“Thank you, ma’am.”

“That’s quite a saddle you have,” she commented without taking her attention off the eggs she was stirring. “How’d you run across it?”

Henry had never been in Jessie’s home, and so felt somewhat tentative as he walked over to the table.

“It was my father’s, and his father’s before him,” he said as he gently pulled a chair from the table and sat down. He went to flop his hat on the table next to his plate, then stopped himself and got ready to put it on the chair next to him. That didn’t seem right either, and as Jessie, still stirring the eggs in the pan, turned and began to come to the table, Henry quickly dropped the dirty and battered old thing on the floor at his feet.

“Well,” she said as she breezed across the floor. “Don’t let Tom Essex see it.”

“See what, Ma’am?”

Jessie stood next to Henry and scraped half the eggs from the pan onto his plate. “Your saddle.” She scraped the rest onto her plate, which sat on the table directly across from him. “He collects those old ones. I swear he must have two hundred of them.” She went back to the stove and brought back the pan with the bacon in it.

“I doubt he’s got enough money to buy that one.” Henry’s tone was matter of fact. “I expect I’ll be buried with it.”

She placed several pieces of bacon on his plate. “Well, if he starts hounding you about it, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Jessie placed the bacon pan on a hot pad in the middle of the table, and then took her seat. Henry had been patiently waiting, refusing to take a bite of anything on his plate until she did first.

“Oh, please, Henry,” she said scooting her chair to the table. “Go ahead and eat. You don’t have to wait for me.”

Henry smiled but waited for her to take the first bite. Once she did, he picked up his fork and dug in. It was about that time it dawned on Henry he was having breakfast with his boss in her kitchen, and he suddenly felt a little self-conscious. Several uneasy seconds passed before Henry finally broke the silence. “Ma’am,” he said, swallowing a bite of bacon. “I just gotta ask. How did you get the rope off that horse?”

Jessie swallowed, and then placed her fork on the table next to her plate. “I just tried to show him I wasn’t there to hurt him,” she said after giving the question a few seconds thought. “Once he understood that, it was easier for him to come to me for help.”

The answer made no sense to Henry whatsoever, and he felt himself looking blankly back at her. “Yes ma’am,” he finally said. “But how did you get the rope off?”

Jessie sat for a second looking back at him. To her, the answer she already gave was as clear as could be, but it was obvious that its clarity had escaped Henry. “I just slipped it over his head,” she shrugged.