“Miss Jessie…we’re out of guest towels!” a young girl said breathlessly after running up.

“In the laundry room, to the left of the door, top shelf,” Jessie replied calmly. “They’re new, so you’ll need to wash them first.”

“Jessie, do we have anymore feed pellets anywhere?” one of the wranglers asked.

“There are two extra bags in the tack room, next to the saddle blankets, up against the wall. I’m going to town either today or tomorrow to get some more.”

“The Hamilton’s shower isn’t working…”

“I’ll get to it in a minute…”

“We don’t have enough chicken for dinner…”

“Use the steaks instead, we have plenty of them…”

“The phone’s for you, it sounds important…”

“Take a message…”

In between catastrophes, she’d point out this or that tidbit of information about the ranch. The main house, where she lived, had been built in the late 1800’s. Many of the corrals had originally been holding pens for cattle. The ten guest cabins had been built by her father and could hold fifty people, give or take. Her father also built the bunkhouse. There were roughly twenty employees on the place when it was open for the season, twelve of which were wranglers. This year, including Henry, she only had ten.

The ranch sat on twenty-six thousand acres of land, and Jessie was grateful to her grandfather who had the foresight to buy as much as he could when land was cheap in Nevada. Most of the ranch was used for trail riding for the guests and grazing of the herd, and it butted up against an additional one hundred fifty-four thousand acres of BLM land, some of which they also used for grazing and trail riding. There were seventy-two horses and two ponies on the ranch, all trained right there on the place, most by Jessie herself.

It would be the two ponies, however, that would need to be of interest to Henry. The job Jessie had apparently needed him for would be giving pony rides to the children who were too small to ride the big horses. Three-and-a-half hours after he had been hired, he was leading a pony with a screaming four-year-old girl, the child of a beaming New Hampshire couple, sitting on top. Henry was wishing for all he was worth he’d been more specific about the kinds of jobs he would agree to do.

It was the second pony ride he’d given in thirty minutes and already he was figuring how much time he’d have to put in at this place to get enough money to fill the tank in his truck (which had run completely dry when he moved it from the parking lot by the dining room, down to the one near the bunkhouse), and have enough to sustain him while he made his way to New Mexico, or perhaps Colorado in search of a real job. At $100 a week, by his estimation, it would be a minimum of two and a half weeks, seventeen days total, eighteen at the outside. A lifetime away from this narrow pony trail that lead down into a sand wash, around a number of large barrel cacti—some with holes that seemed to form faces that smirked knowingly at him—back up the side of the wash, through a small grove of Joshua trees, then back to the little covered pens where the ponies were kept. Here, three more kids were dancing around, squealing and waiting not too patiently for their rides. It was going to be a long afternoon.