On the sixth day Henry woke up with some muscle soreness, but otherwise feeling better than he could ever remember. His head and eyes were clear, his breathing was easy and his natural energy had returned. By midday, Henry had eaten a full meal of canned chili cooked over an open fire, bread and coffee. Immediately after eating, he was up and starting to string wire on the two-and-a-half mile stretch of fence that had been assigned to him by Chad. Henry would continue on the project for the next two weeks, stopping only to eat, drink, sleep and tend to his horses.

By the time he got back to the ranch, Henry was a different person. Much of the bruising from the beating he took from what he believed to be an unknown assailant was fading, and the cuts and scrapes were also healing well. He had gone a full two weeks without even the hint of a flashback or nightmare, and had been sleeping through the night without any trouble. Even though things were beginning to turn around in Henry’s life, things were still the same at the ranch. No sooner had Henry ridden up to the corral and got his horses and equipment put away, than Chad put him to work scooping manure from the corrals and pens.

Henry was dumping the last wheelbarrow full of manure of the day into the spreader when he heard the sound of a truck and large enclosed stock trailer rattling its way up the driveway and into the yard of the ranch. He quit what he was doing to watch the rig pull around the bunkhouse and stop at the new corral Jessie and Henry had finished several weeks ago. There was sporadic loud banging and the panicked whinnying of a horse emanating from the trailer as the rig backed up to the open gate of the corral. Jessie was waiting near the gate and as the rig pulled to a stop, she opened the trailer’s back door and the dark gray mustang colt jumped from the trailer and into the corral. Jessie closed the trailer door, then swung the corral gate shut and latched it. She then turned to look at the horse, which was running frantically around the inside of the round pen, looking for a way to escape.

It had already been a confusing and frightening day for the young colt that had begun shortly after dawn. He noticed an unusual amount of activity in and around the alley just outside his pen. Tug, Ben and Matt had opened several gates, and closed others to create a path through the four-hundred-foot-long, twelve-foot-wide alley that ultimately ended with the alley narrowing into a three-foot-wide chute. At the opposite end of the chute was a sliding metal gate that opened into a large catch pen. Cat had pulled the ranch truck and stock trailer into the catch pen and backed it up to this gate, with the trailer’s sliding stock gate also opened and lined up with the chute’s open gate.