1 Chapter 1

Bobby Estrada kicked a stone, then hopped, wincing at the pain. He came down on a sharper one and let out a yell. He was not used to worn-out shoes or much walking. These last few weeks, he had gone farther on foot than he had ever walked in all his nineteen years. Talk about dumb moves. He had racked up half a lifetime’s worth. Still, he was not going to go back. No fuckin’ way! Crawling back to his folks to admit he was wrong was not an option even if he didn’t have many others.

Three weeks ago, instead of enrolling at New Mexico Western in Silver City as he was supposed to, he had bought a beater Chevy and headed off to northern Arizona and the south rim of the Grand Canyon National Park. His behavior during his senior year in high school had cost him the car he would ordinarily have had before he left home for college, riding with a friend. One more screw-up would be one too many, and he’d probably end up disowned.

The ad had made it sound so great—working as a guide and wrangler while taking tourists down into the canyon or on shorter rim rides on the string of mules the concessionaire managed. Hey, he knew how to ride and stuff. What a great way to meet some cool people, maybe even some rich celeb looking for a protégée, and there’d be no tests, no studying, no dumb dorm rules, would there?

Wrong answer. They’d had rules out the ying-yang, and besides, they had almost laughed at him. The grizzled old cowboy type who seemed to be the head wrangler asked him only a few questions. His glib answers hadn’t hacked it.

“Go get some real experience, kid. And while you’re at it, adjust that attitude a bit. I wouldn’t hire you today to muck mule muffins out of the barn. Come back next year with a pair of well-used boots with shit on them instead of them fancy city shoes, and I might talk to ya.”

Bobby had been by turns indignant, crestfallen, and downright discouraged. When the folks found out he was not in school, he’d be in deep shit at best. He was already walking a shaky rim with too many scrapes and close calls with the law, although he had quit running with that wild gang of boys in Santa Fe. Maybe one point in his favor. Their new game of mobbing and doing hard drugs instead of MJ and booze scared even him. All that was now history. He was walking into a dubious future, along a narrow two-lane highway toward what might be his last best hope.

There had been another ad in that mule magazine, not as big or glitzy, but he read more into the simple words than some might.

“The Mule Men—we train and sell the best in trail-wise, mountain-trained saddle mules. If you can rough it, we might take you into some of the last real wilderness in the lower forty-eight to choose and then try out your mule. Orr Loveless and Jase Keller, Gila, New Mexico.”

That ranch was supposed to be somewhere up this road, if he could stand the hunger pains and battered feet long enough to get there. When the old car quit somewhere between Flagstaff and Tucson, he’d left it beside the road. Since then, he’d ridden his thumb. The way he felt now, he’d muck stables or just about anything for a couple of meals.

Some of Nana Estrada’s old sayings echoed in his mind. “Pride goes before destruction” and “How the mighty are fallen.” He hadn’t been exactly mighty, but he had been proud, arrogant, and basically a total asshole. Whether he could dig himself out of this hole he’d slipped into remained to be seen. For the moment, he’d settle for a few meals and a bed instead of a tattered and holey sleeping bag wherever he threw it down.

Fifteen minutes and a mile or so later, the road dipped into a cottonwood-shaded hollow. The leaves were starting to turn gold, and a few had dropped onto the pavement. That was when he saw the sign. It looked freshly painted with “The Mule Men” in frontier-style letters and an arrow pointing to the right off the road, down a steep incline to a level near that of the stream that chortled along under a bridge the highway crossed. He hoped there would be more sand than stones on that road.

* * * *

“Hey, Orr, we got company. Looks like a stray mutt just found his way up the road. Come take a look. You’ll laugh your ass off.”

Orr looked up at his partner’s shout. He let the foreleg of the mule whose hoof he was trimming slip from its clasp between his knees before he straightened with a muted groan. No wonder farriers always seemed to move like they were eighty-five. Those hunched postures could sure kill your back.