Chapter 1

Just outside of the wonderful city of Boston, Mass is a place of great evil. This reflection of the realm of the nether world generates two of the worst curses of our great nation. These spawn of the devil are commonly called Harvard MBAs and Harvard Law School Graduates. If a particular spawn unit is both, you have defined the antichrist.

One of these curses upon the American economy causes massive damage to the country by repackaging and respinning failed and disproven business theories and concepts in a desperate attempt to sell books and justify their massively inflated salaries.

The other curse that floats under the veil of civilization and poaches on the innocent by increasing everyone's cost of living by initiating massive and frivolous law suits. We're not talking ambulance chasers' little harmless million dollar flea bites here and there. (We can leave those to the non-Ivy League klutzes.) We're talking about multi-billion dollar class action stuff where the thousands of class action clients get one dollar for every one thousand awarded.

At least that's the way my daddy tells it.

Now personally, I don't see that Pop has a lot of room to talk. He teaches banking at Yale. (He continently forgets all those useless presidents Yale has cursed us with from his anti-Harvard soapbox.) Talk about a racket, that's banking. Here's how banking works.

The good people of the community work their ass off for the 'MAN', and put what little is left over after they pay the Arabs for energy, the landlord for rent, ADM for food, Budweiser for beer, and the government for the outrageous taxes and fees needed to support governmental graft and corruption, into their savings account to earn a small interest rate.

Friendly Joe, the banker, then takes that money and loans it out to his rich buddies at a much higher interest rate to do what is needed to make them richer. Wait! This is the cool part. Friendly Joe doesn't loan it out just once. Thanks to this little do-dad called a reserve requirement, he can loan out that same money to several people at the same time.

Let's say the reserve requirement is 10%. As long as Friendly Joe keeps real money, say $100.00, in the bank, he can loan out $1,000.00 dollars electronically. The really boss thing about it is that EVERYONE acts like the $1,000.00 is real money. It even has a name, "The Money Supply." I've been told that that's not the only element of the money supply, but it's the BIGGEST part of it.

I addition to that, there is this group of super bankers called the Federal Reserve System, "The Fed". (A more accurate name may be Federal Reward - for giving the most money to the winning political party — System, but everyone pretends it has nothing to do with politics. Hollywood doesn't have a monopoly on fantasy.) The Fed sets these percent requirements. Not only does the Fed set reserve requirements, but if Friendly Joe gets carried away and loans out $1,100.00 and he's afraid that an auditor is going to show up, the Fed will loan him $10.00 for a very low interest rate called the Fed Funds Rate until some hard working normal citizen adds $10.00 to his savings account. Another way to get the $10.00 is to take some of that funny electronic money and deposit it in another savings account and act like it's as real as the original $100.00.

Talk about a racket. I've heard of people going to jail for scams like that in other businesses. The only way you can lose money in this deal is if you're stupid or you listen to a Harvard MBA. There must be a lot of Harvard MBAs or a bunch of stupid people in banking, though, because there're a lot of banks losing their shirts these days.

Me? I don't give a hairy rat's ass one way or another. I'm a red neck. Well, more specifically, I'm a red neck wanna-be. I like quiche, so I'm not a true to the rawhide red neck. Now Pop is also the cause of all my "common man" attitudes. He taught economics at the University of Texas during my formative years, and I started school there. Many of my classmates were from ranches, so I spent my holidays and summers trying to get out of Austin by working cattle and horses. It was hard work, but I loved it. Oh, I finished my engineering degree at UT with honors, but my heart was lost to the old west.

Damn, we (my friends and I) even played around with the local SASS (Single Action Shooting Society) member western quick draw clubs. That's something the family never found out about because they believe the Second Amendment is more Satanic than a Harvard MBA. I even got to be pretty good with an old double action Schofield in 44-40 replica that one of the ranchers loaned me and later gave me for helping him improve his water supply. The project was my Senior Project, but the rancher insisted the gun was mine when I tried to give it back.

Now I ain't gonna say that the rest of the family would like for me to kind of tone it down, but when I wore my best alligator skin cowboy boots, a pair of Wall Mart Wranglers, a hand scrolled leather belt with a solid silver rodeo buckle, and a hand made silk cowboy shirt to my sister's graduation from Vassar the kin folk were not too happy. Never mind that the outfit cost me over $2,000.00, it was not what the good folk running the hootenanny felt was appropriate. Shit, the guys that threw me out were wearing 5 year old Sears reject suits with clip on ties. Damn it, I was offended by their clothes as much as they were by mine.

Now Pop tells me the purchase of the Nevada ranch had nothing to do with that Vassar blowup, but one came awfully close to the anniversary of the other. He claims one of his former students who worked for some bank in Carson City called him and said he could get the 8,000 acre ranch for 10 cents on the dollar. Pop quickly bought the ranch with my share of money from Grandpa's trust fund. You know the one that was to be split up when my brother, sister and I all reached 25. The family convinced me that I was the only one who could run a ranch, so off to Elgin, Nevada and the Rainbow Valley I went.

I really was excited about the new opportunity until I got to the ranch. Well, calling it a ranch may be too kind. The contract Pop signed gave us all buildings, equipment, fixtures, and livestock. I understood then that the former student must have had a grudge against my daddy. The family had just taken a long walk off a short pier.

The first thing I saw when I finally got through the pothole patch and washouts some people might have once called a driveway was the ranch house or what was left of it. The house had been set up on a wash.

Now a wash is just that, it's where all the water runs from the rains in the wet season. Hell, the Nevada Department of Transportation doesn't even try to put bridges on the highways in washes. They just run concrete pads into the low area and put up signs that say "Do not drive into the water." I don't think that the signs were for the locals. Tourists just ain't any smarter than Yale Banking Professors sometimes.

Anyway, the DOT was a lot smarter than the guy who brought in the double wide trailer and set it on concrete blocks. It seemed that he didn't pay too much attention to where he put it. At some point, the wash, being a wash, lived up to its name and washed the dirt out from under some of the blocks, and one side of the house pulled off the other and slid about 10 feet from where it started.

The out buildings were in no better shape. There was what looked like it had been a giant pole barn at some point, but now was just a concrete slab buried under the remains of a fire. There was a large machinery shed that had a portion of the roof caved in and rotting boards on the sides. The only thing that looked like it wouldn't fall apart was the outhouse. (Believe it or not, it was brick, but I was in no mood to check it out.) There was no sign of stock anywhere, nor anywhere to house or feed them. The equipment appeared to be limited to a 10 year old Ford dual tire pickup sitting on blocks and an old stock trailer on rotting tires.

Sagebrush paradise that it was, it really didn't look like there was any reason to drop more money and time on the place. Maybe we could sell it back to the government as a toxic waste dump. I know, I know. To err is human, but God damn it, to fuck up this bad took an advanced college degree.

I slowly walked back to my pickup, sat on the tailgate, and started muttering about how Pop had screwed the pooch on this deal. I must have been deep into it because I heard nothing. Suddenly a woman's voice intruded into my depressed thoughts.

"Would you be the city slicker who got suckered into buying this piece of shit?"

I looked up. About 15 feet in front of me was one of the best looking quarter horse mares I had ever seen. The only thing I could see that was more impressive than the horse was the well built redheaded woman ridding her.

"That would be my daddy. I'm the slicker who's supposed to run this piece of shit."

"I hope you do a better job than the last two idiots who tried to run it. Shit, we still have the Feds running around trying to see if any more of us are growing dope. It's a real pain in the ass.

"You know," she continued. "I tried to buy this at the DEA auction for what it was really worth, but you paid three times that much. I bet you didn't even look at the place before you bought it."

"I didn't even know it was mine a week ago. Pop called me from his office and told me he had made my dreams come true. He bought me a ranch. I'm still looking for the ranch described in the purchase agreement."

She laughed, "Bought a pig in a poke, did he? Is he stupid or something?"

"Just the opposite, He just thinks that people are grateful for what they've learned from him. One of his former students working for a bank in Carson City conned him into this deal. We probably paid too much because the asshole was working on commission. Pop's a professor at Yale."

"Oh God, I hope you're not one of those East Coast Liberals that are trying to destroy farmers and ranchers."

"Nope, I'm just a good old Texas redneck that's an embarrassment to his high society siblings. I'm the black sheep of the family. They put me out here to keep me out of sight. I think it was safer than hiring a hit man and cheaper than locking me in a loony bin."

"What'd you do before you became a great rancher?"

"I was an uncivilized civil engineering student at Texas. The name's JD Barton. What's..."

Before I could say another word, we heard the rattle of a sidewinder just before it struck. Without thinking, I pulled my old Colt from its holster and blew the snake's head off. Between the noise of the pistol and the fright from the snake the woman had lost control of the mare and was hanging on by a thread.