Page 39 of Trickster King

“You’re going all Texan on me again. Got tired of being prim and proper?”

“Damn straight, ma’am.”

My wife lost her tenuous grip on her mirth and laughed so hard I bet she cried. “Are you worried I’m going to be mad at you for getting your very own herd of Akhal-Tekes?”

“Maybe a little. But only a little. I’m more upset I’d been trying to stay out of bad fields and wandered into one.”

“We could probably identify every fungus-filled field in Texas if I sent you off to visit ranches. You’d go straight for the bad fields and roll in them.”

“I didn’t roll in this one. I just rode across it to fetch a horse.”

“You’ll probably be fine but tell Randy to keep an eye on you more than he usually does, okay?”

“I’ll ask my babysitters to make sure my lungs behave.”

“Good. What’s Eddie doing?”

“He’s helping the RPS agents treat the horses,” I admitted. “I’m staying out of it because I don’t want an entire herd of angry men and women accusing me of trying to get another infection.”

“Isn’t he supposed to be resting?”

I heaved a sigh.

“Well, that doesn’t sound promising. What’s going on?”

“Remember how I’d go to the ranches at three in the morning to visit with Eddie before work?”

“I do. You’d try so hard to slip out of bed without waking me, but you can’t seem to go without tucking me in, thus waking me up. Don’t stop that, by the way.”

I loved how she appreciated the little things. “This morning, right before six, he crawled all over me to get me up to take care of the cattle. Don’t be surprised when I stop at the RPS clinic.”

She sucked in a breath. “Your poor back. All right. It’s not hurt badly, is it?”

“It is deceptively in good shape, which is how I know trouble is lurking on the horizon, waiting to catch me off guard.”

“Ah.” As that had happened more times than I cared to think about, my wife joined me in sighing. “Which clinic?”

“Whichever one Randy and Geoff decide is best for my specific issue of the hour. I’m sure it’ll be fine. I just wanted to let you know a rambunctious child had bounced all over me and my back snapped, crackled, and popped in alarming ways without immediate pain.”

She muttered a few curses. “I give it three days before one of the RPS chiropractors is turning you into a living pretzel to fix that mess.”

“I’m betting one week and five days.”

“If you legitimately last one week and five days, I am going to take a day off, load you into my trailer, and pick you out three new cows. And if we need to get your cows imported from overseas, I’ll let you go pick one random cow as a pet. The pet rules apply.”

As most cattle ranchers burned through their livestock in two to four year cycles, I’d decided there would be rules regarding how my ranches operated. The dairy cows worked until they no longer produced excess milk, after which they were assigned a new job: diversifying breeding stock. If the cow couldn’t be bred due to being bad genetics, she entered one of two programs. She either went to pasture with the end goal of being slaughtered for the meat market or she became a pet.

The pets all lived at a ranch without a single bull in sight, and they were used to teach children and other ranchers about cattle care. In rare circumstances, I would put the pets to work to breed for a rancher who needed calf stock or dairy cows, bringing in the most diverse bulls I could find to salvage an operation falling on hard times.

“Can I get a fancy breed and have her live at the Dallas ranch?”

My wife snickered. “If the cow gets along with horses and doesn’t mind being with horses instead of other cows, you can keep her at the Dallas ranch, although I may insist you get two fancy cows if you do that. They’re herd animals, and we don’t want a sad cow moping around.”

“That’s fair. If not, I’ll just visit my pet on days off.”

That got her laughing in earnest. “We get days off?”

“I have been hinted at, rather severely, we need to start taking days off.”

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