 Dreamscape presents The Unlikely Lawman, a Huey Calloway adventure by Steve Kelton and Elma Kelton. Narrated by me, George Goodell. CHAPTER ONE Huey Calloway was in his element. It was spring, and West Texas had on her Sunday best. The morning sun was warm, the effects of earlier rains beginning to show. Green shoots had appeared in the few clumps where grass grew, and much of the rest of the ground boasted tallow weed and other plants Huey knew but couldn't name. Most of the cows he saw had babies by their sides, full udders, and a thin layer of fat beginning to show in their ribs and over their hip bones. The cows without calves were pig fat and would soon be cut off and sold as freeloaders that wouldn't earn their keep this year. Huey was on horseback, taking it all in with the pride of ownership, but without the headaches or expectation of reward. These were two seas cattle and belonged not to Huey, but to ranchman C. C. Tarpley, who had just fired Huey at the chuck wagon that morning. It wasn't the first time Tarpley had fired Huey, and it probably wouldn't be the last. Huey had even quit once or twice himself, but the two always came to an accommodation eventually. Huey was a good cowboy and C. C. valued that, even if he didn't value it enough to pay well. Parsimony was a common condition among the ranch owners Huey had known, though C. C. Tarpley displayed a more severe case than most. Huey had a month's worth of C. C. Stingy pay in his pocket, a round horse that would watch a cow, and he was gloriously unemployed. So close to his 40th birthday that he could hear it taunting him in quiet moments, Huey was the older of two sons. The widowed father had a restless streak that he stamped indelibly on his firstborn. The three colloies, Pa, Huey, and Brother Walter had drifted constantly within the East Texas region of Blackland Farms, picking up what work was available to them. As a boy, Huey drug a cotton sack for miles before he was big enough to put behind a mule and a pair of plow handles. They were an ill fit for his hands from the beginning, and Huey chafed to be somewhere else, doing something else. Brother Walter, a year younger, took to farm work like he was born for it. It was only at Huey's insistence after Pa died that the two brothers went west looking for cowboy jobs that were said to be plentiful in the Pecos River country, and the brothers found the job situation to be as advertised. A decade and a half later in 1904, Huey had earned a reputation in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico as a top hand, and Walter was back behind a plow, but this time it was his own, and he was turning back native sod on his own land. Walter was the only one of the colloway clan, what little Huey knew of it, to own land. Back in East Texas, where it rained, Walter's homestead... Sample complete. Ready to continue?