Word: mccanless
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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...Yahoo!" the wing-mustached old saddle tramp yelled, reining up in the startled dude resort of Warbag, Colo. "I'm Scandalous John McCanless, and I've got the prettiest daughter, the fastest horse, and the ugliest partner in the district, and I'm a ring-tailed screamer lookin' for a fight...
...clutched children to their skirts and men edged for cover, for all knew that Scandalous John was the meatiest waddie ever to ride out of the West-the 1960s West of tail-finned Cadillacs and fat farm subsidies, that is. Unhappily, his neighbors back home in New Mexico considered McCanless as loco as a headless road runner. He has embarked on history's last Long Trail Drive, across macadam highways and through skyscraper-canyoned cities at the head of his herd-which consists of one aged cow with a plastic window in her side...
...Fence." The grandson of a pioneer, Scandalous John was once a gifted college veterinary professor; after years of research he had succeeded in keeping a cow alive with a four-stomach picture window. But McCanless' impersonal superiors didn't care enough to look through it. Then John's wife died. Then he lost his teaching chair after he took to packing a Colt .44 to class. He fell behind on the mortgage on the family ranch...
Over a bottle of sour mash with Houseboy Paco, McCanless succumbs to a vision. That ventilated cow out in the barn, Old Blue-she is actually a vast, milling herd of white-faced steers. Like a latter-day Don Quixote, McCanless lays out his inspired plan to Paco: "We grass-fatten the herd on the trail, and then we sell it at top market. And when it's all over . . . we'll buy each of us a scarlet sweetheart and honky-tonk our tails...