“Take an ornery illiterate, Parker Quiney, and the tenderfoot son of a wisdom-bringer, Nate Graber, headed 400 miles north to fetch the body of Parker’s brother; cross their path through 1879 Texas with a gospel shark and his blacksmith wife, a Mexican witch, “saloon” ladies, stampeding cattle, a bookish Eastern family homesteading, an old reprobate making restitution—and you have a recipe that, in practiced hands, can’t fail. Not, of course, that Parker and Nate, skinny and fat. Rebel and Yankee, cowboy boots vs. “sodbuster shoes” and the rest, can help but learn from each other and become more alike, the one who prides himself on his know-how (and everything else) doing most of the learning. But if the taming of Parker is the point, there are distractions aplenty, not the least being the very distractions the boys devise to get out of towns in a hurry. One of these, the dodge of the slavering dog, the Author’s Note attributes to her teenage daughter…”