[Excerpt from “The Injured Cowboy and the Sheriff of the Mesa Jumanes” | Derrick van der Lem |September 17, 2006]
The Injured Cowboy was by no means a stranger to the sight of a town in fear, but when he approached Jicarillo, emaciated from his travels through the barren Mesa Jumanes, he had second thoughts about entering. There might as well have been a storm cloud over the town. Two wagons he’d passed, and two sets of miserable townsfolk looked at him as if the sight of him only added to their misery.
If there was anything less sought-after in the cowboy’s life on that scorched New Mexico plain, it was being the wrong stranger at the wrong time in a town that lynched to cure its ills. But he needed rest, and his everlasting wounds needed their due attention.
Sheriff Cogill sat on the
