Bannock's Brand (1991)

Leo P. Kelley's Western, published by Doubleday in 1991 in its Double D Western line, follows Ben Bannock, who built a cattle ranch from nothing in the Nueces Valley of Texas early in the twentieth century. With the Texas Rangers disbanded and the Mexican Revolution turning soldiers into rustlers, he fights Colonel Pedro Mantavo's raiders while falling for Celia Flores, the granddaughter of Mantavo's old enemy Franco Flores, who has taken the colonel as a suitor. (Open Library)

Watches

Waltham watch: During the spring branding, one of Barney's crackpot ideas becomes a cow-milking race: two-man teams chase a cow cut from the herd, one holds her head while the other milks into a tin can and sprints for the finish line. Mickey O'Rourke runs it, taking a Waltham watch from his vest pocket and snapping it open before calling the first team; he squints at it to start them and calls Slim's time, four minutes and fifty-one seconds. Bannock and his hand Viviano Colorado choose to go last. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: “All right, gents,” intoned Mickey O’Rourke as he took a Waltham watch from a vest pocket and snapped it open. “Who will go first?” (Leo P. Kelley, Bannock's Brand, scan cataloged as Doubleday (Double D Western), 1991, p. 27, where the OCR's doubled apostrophes are normalised to quotation marks; the contest is set up on p. 25 and the first time called on p. 28; Internet Archive scan OCR)