Noah Benton, a teenager with a great memory, a head for arithmetic, and dreams of excitement, is hired along with his older brother to help drive a herd of Texas longhorns to Abilene, Kansas. But Noah's trail boss happens to be John Wesley Hardin, a notorious killer who thinks Texas lawmen won't look for a fugitive in a crew of hardworking cowboys. After Hardin sees a profit in Noah's ability to count and memorize cards in gambling dens, Noah's dreams of excitement quickly turn into nightmares-for Hardin will kill with little provocation.Earning the nicknames "e;Counting Boy,"e; "e;The Abilene Kid,"e; and "e;Abilene,"e; Noah survives the bloody journey to Kansas, only to learn that Abilene rightfully deserves its nickname as a Sodom or Gomorrah. In a town where anything goes, the marshal, legendary gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok, reluctantly forms a truce with Hardin-leaving Noah caught in the middle. As summer stretches into fall, Noah finds another friend, a special deputy named Mike Williams, who tries to keep Noah from stumbling on his way to manhood.In this well-researched historical novel, eight-time Spur Award-winning author Johnny D. Boggs chronicles Abilene's last year as a cattle town, 1871, while humanizing Hardin and Hickok and painting sobering portraits of a city undergoing rapid change, and the never-changing challenges teenagers face on their path to adulthood.
