“You might as well come in on a more regular basis,” Firth said. “You're here all the time anyway. You can sweep out and run the counter here so I can take a nap. I'd guess you know my stock better than I do by now. You could tote water up from the spring as well. I'd pay you some money as well as the canned goods.”

The customers liked Tom well enough. He wasn't shy and shifty-eyed like most boys his age, and he didn't smirk over jokes he silently told himself. Instead, he looked customers in the eye, smiled the great smile, and, with surprising speed, began to call them by name. More and more, Tom watched the store and handed out the mail while Firth attended to other business, usually his small herd of cattle. At the end of the week, Tom got three dollars and some canned goods. Firth let him take whatever he wanted, which was usually not much.

After one of Firth's steers had knocked him into a fence post, bruising his shoulder so badly he couldn't move his arm for two days, Tom suggested he could save Firth a lot of time and pain if he let Tom take the herd to graze with Will's up in the gulch.

“And what would this cost me?” Firth asked.

“What's fair?” Tom asked back. “I only want what's fair.”

“Another couple of dollars a week?”

Tom hesitated.

“And more canned goods,” Firth offered.

“Then that's what we'll do.”

Tom drove the little herd of twenty cattle back up the canyon and brought them in with the Power and Morgan herd. There was plenty of water and good grass, and the addition of the few cows didn't change that. Tom gave Will a dollar a week and brought him cans of potted meat, of which Will was overly fond. Tom was now, at sixteen, making three dollars a week. And it was easy work, except for hauling the water. Every day he took a string of burros three miles to Turley Springs, filled up ten-gallon kegs with spring water, and loaded them on the burros. Then they trudged three miles back.

“You take those burros back there to that spring empty, don't you?” This was a cowboy named Albee who came to the post office every week.

“I do,” Tom said. “That's where the water is.”

“That seems a waste, don't it? Taking those burros back there empty?”

“I don't know what I would take to Turley Springs, except kegs for the water.”

“Yep. That's right. You would have to find someone who wanted to send something up that way, wouldn't you?”

“I guess I would.”

A week later, Albee caught him again. “This here's your lucky day. I found you some folks that want to send stuff back to Turley Springs.”

“Who would that be, and what do they want sent back there?”