Life still depended on two fundamentals: crops planted by the hand of man and grass planted by the hand of God. They had gone again, leaving dreams of quick riches to drift away on the arid wind like the cotton-white clouds that promised rain and failed to deliver. Oil companies had come and punched their holes and found them dry. Now it held steady, gaining no ground but losing none. The town long ago had made its growth and found its natural level.
It had been born out of necessity, a trading place for sprawling cow outfits, for scattered sheep camps and industrious German dryland farmers who had come west with their wagons, their plows, and a compulsive will to build something. Like most of them, Rio Seco had old roots.
To an impatient motorist hunting a cooler place to light before dark, these dusty little towns are all cut from the same tiresome pattern and, despite the signboard, a long way from heaven. This cattle, sheep, and farming town was much the same as fifty others dotted along the interminable east-west highways which speed traffic across the great monotonous stretches of western Texas ranch country. THIS IS GOD'S COUNTRY DON'T DRIVE THROUGH IT LIKE HELL WELCOME TO RIO SECO HOME OF 3,000 FRIENDLY PEOPLE-AND THREE OLD CRANKS!įarther inside the city limits, half-hidden between a Ford billboard and one for Pepsi-Cola, he had placed another sign: A man of wit, some people thought, he had erected a big red-and-white sign on the highway at the city limits: The part-time volunteer, elected because no one else wanted the job, made his living selling an independent brand of gasoline two cents under the majors though he bought it from the same tank truck that serviced half the stations in town. RIO SECO WAS TOO SMALL TO AFFORD A PROFESSIONAL manager for its one-room Chamber of Commerce.
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