" September Strawberries "
Living outside four walls with only your wits and a sound horse,
a good tarp, a
Colt 45, and a Code of honor to protect you.
~
Paul McWhorter, Luke
Cole and Manuel Gonzales were a part of Becka Fosse’s life
for as long as she could remember. When she was ten years old and her Texas Ranger father was killed by a deranged rancher
who’s shot and killed his wife and best friend in the delusion they were having an affair behind his back, Paul put
her up on the bedroll tied at the back of his patient dun’s saddle, told her to duck as he swung his leg over the top
of the broad backed mustang to mount up and ride away, and she’d been with him and Luke Cole ever since. Manolito was
the orphan of an outlaw, apparently a couple of years younger than herself, who’d simply wandered into their camp one
night, dazed, bloodied, unable to speak about the tragedy, but he could cook better tortillas and range-tough beef than either
of the two grown men; when no one claimed him, he was simply given his own horse at the next town and they’d became
inseparable.
As elder statesman of their little group,
Paul McWhorter had always made it clear that on the day after her eighteenth birthday, if he was still alive at seventy,
a scant three weeks after that, he would retire from enforcing the Law, but on that day she was to catch the nearest
stage and ride Back East to claim her late father’s inheritance. Like Luke Cole’s constant lament that one day he would find a good woman with a small
spread and bust cows instead of heads, it always seemed dreamlike, and never near enough to happen in reality-until the day
Luke met his match in the Widow Perry and he shook hands with Paul and Manolito but oddly ignored her gamely struck forth
hand to pull her into a disgusting ‘womanly’ embrace that turned her world
upside down as she rode out behind the leather tough Lawman and the
oddly grinning black haired imp who knew how to cipher better than she did as she approached her three hundred and sixty-fourth
day until her 18th birthday.
