Dead Peasants Read Online Free PDF

of this building. Ask Smitty to give you a shirt, shorts, shoes and a jock. I’ll meet you on the field in thirty minutes.”
    J.D. did as he was told and was stretching and jogging around the field when Patton joined him.
Wow, what a specimen
, Patton thought.
Too damn bad he never played before.
“J.D. come over here,” he hollered. J.D. joined him at the goal line. “You warm?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Okay, I’ve got a stopwatch. Go out to the forty and sprint this way when I drop my hand.”
    Not sure what to do, J.D. dropped into a four point stance and waited. Patton dropped his hand and hollered, “Go.”
    J.D. strained as he drove his legs into the ground and up righted himself in five yards. He remembered Olympic athletes flattening their hands to cut down wind resistance. In ten yards he was in an all out sprint. When he breezed by the goal line, he trotted to a stop and circled back around to the coach who was staring at his watch.
    “Must be something wrong with this damn thing. Should have made sure I had one with a new battery before I came out.”
    “I don’t understand, sir.”
    “This damn watch clocked you in a 4.45. Nobody your size has ever done that in my twenty-five years of coaching.”
    ‘Sir, I’m pretty fast. I always led the sprints in the Marines.”
    “Well, son, go back there and let’s see if you can do it again.”
    J.D. did 4.48. Patton shook his head in amazement.
    “If you can catch a football, you’re gonna be a tight end. Hell, with your size and speed, I may try you at linebacker, too. Go tell Smitty to give you a locker and some practice gear.”
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” J.D. said as he started to trot off. After two steps he turned and asked, “Can you tell me about the construction, sir?”
    Patton gazed up to where the western stands had been imploded in December, 2010. “Sure. Our goal is to remain a national power and bring TCU and Fort Worth a national championship pretty damn soon. We got more fans than we do seats. So, we’re starting there. Construction will be complete in time for opening day. Adding ten thousand seats and some luxury boxes and suites. Hopefully, it won’t be long until we expand again.”
    J.D. turned and resumed his trot from the field. Coach Patton smiled as he thought,
Hell, this kid is big and fast and was a combat Marine. If I can’t make him a football player, I better just turn in my whistle.

9
    Fort Worth had several nicknames and was proud of most of them. The original fort was built on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River, a suitable location for spotting marauding Indians. Then someone said Fort Worth was “Where the West Begins,” a shot at the neighboring city of Dallas, whose inhabitants people in Fort Worth thought belonged back east, maybe somewhere in the vicinity of Philadelphia or New York City. Dallasites retorted that Fort Worth was so dead that a panther could sleep in the middle of Main Street. In return the people in Fort Worth adopted the panther as the official mascot for their first high school.
    Then the cattle drives started in the late eighteen hundreds. One of the two main trails to Abilene passed through Fort Worth where the drovers would make one last stop to spend their wages on whiskey, women and gambling before heading into the Indian Territory. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid spent time there as did Bonnie and Clyde years later. The area of downtown where they congregated was known as “Hell’s Half Acre” and the drovers began calling Fort Worth “Cowtown,” a moniker to this day folks in Fort Worth wear with honor, even more than a hundred years after the drovers quit coming and fifty years after Swift and Armour closed their plants and stockyards on the Northside.
    Dwayne Allison was born and raised in Fort Worth. He went to TCU for two years before he dropped out to sell cars. Over the years he had sold cars and trucks to half the people in Tarrant County. At least that was his