Henry went back to the catch pen and pulled out the buckskin gelding named Mic that three weeks earlier Jessie had given him to ride. He was young, barely four years old. Jessie had started him the past summer, but she hadn’t had time to work with him much since. The gelding was Henry’s first project after the ranch closed and all the other help left. Jessie had asked him to ride the young horse every chance he got, mostly just to get some miles on him, but also to get him some experience with working for a living instead of sitting out in a pasture grazing all day. Henry had taken her request seriously. He caught the young horse every day, saddled and bridled him and rode him everywhere he went on the ranch. Whether he was going to the back of the property to check fence, a distance of several miles, or if he were simply going from the barn to the bunkhouse, a distance of only a hundred yards, he rode the gelding. Henry grew up in a culture where a cowboy never walked when he could ride, and the young horse he’d been assigned was finding out just what that meant. If the man worked, his horse worked, too, which meant if Henry was doing a project near the barn for the day, the young horse was with him, saddled and bridled and standing tied to a hitch rail.

Henry saddled the young horse in the rain, placed his lariat over the saddle horn, and with water pouring off the brim of his hat, mounted up and headed out across the yard to the open country to start a big circle and do a head count on the horses he and Jessie didn’t bring in the day before. It was a quarter after five in the morning.

The storm had kept Jessie awake most of the night and early morning. Realizing she had probably gotten all the sleep she was going to, she grudgingly tossed the covers aside and placed her bare feet on the hardwood floor next to her bed. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she looked out the window and saw Henry and Mic, both soaked to the bone, trotting out across the yard and heading for the desert. She glanced at the alarm clock, then back out the window, suddenly remembering something her father told her about cowboys when she was a little girl.

Eight-year-old Jessie and her mother had been in town when she overheard someone refer to a fellow walking down the street as a dime store cowboy. When she got back to the ranch she asked her father what it meant, to be a dime store cowboy. Her father said the term referred to someone who wasn’t a real cowboy, but just acted like one. “A dime store cowboy will always quit when the going gets tough, or the weather turns too cold, too hot or too wet.” He put his gnarled hand on her shoulder and smiled down at her. “The real ones never quit no matter what. They look after their animals before they look after themselves, and they go till the job is done. That’s a real cowboy.”