She regretted putting him on pony ride detail almost as soon as she did it. She knew it was way below his skill level, but the truth was she needed it done and everybody else was busy with other things. Her father had always told her the boss might not always be right, but the boss is always the boss. The quality of an employee can be measured by the willingness to do something for you the employee’d rather not be doing. She saw by the look in Henry’s eyes doing pony rides wasn’t his first choice of jobs but was again impressed when he did it without complaint.

By the end of that day Henry was tired, more tired than he’d been in a long time. But then he had walked more than he usually did, too. Ten pony rides during the hot and dusty afternoon and all along the same three-hundred-yard path through the desert. Total, he’d walked nearly two miles. Near dinnertime and after the last child came around looking for a ride, he unsaddled the ponies and put their tack in a small shed near the covered pens they stayed in. He tossed them each a flake of alfalfa hay, checked their water tank, and then went up to the dining room to get his dinner.

The help on the ranch ate the same thing the guests did. On this day it was a T-bone steak, fried potatoes, green beans and corn, salad and lemonade, water or ice tea to drink. For dessert, which Henry skipped, it was ice cream sundaes. It was a good meal by anyone’s standards, but by Henry’s it was a feast. Still, he ate it much faster than he probably should have, and was in and out of the dining room in less than fifteen minutes.

After dinner he went to the bunkhouse and put his things away. Along with the footlocker at the end of every bed, there was also a small closet next to the head for hanging shirts and jackets. Henry wouldn’t need the closet. In fact, he didn’t need much room in his footlocker either. Rather, instead of taking his clothes out of his satchel and putting them in neat piles in the locker, as the others had done, he kept everything in the satchel and simply dropped it in the locker instead. No sense in unpacking, he thought. Ain’t gonna be here that long anyway.

Henry carried his saddle over to the tack room by holding on to the cantle, and propping the pommel on his right hip. By carrying it this way, the majority of the saddle’s weight was transferred to his hip rather than his arm and walking long distances with it became much easier. He slung his rope bag and bridles over his left shoulder and easily made his way across the dusty trail to the tack room.