THE DRY DIVIDE

This addition to a long record of indomitable youth brings the author, at 20 and learning to live with incipient diabetes, to the wheat fields in Kansas where work for sharecropper Hudson turns out to be a nightmare. Determined to win a showdown with his boss, he makes arrangements with the newly corralled crew and the local banker to bring in a profitable harvest but the death of Hudson makes a change in his plans. Another deal with the bank, energetic cooperation from the widow's sister, the mixed crew of medicine man Doc, Mexican Paco, Irish Jaikins, the Swedes Gus and Lars, and the work never lets up to stack up the most and the best wheat available. Success assured he turns to the transport business to haul the grain to the elevators and works out a strategy of loading, timing and traveling that pays off for all of them, and then he is in the cattle business. Plenty of get up and go in a youth who was ""greener than a frog"" at the beginning of this 19 summer, capable of handling people and horses, this sturdily continues the autobiography begun by Little Britches (1950) through the recent Shaking the Bush (1962).