Kick the Can

We are back in 1949, in Kansas, with "One-Eyed Mack," son of the best highway patrolman in the whole state and an incurable romantic in the vein of Tom Sawyer. After he loses an eye in the child's game of the book's title, Mack has to give up his "trooper dreams" of derring-do in his father's footsteps and his baseball fantasies as well. Once graduated from junior college, he forms a Sawyer-like ambition to become a "pirate" and sets out for the territoriesin this case, Galveston, Tex. What follows is a series of picaresque adventures involving a number of other upper- and lower-case characters, such as Marshall M. Mooney, the Map Man; Lillian, "The Come Lady"; and Tom Bell Pepper Bowen; not to mention Roy Rogers, the King of the Cowboys and his entourage.