The Outfit

By: John Hansen

Narrated by: Bob Dabagia

Jake Lafarge and his mother were abandoned by his father in the Louisiana woods when Jake was just four years old. At the age of 17, Jake was hired by a hard-nosed Texas cattleman named Cyrus Ellsworth and headed north on a trail drive. Ellsworth became the father figure that Jake never had as they carve out a ranch in eastern Montana.

The year is now 1886, and the open range and the old West is rapidly disappearing, thanks to the thousands of homesteaders that have come and began plowing and fencing the range. Some of them are not law-abiding people. When Ellsworth catches two of them stealing his cattle, he dishes out his own hard justice. Unfortunately for Jake, he is part of that day that sets in motion a calamity of events as he tries to make amends to the widow of one of the dead men. In the end, his allegiance to his surrogate father will be severely tested.

©2019 John Hansen (P)2019 John Hansen

Contemporary Western Painted With A Broad Brush

This is your basic contemporary western story with a lot of today’s morality infused into the story. The Indians are drunken thugs, and the only female in the story spends her time crying or beginning to cry, worked around irrational, angry outbursts. The main protagonist is self-doubting, wish-washy, and the exact opposite of the type that settles the West in the 1880s. These characters would be interesting g as fouls or harmony to other deeper, more developed characters. As is, they merely slow the story down, and make the reader want to skip forward in the story to avoid the whiny attitudes. The story itself in ok is although uninspired.