Henry had stumbled out the front door of the bar just after closing time with the wad of one hundred dollar bills in his hand, minus sixty dollars which he had spent at the bar buying drinks for himself, and nearly anyone that sat next to him, and ten dollars he’d left as a tip for the bartender. Once outside, Henry put the bills in his shirt pocket, or so he thought. He had missed his pocket all together, and dropped all fourteen hundred and thirty dollars on the sidewalk and simply walked away from it. Three minutes later, Bud Stevens, one of the patrons Henry had been buying drinks for during the night, stepped outside and stopped to light a cigarette. He thought he’d hit the lottery when he looked down and found the wad of bills lying there on the ground, and he wasted no time at all in scooping them up and silently claiming them for his own.

Henry checked his shirt pockets again, as if the somehow the money would have miraculously reappeared since the last time he checked. It hadn’t. He let out a deep sigh, and in an act of hopelessness, jammed his fingers into his jeans pockets. It was then Henry found the change he had gotten from Audrey, the waitress at the Teamster Café. At the time he had simply crumpled the money up and pushed the wad down in his right front pocket. Now, Henry gently pinched the bills between his fingers and painstakingly pulled them from their hiding place as if he was doing some kind of surgery.

Henry slowly peeled the bills apart and counted them. Seventy-four dollars. It wasn’t fifteen hundred, but it was something. As he coaxed the bills from one another, a small, white piece of paper fell from the wad and floated to the ground. After he had finished counting, Henry bent over, causing his head to feel as though it swelled three times its size, and picked the paper up. It had writing on it, but the writing was so small he had to hold the paper at an arm’s length to see what it said. In smeared pencil, it said simply, Jessie King, Lazy K Ranch, Route 17, Grant, Nevada. There was also a phone number, but because of the way the paper had been folded in his pocket, three of the numbers were unreadable. In bigger, more legible letters at the bottom, it read: Reliable Wranglers Wanted.

Henry tried to rub the pain from behind his left eye away with the heel of his hand, and then glanced back at the paper. “Reliable,” he grimaced. “Why does it always have to come to that?”

CHAPTER 12

The day he had picked up the scent of the domestic band of horses by the river, the gray colt had unwittingly crossed over onto Tom Essex’s forty-seven-thousand-acre ranch. Part of the hundreds of miles of fence line that bordered the Essex property crossed the river near where the colt had been resting. But three days into the massive rainstorm that covered the west, the river, swollen by its many tributaries dumping thousands of gallons of water into it, flooded. The flash flood easily removed a quarter mile section of the fence on either side of the river, and washed it miles downstream. The barbed wire fencing snapped as easily as a child breaks a twig and what wire didn’t wash away coiled back on itself like a spring. The metal T-posts that held the wire disappeared altogether, ultimately leaving a huge gap in the boundary fence, and allowing the colt to walk onto the property, never knowing a fence was ever there.