CHAPTER 44

“Isn’t it a fine full moon, tonight?” the young woman said as Jessie walked past her. The voice snapped Jessie out of the mental mist she had drifted into as she made her way back to the house. It had been a long day, the kind that had Jessie second-guessing whether or not she even wanted to continue running a guest ranch. Those kinds of thoughts didn’t really enter her mind all that often, but she had to admit, they were starting to occur more frequently.

It had started that morning when she found that one of her cooks and two of her housekeepers left during the night. It seemed at some point during the past week, the cook and one of the housekeepers had decided they would go seeking fame and fortune over in Las Vegas, and the third, a somewhat naive twenty-year-old girl from the Midwest, chose to go along. As a result, Jessie spent a good part of her day helping out in the kitchen and cleaning guest cabins.

Then, there was the argument at breakfast between the newlyweds. Apparently, the bride, who had been raised in the city but had dreams of being a cowgirl, had decided to surprise her husband by using the ranch as their honeymoon destination. The bride was having the time of her life. The groom, however, would have preferred somewhere with a golf course. The discussion between them had begun sometime during the night and by the time it spilled over into morning, it wasn’t really clear to anyone on the ranch just how long the new marriage was going to last. The quarrel had gotten so heated that, at one point, Jessie had to step in and separate the two, and when they refused to call a truce on the subject after thirty minutes of yelling and screaming, she finally asked them to leave the property.

Then there was the young Hollywood actor from Los Angeles who had come to the ranch because he had landed a part in an upcoming western on the pretense that he knew how to ride horses. Unfortunately, the actor was from Chicago and the closest he’d ever been to a live horse was looking out at them from his car window. Not only did he not know how to ride, but he was also scared to death of them. His agent had stayed at the ranch with his family a few years back and suggested the young man come there to learn how to ride and be around horses. In an attempt to work up his nerve just to go down to the barn, much less mount up, the actor had spent most of the day drinking in his room. By the time he was sufficiently drunk enough to make the effort, he was also too drunk to walk. He left his cabin, staggered around for five minutes, and then ended up falling into a rock garden dotted with a variety of native low-growing cactus. Not only was he covered from head to foot in cactus tines, but he also broke both wrists in the process. Jessie ended up driving him to the medical clinic in town and the entire way she had to listen to (between his bouts of throwing up) how he was going to sue her for putting a rock garden right where he had been trying to walk.