During the winter of 1896, two men, Charles MacFarland, Texas cattleman, and Charles C. French, public relations director for the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, met on a sidewalk in North Fort Worth. In the course of their conversation they agreed that a stock show would do a great deal to stimulate the livestock industry and to draw attention to Fort Worth's place in it.
On a crisp winter morning in 1993, two men met on a sidewalk in West Fort Worth. Both were professional stockmen. They spoke entirely different languages, one Portuguese, the other a highly inflected brand of English....

Fleeing Atlanta and an emotionally abusive marriage, Imogene McBride is heading west with her precocious, beautiful teenage daughter, Cora, when their car breaks down in the tiny North Texas town of Agatite. While her mother sits out its repair on a bench on the courthouse lawn, Cora wanders off to buy ice cream, enters a drugstore and disappears without a trace. Initially, believing Cora is playing a prank, an agitated Imma storms the drugstore and then the sheriff s office demanding answers. When answers don t come, she returns to the park bench to wait, her annoyance turning to fear, and...

Sandhill County Clay Reynolds s Yoknapatawpha is the setting for all nine stories in this collection. Reynolds sees his stories as reflective fragments, the kind one notices when driving through a county in North Central Texas old buildings and houses, each one concealing a story. I wonder about such places, who may have built them and what they looked like new. I think also about newer places, or places that have been converted from one thing to another, and I wonder about the people behind the windows and doors, what their stories truly are. Sometimes a sensation that wouldn't cause so much...