The remainder of the rails went up easily and quickly, and before long the project was finished. Jessie thanked Henry for his help and they went their separate ways, Jessie to take care of the next impending crisis her staff was experiencing, and Henry scooping manure out of the other corrals. Henry wasn’t sure what to think about the conversation he and Jessie had, and it weighed on his mind the rest of the day and into the evening. He was having trouble figuring if Jessie had been making idle conversation with her questions about working with horses, or if she had something else in mind, like asking him to stay on after the season was over. Finally, while sitting on the trashcans out behind the kitchen and having his supper, Henry decided it’d be best just to let it go. Whatever was on her mind, if anything, he’d probably find out soon enough.

Henry took his plate into the kitchen, thanked the kitchen help for his supper, and went back to the bunkhouse. His first thought was to pull the bottle out of his footlocker and start his nightly self-medication process. But it was such a pleasant evening, with a slight warm breeze coming from the south and the beginning of a beautiful yellow, orange sky developing in the west, he decided to have a seat on the porch and just sit for a few minutes.

He had been sitting in a rocking chair, gently rocking back and forth for nearly a half hour when he noticed Jessie walking across the yard toward the corral, where some fifty horses had their heads down and were eating from the piles of hay that were scattered about. He watched as she climbed between the wooden rails of the fence and stood quietly inside the corral. The horses all stopped eating and one by one, slowly made their way over to her. Like the conversation the two of them had earlier in the day, he wasn’t sure what to think about what he was seeing, and he stopped rocking and leaned forward, as if that would somehow give him a better vantage point. Soon, Jessie appeared to have been consumed by the herd as they circled around her, and Henry, becoming concerned for her safety, got to his feet to get a better look at what was going on.

If Jessie could have seen the worry on Henry’s face, or if she would have even known he was watching, she would have laughed. This was something Jessie had been doing with the horses since she was a little girl. It worried her parents at first, too, seeing their little girl all by herself in a pen full of (at the time) wild horses, and them milling around her to a point where she disappeared. They had warned the young Jessie about going in with all the horses, and at ten years old, even threatened punishment if they caught her doing it again. But it didn’t stop her, and eventually they realized what she already knew: the horses weren’t going to hurt her. Even back then, anytime things got to be a little too much for her, she would go spend time with the horses, and before long, her worries would fade like the last note of an old song. There had even been times back when she lived in the city when she longed for her herd, even for just a minute or two, when she could stand amongst them and draw from their strength.