Ned gulped, a rather complex action given the size of his Adam’s apple. Even from forty-odd feet away, onlookers could clearly make out the nuance of the Sisyphus’ boulder in Ned’s stubble-splattered throat.

Hezekiah had led the excited crowd to an outcropping of Cool Canyon (commonly known as Limpdick Canyon by the McAlester farmhands for the practice of urinating off the ledge and watching streams of yellow arc down to the piss-colored stream below). After tossing a length of wire across the drop to his partner-in-crime, a skin-and-bones Mexican humorously known as Fatty, Hez lashed it to post and with a smile that would cut through week-old cowshit, declared “Come one, come all…”

Ned wasn’t listening to Hezekiah’s imitation of the barkers and belters of the sundry wild west shows that would blow across town. No, standing atop that scenic ledge in a pose the spectators saw as embodying grim determination and poise, Ned the Nimble Wonder was thinking of one thing: the retainment of his bladder.