I’m a deputy for Marshal Dylan, but I spend most of my time with a bunch of rowdies like Less Than Jake, Jackson Browne and The Impotent Sea Snakes. They all like to hang out at Miss Reba’s place, the Lonestar Saloon, where they will spend each day playing poker, picking fights and singing. Yeah, they’re a rough bunch, but they know how to have a good time. Poor me another shot, will ya? Ol’ Festus needs to wet his whistle to tell this one.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, last Sunday. That was the day the travelin’ show came to town, the George Strait Country Music Festival. After the show, I was standing in the parking corral, jawing with the folks from the Furthur Festival when Quick Draw Tim McGraw and his sidekick Kenny Chesney, AKA Baba Looey, walked up. Quick Draw started admiring Marshal Dylan’s horse and before you knew it, old Baba Looey had climbed up and started riding that boy all the way to the other side of the corral. That’s the horse, not the marshal.

When the marshal saw him on that horse, he got madder than a bookin’ agent facing a short ticket count at settlement time. I tried to git Baba Looey to dismount, but Quick Draw grabbed me and got me in one of those headlocks you see on the WWF. The marshal broke us up, pulled Baba Looey off of the horse, looked at the two of them and said something like, “Ehhhhhhh. A hard rain’s a gonna fall, ehhhhhhhhh.”

You already know what we do with horse thieves around these parts. People started making noise about a neck tie party, but Miss Reba sweet talked the marshal out of it, and we all went back to the Lonestar, where The Girls Room and Don Caballero were playing up a storm.

What? You wanna know what ever possessed those two galoots to go after the marshal’s horse? I asked Quick Draw that very same question. Told him he could have gotten into a whole heap of trouble. You know what he said to me? He looked me in the eye and said, “Festus,

“You just gotta have Faith.”