For the next couple weeks, Henry took what little money he had from his last paycheck from the Rafter Seven and drove aimlessly through Arizona and Nevada, up through western Idaho and eastern Oregon, then back down to Nevada. During the trip he stopped at nineteen different cattle ranches and even four sheep ranches looking for work. Nobody was interested. Of course it probably didn’t help that he was always dirty, unshaven and smelled of liquor when he stopped. His reputation always preceded him and nobody seemed all that interested in hiring a broke-down old drunk cowboy to tend to their place or their stock, not even sheepherders.

Then, just as he was running out of money, somewhere in the back of his mind Henry recalled having been offered a job a few years back by Sam Mitchell down near Elko. Mitchell owned one of the biggest cow/calf operations in Nevada, and by all accounts was a good man to work for, providing you could get hired on, which wasn’t always easy. Henry knew Sam only hired the best hands he could find. Once you worked for Sam Mitchell, you were considered to have made the “big time,” and the cowboys who worked for him usually did so for a very long time. Henry recalled the reason he didn’t take the job when it was offered was because he was riding for another outfit at the time, and by the time he lost that job, he’d forgotten about Mitchell’s offer all together.

Henry had hoped to get to Elko in one day from Mountain Home, Idaho, but ended up stopping out in the middle of nowhere. As dusk set in, he pulled off the main road, over a cattle guard and into a pasture. The road on the other side of the cattle guard was little more than a seldom-used two-wheel path. He followed the path off the main road into miles of fenceless pasture and brown, treeless rolling hills. He could have stopped anywhere, but he was looking for something very specific. He knew by experience when there was a pasture that size in an area that was that dry, there had to be a water source for the livestock somewhere. He figured this path was more than likely a maintenance road for that water source and he was hoping to find it before he stopped for the night.

Sure enough, as he rounded a gentle bend to the left and past a lone tree on the side of a hill, there it was: a thousand-gallon water tank with a decades-old, but still functional windmill spinning gently next to it. Henry drove the truck in a large circle about a quarter mile in diameter around the windmill, and with the headlights illuminating the darkening pasture, stopped and picked up old, dried piles of cow manure, and put them in the bed of the truck. When he had what he figured would be enough to last the night, Henry drove back to the windmill and dug a small fire pit. Breaking a few of the pies into smaller pieces and placing them over several pieces of tightly rolled up newspaper in the pit, he lit the paper and immediately started the old manure on fire. Eventually he placed some of the bigger pies on the fire and just as it turned dark, he had a fire big enough to not only keep him warm for the night, but one he could cook over, as well.