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plaintive note in his voice, “You be by tomorrow, son?”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “I’ll stop in.”
    I left then, walking home in the soft night. I decided, at least for a while, to forget about Howard and his revelation of being a youthful bandit. Like Nora had said, the old man was getting along. He wasn’t just getting hard of hearing; he was getting hard of remembering too. I walked along, looking forward to playing with my son. But I was looking forward even more to playing with his mama a little later on.
    I was a simple man; it didn’t take much to make me happy, especially if it came in a package of goods like Nora.

CHAPTER 2
    I didn’t wait until the afternoon to go by and see Howard. Instead I dropped in mid-morning when I knew there was no one else around. I knew Ben was out with the horse herd and of course Norris had gone to his office in town. I wanted to get the business with Howard over with so I could spend the balance of the day surveying the herds with Harley. I had decided to sell all the crossbred steers over the age of four. I knew we’d have plenty of fives, and there ought to be a goodly number of sixes according to my books, and a couple of hundred sevens and some scattered eights. I figured the numbers would run to somewhere around eleven hundred head, and at an average price of ninety dollars a cow, that ought to give Norris some healthy money to buy Treasury bonds with. I had debated about marketing the fours also, which would have been about another thousand head, but I’d decided to hold them back for the spring market in anticipation of a better price. Of course the price could go down just as easily as it could go up. But that was ranching; there wasn’t that much difference between it and rolling the dice for a living, except ranching wasn’t against the law. That is, so long as you were ranching your own cattle.
    I found Howard out on the big front porch taking the sun and having a cup of coffee. Somebody had brought him out his rocking chair and he was sitting there, looking content, looking out over the vast cattle business he’d started and mostly built.
    I rode up, dismounted, and dropped my reins on the ground. All our horses ground-reined. If they didn’t think they were as securely tied when those reins were hanging on the ground as if they were snubbed to a tree then they were on their way to the auction block. A rider in a hurry didn’t have time to hunt up a hitching post when he was working cattle or some such. Ben had strict requirements for a Half-Moon horse, and they either made the grade or got sold to somebody that didn’t expect as much out of an animal he might spend most of his day with.
    I made my way up on the porch and sat down in a wicker chair next to Howard. I took note that he was wearing his boots, which I took as a good sign that he was not only feeling better, but might be thinking better about his request of the day before. I said, “Well, Howard, it appears you’ve looked the place over. You going to buy it?”
    He was chewing tobacco. He made a futile effort to spit off the porch, and only managed to put a brown splotch on the white railing. He said, “Place looks run-down. Don’t know who’s been bossing it but it appears they ain’t been steady on the job.”
    â€œThat the way you see it, huh? Think you could do better?”
    â€œSon, I learnt a long time ago they wasn’t nothin’ educational about getting kicked twice by the same mule. First time this particular mule kicked me, I found me the first fool I could to go back in the barn and get him harnessed up.”
    I lit a cigarillo. “Well, I always wondered what I was. Now I know. Just something for a mule to kick.”
    He looked over at me. “You thought anymore on what we talked about?”
    I took a moment answering, drawing in a lungful of smoke and then slowly blowing it out.