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leans in the open door and takes out his cigarettes. He offers the pack to George and Margaret and when they refuse, he lights one for himself. Who’s working the ranch in your absence? he asks.
    Margaret glances over at her husband as if she hopes he’ll be the one to answer this question. When it’s plain that George doesn’t intend to speak, she says, We sold the ranch a few years back.
    But you were doing both, Nevelsen asks, law enforcement and running the ranch?
    So to speak, George replies. It was mostly Margaret kept it going. If it had been me alone working the place, even if I could have done it full-time, we’d have gone under long ago.
    Don’t listen to him, Mr. Nevelsen, Margaret says. For years he was working more hours than there were in a day and doing a damn good job at everything he turned his hand to.
    Running for sheriff, George says, was supposed to come second to running the ranch. I thought a regular paycheck from the county would give us a little breathing room.
    Jack Nevelsen blows a stream of smoke toward the jail cell’s low ceiling. I can imagine how well that worked.
    I don’t have to tell you, says George, law enforcement will take all you can give it and still ask for more.
    Same as ranching, says Margaret.
    George nods in agreement. Same as ranching. It was Margaret’s to work or lease or sell. Her people homesteaded that land. And she was her father’s top hand almost from the day she could sit on a horse.
    Margaret says, We made it work for a good many years. Damn near wore George down to the nub but we kept it going. But after our son died, we had his wife and son living with us. It was mostly for them we sold and moved to town. Thought she’d be better off with the company of people her own age.
    And that turned out to be Donnie Weboy, interjects Jack Nevelsen.
    That was Donnie. So you can see how that came back on us. But it was for the boy too. He could be closer to school, when the time came.
    George shakes a Lucky Strike out of his pack, scratches a match on the rough wall, and lights his own cigarette. She makes it sound all personal, he says. Our circumstances weren’t so far off from a hell of a lot of folks’. We had a run of hard years. The price of cattle kept going down. One drought year after another. I tried a little wheat farming and no sooner got started than we got hailed out.
    Sheriff Nevelsen says, It’s a wonder how anyone with a small spread makes a go of it in this part of the country.
    But some do, says George. When we finally sold, it felt like . . . I don’t know—
    Oh, hell, says Margaret. It was time. Past time.
    The cell door does not swing open or closed but slides on a steel track, and now Jack Nevelsen moves the door a few inches in one direction and then the other. How’d your boy die, if you don’t mind my asking?
    George and Margaret exchange the look that so often passes between husbands and wives: Are you going to tell this or am I?
    But was there ever any doubt?
    Margaret Blackledge sits down on the cot before shebegins. She braces her chin in her hand as if she knows that telling this story will bring more than the usual vibration to her voice.
    Thrown from a horse, of all things, and this was a boy who practically grew up in the saddle. Who was happier in the company of horses than of children his own age. And who loved saddles and tack the way some boys loved their toy soldiers. James kept hoping something would change so he could come back to the ranch for good, but that hadn’t worked out. So he was driving a truck for a local fuel oil company, and he and Lorna and their little boy were living in town. But they visited often enough and on this particular day, early August it was, they’d come out for a home-cooked Sunday supper. After, while we were all sitting outside digesting our meal, James decided he’d ride the circuit he’d ridden so often over the years—out to Dollar Butte and back again. Who knows what happened out