“I know the kind,” Jessie smiled.

“When did all that happen?” Lloyd asked.

Leon took of his hat and scratched his head. “Seventeen or eighteen years ago now, I’d say.” He put his hat back on. “Don’t really seem like that long, though.”

The conversation then turned back to the yearlings Jessie had brought. Lloyd talked of how impressed he was with the looks of the youngsters and wanted to know what their breeding was, how much they had been handled, and if Jessie had any more like them that she wanted to sell. She thanked him for his kind words about the babies, but told him that was all she had for now. They discussed the weather for a bit, and Jessie asked about a hotel she could stay in for the night before heading back to the ranch in the morning.

As the sun started to set, Jessie said her goodbyes, climbed back in her truck, and drove to the end of the road where she found an area big enough to turn her rig around and headed back out the way she came. She passed barns C, B and A and when she came to the parking area in front of the pavilion, she slowed the truck to a stop and looked up at the big green letters on the front of the building. She felt a profound sadness well up inside her as she read the words “Josh McBride Memorial 4-H Pavilion.”

“My God, Henry,” she said with quiet sympathy, as if he were sitting right next to her. She looked at the building for a long time, fighting back tears, before finally putting the truck in gear and slowly driving away. She thought about the pain Henry had been living with, and the grief he was still carrying around when he arrived at the ranch. A wave of guilt washed over her for thinking of him as just another drunk cowboy and for being hard on him about his drinking.

What kind of man still grieves for his family seventeen years after they’ve passed? She wondered to herself. As she got ready to pull the rig out onto Brine Street, something Leon said during their conversation flashed into her mind and answered her question: the best kind.

CHAPTER 26

It was the most comfortable the gray colt had felt since he was first forced into the company of humans some several months earlier. During the past few weeks the man would come in the morning and put feed in the pen, then he would come back a short time later to clean. Soon after, the woman would come around to look in on him. Neither one would hang around long, and the colt usually wouldn’t see either one again until later in the day when either one or the other would stop by to give him some more hay, or fill his water tank or check the latch on the gate.

Then, suddenly the woman seemed to disappear. She stopped coming around and the gray colt figured she must have gone to the same place where all the other humans who used to be at the ranch went. He remembered when he first arrived, there were humans everywhere. Then one day they all disappeared, except the man and the woman. Then the woman disappeared, too. It was too bad, because the colt liked her. She was the one that got the rope from around his neck, and she always spoke softly when she was around him. The man never really spoke at all, unless it was to the woman.