern borderland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Masero
• Release date: Jul 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005392680

Tony Masero

It’s not such a big step from pictures to writing.And that’s how it started out for me. I’ve illustrated more Western book covers than I care to mention and been doing it for a long time. No hardship, I hasten to add, I love the genre and have since a kid, although originally I made my name painting the cover art for other people, now at least, I manage to create covers for my own books.A long-term closet writer, only comparatively recently, with a family grown and the availability of self-publishing have I managed to be able to write and get my stories out there.As I did when illustrating, research counts a lot and has inspired many of my Westerns and Thrillers to have a basis in historical fact or at least weave their tale around the seeds of factual content.Having such a visual background, mostly it’s a matter of describing the pictures I see in my head and translating them to the written page. I guess that’s why one of my early four-star reviewers described the book like a ‘Western movie, fast paced and full of action.’I enjoy writing them; I hope folks enjoy reading the results.

Book preview

THE PATH LESS TAKEN

A Western Short Story

Tony Masero

THE PATH LESS TAKEN traces the journey of James ‘Buddy’ Boyd and his devotion to his upright elder brother whose moral attitudes that are a leading light in young Buddy’s development.

The Boyd family arrives at a lonely way station set in the desert and Buddy watches the gradual development of the place from fortress to town. One by one his siblings depart until it is Buddy who is left alone in the town and is obliged to track down his older brother’s journey into an ambiguous life as a Texas Ranger on the southern borderland.

Cover Illustration: Tony Masero

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations,

or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the

written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Copyright © Tony Masero 2022

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1

Looking down the road at sunset, it’s a long chalk-white marker stark in the dimming light and it disappears out beyond the empty stockyards to be lost down there in the evening haze of coming night.

The last train in the station at that end of town is hissing and shunting and the Loughborough Hotel is lighting the lamps along its portico ready to welcome the few overnight passengers.

The hotel used to be called the Mullings Saloon until the owner developed what can only be described as a severe headache. Mullings was a heck of a guy and the only saloonkeeper I ever knew who always wore a clean apron over his neatly pressed pants. Always pure, white and ironed that apron was and somehow out of place as the saloon he owned was a gloomy hole favored pretty much by drunken deadbeats and low-life marginals.

Mullings was a big man and invariably put paid to trouble by clambering across the bar top with a wooden bung hammer in his hand. On the day of his demise he got one large thigh across, then a stray round from a couple of fighting miners stopped him in his tracks. Poor Mullings was stuck halfway with one leg over, a bullet hole above his left eye and his pristine apron dragging in all the whiskey slops.

After that, the more entrepreneurial Evan Loughborough took over the saloon as a hotel but when the cattle drives starting coming in and the stockyards were built he found his hotel was too far down the road from the railhead. Passengers had to hike a-ways with all their baggage if they wanted to use the hotel. But being an enterprising soul Evan had a twenty-seat tram built and with a driver and two-horse team it carried folks and their baggage