Cowboy

"I always wnted to be a cow-puncher," says Shorty Caraway. "As a little kid back on the farm in east Texas I couldn't think of nothin' else." Shorty's father took some persuading, but in the end he staked his fourteen-year-old son to a white pony, a second-hand saddle, and "forty dollars to go with the two I had, an' he said that ought to run me until I got a job." What happened from that day until Shorty was taken on as a regular hand is told in the pages of Ross Santee's Cowboy, first published in 1982.