OUT OUR WAY: If you ride …

Out our way, old timers warn wanna be cowboys that there is a price to be paid. As a greenhorn pastor on his first round up, they picked me a very slow and gentle old horse - but also told me that no cowhand escapes injury in the long run.

A few weeks later, another old timer asked me to join him to help repair a marker in an old, long forgotten cemetery out on the plains. He told me the grave belonged to a 19 year old kid he had known in his youth who had been dragged to death on a cross country trail drive when his cinch broke and the saddle slipped.

Many years later - an old coot now myself...