" The September Strawberries Collection "
A Wild West Mystery Trilogy
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.
