Hewey Calloway
Forge Books
October 2006
On Sale: October 3, 2006
Featuring: Hewey Calloway
256 pages ISBN: 0765348462 EAN: 9780765348463 Mass Market Paperback Add to Wish List
Hewey Calloway, the best-loved cowboy in all of Western
fiction, returns in this novel of his younger years as he
and his beloved brother Walter leave the family farm in 1889
to find work in the West Texas cow country.
The brothers are polar opposites. Walter pines for a sedate
life as a farmer, with wife and children; Hewey is a
fiddle-footed cowboy content to work at six bits--75
cents--a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the
penny-pinching C.C. Tarpley.
Hewey, who "usually accepted the vagaries of life without
getting his underwear in a twist", is fun-loving and
whiskey-drinking. He spends every penny he earns and
regularly gets into trouble with his boss--and occasionally
with the law--often dragging innocent Walter along.
When Walter falls in love with a boarding house girl and
begins dreaming of a farmer's life, Hewey jumps at the
chance to rescue him from this fate worse than death. He
convinces Walter to join him on a mission for Tarpley,
driving 600 head of cattle from beyond San Antonio to the
Double-C ranch on the Pecos.The journey is both memorable
and dangerous: a murderous outlaw is searching for Hewey;
and another ruthless character is determined to sabotage the
cattle drive. When the drovers reach the Pecos they find
Boss Tarpley in the midst of a vicious range feud with Eli
Jessup, a neighboring cowman. Hewey and his brother Walter
have to get the herd safely across Jessup's land—but how?
aThe events of Six Bits a Day precede those of Kelton's
best-selling The Good Old Boys (1978, transformed into the
memorable 1995 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Sissy
Spacek), and The Smiling Country (Forge, 1998).