Henry stopped in his tracks, and with a look of contempt stared at Chad’s hand, and said quietly, “Turn me loose boy, or you’ll lose that hand.”

Chad swallowed hard, and then slowly released his grip. Henry shook his head in disbelief at the childish behavior of the man, turned and walked out the door.

CHAPTER 18

The first few weeks in the pen next to the old gelding had been hard on the gray colt. There was always a lot of activity by the humans, which worried him. So much, he never knew which way to flee when they came around. Even if he thought he knew where to run, he couldn’t go far before running into one solid five-rail fence or another. The pen itself was large as far as pens go, nearly thirty feet long and twenty-four feet wide with a slanted cover over the far end. But it was small for the colt—very small. He was used to having hundreds of thousands of acres that he could roam at will. Now he was down to just a few feet in any direction. That, in and of itself, took some getting used to.

But it was the humans that worried him most. They seemed to always come out of nowhere, and in the beginning there appeared to be so many of them. It was weeks before the colt realized there were really only a few humans coming around and it was just that they looked so different from one day to the next that he thought there were more than there actually were. They were an odd species, and one that took some getting used to because of how much their bodies seemed to change. When it was cold they looked bigger, and when it was warm they looked smaller. Their color would be different from one day to the next, as was their odor. Sometimes their odor would change from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. On bright, sunny days, their eyes were very big, and on cloudy days they were small. They seemed to be able to peel their hide off whenever they wanted, or put more hide on. The colt had never seen anything like it.

Another thing that worried him was when he first found himself in his pen there had been plenty for him to eat. It was in a big pile in the back of the pen near where the old gelding was eating in the pen next to him. But once that pile was gone, which took less than a day; a human started bringing his food around, usually just tossing it over the fence at the front of the pen, near where the tank for his water stood. At first, seeing the hay come flying over the fence would terrify him and send him panicking to the back of the pen. Food wasn’t supposed to fall from the sky. As the days went on, however, he not only got used to seeing the human with the hay, he actually started to look forward to seeing him. Each time the hay would arrive there would be just enough for him to eat, and about the time he would finish that pile and start getting hungry again, the human would show up and toss him another pile. It happened every day, twice a day, like clockwork.