The truck and trailer pulled out of the ranch driveway and turned right, toward the final pasture of the round up, which was seven miles to the south of the ranch. The colt, the first one loaded into the trailer, was standing with his head facing the oncoming traffic in the other lane. Just as the trailer pulled out, he received a very familiar feeling from somewhere outside the trailer.

In the opposite lane, Henry was heading north toward Elko. He had been thinking about the gray colt when he passed a truck and stock trailer pulling out of a ranch driveway. He glanced up at the trailer, as most stockmen will when passing a trailer full of cattle or horses, and thought he caught a glimpse of his old friend’s gray face standing in the trailer’s nose. He turned to get a second look, but by that time, they had already passed each other.

The colt, also thinking he caught a glimpse of Henry, turned his head toward the pickup and nickered. When Henry’s voice didn’t answer, he settled back in for the trailer ride that would take him to his next day’s work.

CHAPTER 43

Henry had been a cowboy all his life, and other than taking a few years off to rodeo when he was younger, it was all he’d ever done. It was the one thing that gave him solace in those years when he could barely get out of bed without first taking a drink—in the time before Jessie. There was a certain amount of comfort in cattle. He could always depend on them. He understood their quirks, the way they thought and acted, their lowing in the evening, and bawling at feeding time. Even when his life was spinning hopelessly out of control, the cattle were always there for him.

When Jessie first hired him on, all he could think about was leaving her place so he could get back to a cattle outfit as quick as possible. Even after he stopped drinking and fell into a comfortable routine with Jessie, there were still nights when he would lay awake and think about checking on momma cows during calving season, or gathering a herd or roping a sick steer out in the open so he could doctor it.

Henry had always been a cowboy in the truest sense of the word, which is why he found it so disturbing on his first day working for Sam Mitchell on one of the biggest and most prestigious cattle outfits in the country, that all he could think about was going back to Jessie. It had been true that cattle had not only been his livelihood, they had also been his life. But as he stood next to the big sorrel gelding he’d been given for the day’s work—helping to bring the last of Sam’s massive herd of registered Herefords down out of the high country—he was beginning to understand that perhaps his cowboy life was now behind him.