“ I was seven
years old the day I met the legendary law man of the West, Paul Lee McWhorter, after my mother refused to allow me to stay
in her house any longer. Even before my last remaining older brothers and sister married or moved away, I was never allowed
to feel that I belonged, I was always just a stray who’d tumbled against her door by accident, so other than crying
from the strangeness of having my few belongings tied in my shirt and thrown to the ground outside the cabin while my mother
stood there with a shotgun to make sure we all left the property and I wasn’t left behind a second time and my being
forced to share a blanket as a tarp over a hard bed of a wagon with two others, Injuins, whom I’d been taught to fear
and hate, a girl just a year older than me and a boy almost sixteen, but short and skinny as a rail, I was already a tumbleweed,
ready to move on to see what I might find at the crest of the next hill. I guess that’s what makes me good at my job
as a war correspondent, what can happen to me, short of being killed that hasn’t happened worse in my life already?
I won’t bore you with made up stories of my journey to the house near Lake Lahontan because I don’t remember the details. Just being afraid, hot, lonely, and of wanting to make
sure I didn’t wet my pants to make the silent pair find me as disgusting as my previous family had, for the shorter
man at the head of the team, with a leather patch across his eye to keep out the dirt and glare was my father. He said so.
And since he didn’t have any other reason to want to claim me, I simply assumed it was true. My life didn’t really
begin until we reached a grand, pillared house on the edge of the great desert where, at seven years of age, I experienced
love for the first time in a my life. A love that has proved truer than any other save my darling wife Clemmy. “ 30
