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in the taverns of Maitland, Graham, and Skidmore facing the door, with his back to the wall.
    McElroy was happiest at a coon dog meet or trading hounds at a friend's house or just telling dog stories and drinking Jack Daniel's at the Shady Lady bar in Maryville. His skill as a dog handler and shrewdness as a judge of dog flesh was legendary among coon hunters and dog owners. He bought and sold dogs over the phone without ever laying eyes on them, sometimes at $200 or $300 apiece. He could control one of his hounds with a slight wave of his hand or a nod of his head.
    Until the court ordered him not to carry firearms in the fall of 1980, Ken McElroy never went anywhere without a gun, whether it was a pistol in the shoulder holster, a shotgun in the window rack of his pickup, or both. But nobody remembers ever seeing him in a fist fight.
    Across the Missouri River from St. Joseph, the land flattens out as though a huge steam roller had once run over it. This is the beginning of the great Midwest, cattle country, where the plains stretch far over the horizon and are broken only by occasional rises and clumps of cottonwood trees. Barbed-wire fences and telephone poles cross dry creek beds and stitch the endless windswept prairie. About seventy-five miles southwest of the river is Topeka, Kansas, and twenty or thirty miles south of Topeka is the tiny cattle town of Dover. Like Skidmore, Dover was once a thriving community, but now only a post office, a few stores, and 125 people remain. Here, on February 28, 1897, Mabel Marie Lister was born, third of five children of Oliver and Isabelle Lister. The Listers were tenant farmers, hired by the year, the season, or the month. They moved from ranch to ranch, living in little shacks without electricity or water, earning barely $30 a month. The Listers were good people who just never managed to accumulate much money.
    On June 6, 1910, when she was just fourteen years old, Mabel Lister married twenty-year-old Tony Wyatt McElroy from nearby Shelton. Tony ("Tone" to his family) was known for his hot temper and terrible cursing. As a young man, he made moonshine, drank too much, and got in fights, usually over women. He was boisterous when sober, but he became downright quarrelsome when he drank. Tony farmed a little, but he mainly made a living with his wagon and horses. He hired out to haul hay for people and, when times were good, worked for the county cutting ditches and scraping roadbeds. He owned good horses and wagons and fine harnesses of oiled leather with shiny rings.
    Mabel gave birth to a boy, on February 26,1911, only two days before she turned fifteen. Hershel was the first of sixteen children Mabel would bear, losing a set of twins along the way. Seven boys and seven girls were spaced almost evenly over a twenty-eight-year span of child bearing. Ken Rex McElroy was born on June 16, 1934, followed by the last child, Tim, born on June 1, 1936. Mabel worked hard feeding and raising her steadily increasing brood, always without running water or electricity. She baked bread every day, hung endless lines of wash in the backyard, and took her turn in the fields. The family was poor then, as it would be poor up to the last few years, but the children were always clean and presentable.
    Times were tough in eastern Kansas in the predepression twenties, and somewhere around 1926 or 1927, Tony and Mabel packed up the family and set out for southern Missouri, ending up in the Ozarks. In the town of Lamar, they rented a four-hundred-acre farm and planted corn, and by early July the crops were doing well. But two rainless weeks of burning sun and hot winds destroyed the entire crop, and the McElroys went under.
    The complete loss broke Tony. Eventually, he went back to road construction, working temporary jobs in small towns in southern Missouri and eastern Kansas, all the while having more kids and all the while staying dirt poor. The family wandered up to Quitman, a small town six miles