CHAPTER 16

In the four days he’d been on the Lazy K, Henry hadn’t seen much of the woman who had hired him. He’d been splitting his time during the day between giving pony rides for hours on end, and scooping manure out of the holding pens, hitch rail areas and the area where guests got on horses so they could go on trail rides. He’d pick up the manure with a large aluminum scoop shovel, trying not to pick up too much dirt along with it, pile it in a wheelbarrow and dump it in the manure spreader out back where he first met Jessie. The work was hot, tedious and unrewarding and as far as he was concerned, his existence now was only slightly less mundane than when he was sitting on a bar stool for hours on end and sleeping in the bed of his pickup.

Shortly after lunch on that third day, however, an incident occurred that seemed to generate a spark in Henry that he thought had long ago vanished. It started harmlessly enough, with an honest mistake by Jim, the young wrangler from Minnesota Henry met on the first day. As far as Henry could tell, Jim was a fair hand and apparently second in command under a fellow named Chad, whom Henry had not yet met. He had spoken with Jim on a few occasions over the past couple days, and as much as he tried not to like the affable young man, he actually found it difficult to do.

Henry had just come out of the dining room, and was making his way to the pony ride area when he glanced over to where the wranglers were mounting guests on horses for an afternoon trail ride. For some reason, every guest on the place had decided to go on a ride that afternoon, and because of that, every horse on the place was saddled. During this particular week, Jessie had expanded her guest capacity by three people to accommodate a family reunion. The problem was that while she had the three extra horses to accommodate those three extra riders, what she didn’t have were the three extra saddles for those horses. Overbooking horses was extremely rare on the ranch, but it did happen from time to time. When it did, Chad had mandated that the wranglers who weren’t guiding or helping out on the ride were expected to volunteer their personal saddle for guest use. It had never been an issue for most of the wranglers that passed through the place, as most “amateur” cowboys don’t have the same strong attachment to their gear as a working cowboy does. But with a real working cowboy, that’s different. Most working cowboys wouldn’t even allow their good friends to use their equipment, not that a good friend would ask to use it in the first place. So allowing a stranger to use their saddle would be out of the question, and allowing their saddle to be used for a “dude” to ride in would be unheard of.