That day, he and Dan had been picked to go to town and pick up a load of grain from the local feed store. They were nearly finished loading the twenty, fifty-pound sacks of grain in the back of the ranch pickup when Henry noticed a construction worker coming from the café next door. At first, the man’s face looked familiar, and then as the man got closer, Henry realized he actually knew him from his days working a ranch up near Sand Point, Idaho. His name was Dick Reynolds, but everybody called him Sunny Dick. This was because he had lost all his hair from a childhood illness and the kids he grew up with said his bald head was as bright as the sun. Sunny Dick had been a fair hand with cattle and horses, but his real strength was drinking hard liquor. He could hold more whiskey than men twice his size and had drunk Henry under the table on more than one occasion.

“Sunny?” Henry shouted. “Sunny Dick?”

Henry jumped down from the loading dock and quickly made his way over to his old friend.

“Who the hell’s that callin’ my name?” Sunny yelled back.

“Hell, Sunny, it’s me, Henry. You goin’ blind in yer old age?”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Sunny turned and headed for Henry. “How the hell are ya, Henry? I ain’t seen you in years.”

“I’m getting’ by, Sunny,” Henry grinned as he shook his hand. “How about you? What the hell’s with this git-up? You a nail-bender now?”

“’Fraid so,” Sunny nodded with a smile. “I got drunk one night a few years back and shot old man Breecher in the foot. I’ll be damned if he didn’t fire me the very next day.”

“That old booger. He never could take a joke.”

“Ain’t that the truth?”

“So you ain’t cowboyin’ at all no more?” Henry sounded disappointed.

“Hell no. I couldn’t find no work. The only place I could get a job was on a dude outfit up in Wyoming.”

“Damn, Sunny,” Henry said, forgetting for a moment he was working on a dude outfit.

“Yup,” Sunny grinned. “Well, I remembered how we used to say that if one of us ever got so stupid we went to work on a dude outfit, the other one was supposed to put us out of our misery. Hell, I was afraid you’d find out where I was and come up there and put a bullet in my brain. So I got out.”

“Damn. Construction? You ain’t no nail-bender. You’re a top hand. You should be trailin’ cattle.”

“Not no more, Henry.” Sunny crossed his arms in front of himself. “Hell, I guess I just got tired of lookin’ at the south end of northbound cattle. Not only that, but this sure beats the hell out of wranglin’ dudes. I just couldn’t stoop that low. What about you? What are you doin’ these days?”

Embarrassed to actually say, Henry hemmed and hawed a bit before finally making up a story about having picked up some day work on a cow/calf outfit forty miles south of town. Henry had chosen forty miles because he knew it would have been close enough that, if the story had actually been true, he would have traveled that distance for feed, but it wasn’t so close Sunny would have wanted to go out and have a look at the place. They spoke long enough for Henry to find out Sunny was just passing through on his way to Las Vegas, where he had been hired as part of a crew to work on a new casino that was getting ready to go up. They also talked a little about the “good old days,” that for Henry, hadn’t actually been that good. It had been back when the wounds of the accident were still fresh, and when he kept himself drunk all day long, instead of just at night, as he did now.