Flannery's Crossing

When George Garrett wrote of Robert Winship's The Brushlanders, "Robert Winship has an abiding and powerful sense of place and, even better, compassion for and curiosity about people--the inhabitants," he might well have been writing about Flannery's Crossing, which, set also in West Texas, focuses on one Arthur Flannery, an aging cowboy, who finds himself resident in a fleabag hotel in Pecos. When Paul Markham, proprietor of the Courtney, begins losing customers because of a freight train that roars past the hotel in the early morning hours, he is helpless to stop it. Flannery saves the day.