Horses in Love, continued ...

"Gee, Charlie, I don't understand why you always gripe about me coming here." I tossed my long, brown hair. "I've bought dozens of horses, and have I ever complained? Am I like your other customers who get mad just because they discovered they bought a lame horse here?"

"Yeah, but you're always bothering the front office."

"So I do my homework and always get a horse that I make money on."

"And you're damn fool enough to get in the pens with those horses. I ought to tell the wranglers to throw you out. You're going to get killed one of these days."

"When I get in the pens I wear a riding helmet, leather jacket and gloves. That's more than your wranglers have sense to wear."

I had met too many broke down cowboys. They'd tell me of the days when they used to throw a saddle on a horse green right off the range and hang on while it bucked itself out. Sure, most anyone can break a horse within days. Then sooner or later a cowboy would get in a wreck that the emergency room couldn't patch up too well.

Yet they downright boasted about this ruptured spleen, that broken ankle, the uncle who died of a saddle horn through the diaphragm...

I told myself it won't be me. I had already gotten more cautious than I was as a 7-year-old kid in West Texas, galloping over lava flows and through groves of oaks. I had herded cattle for play when I thought the neighboring rancher wouldn't catch me.

I turned from Charlie to go through the brand book. The drawing of the brand of the tiger striped herd appeared next to a half-legible typewritten entry. These ponies came from near Farmington, NM. Navajo country!

Perhaps those ponies carried the blood of the horses of the Conquistadors.

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