Under the Texas Sun

If Mark Twain had written about Texas this might have been his book. A young boy thrown into his mother''s family when his father dies of Civil War wounds early grows to be a young man herding cows on Texas'' frontier ranges. But it is not Mark Twain''s story; it is Malcolm Graham Vernon''s delightfully and poignantly retold by his granddaughter. When Mac Vernon''s widowed mother returned with her brood to the Family in East Texas her father assumed stern control. Ku Klux Klan meetings a flight from the Reconstruction army and building a life on a series of frontier farms provided ample occasion for a young boy''s antics to prepare him far manhood. At fifteen Mac thought he had graven up thought of himself as an experienced cowhand. Bidding his gentle but proud mother good-bye he struck out to the west to be a real cowboy. Hired on at the Half Circle Six near San Angelo Vernon worked for the next eight years as a ranch hand branding cows riding night guard around milling -sometimes stampeding-cattle and working on the stillopen ranges. He brashly recovered stolen stock from a thieving army contractor saw one man killed over a four-bit monte game and another over a bucket of buttermilk and got to know the people and the ways of the West Texas range as well as any man I guess. My grandfather Anna Manns Dana writes in her preface was a storyteller and he must have been a spellbinder for whenever any two members of his family or friends got together at some point one would say `Remember Papa''s story about ... ?'' From his leather-bound diaries letters records and family memories Dana has culled his best stories enabling him once more to weave his spell -of humor and sorrow childhood and range work the stories of a young boy growing into manhood under the Texas sun.