Quotes from Scott McCrea

If Tom Mix had just stepped from Olympus, the boys could not be more impressed.

Tom Mix was born in Pennsylvania, and when he was ten years old his parents took him to see Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West. It changed young Tom forever. He took his mother's clothesline and taught himself rope tricks. He took scraps from around the house and made his own "cowboy outfit." And when he was finally old enough, he lit out for the rapidly vanishing West, ready to leave a mark as distinctive as Buffalo Bill or Wyatt Earp before it was gone forever.

But that was Tom Mix. He was not made by the West; Tom Mix knew he was made for the West.

She opened the book on his lap. The pages were densely packed with a neat cursive script; the ink was a pale purple, but each and every i was dotted with a small, red heart. Tom imagined dozens of bottles of colored ink, stored neatly under her (permanently stained) pillow.

It was a perfect night for a killing.

A lynching always makes a town look bad," Alan Brownfield said. "But a card cheat often makes it look worse.