The mother of Troy held the white envelope on her lap through the whole announcement of the next event, and when the clown in the barrel finished his joke, she turned it over and read the name of the bank printed on the flap. I am Hank Mueller, eighty years old, and I sat on a bleacher in Cheyenne with a push broom across my knees and my granddaughter being cheered in the arena below. “Hank,” said the mother of Troy, whose name was Lorna, “what is in the other envelope?” “The reason I swept the stands,” I said, “is so you would be sitting here when you read it.”
She slit it open with a thumbnail. Inside was a notice from the First Wyoming Bank. A draft for thirty five thousand dollars, the price of the horse, had been presented that very morning by a trader in Torrington, drawn on an account of Hank Mueller, signed by Troy. The bank had called me at seven. I had told them to let it pass and to photograph the man. Under the notice was a letter from the lawyer in Denver confirming the sale of the Mueller Ranch, twelve million, six hundred thousand dollars, and a second page, a list of every horse that had left my barn in three years.
The list had eleven names. Troy had sold eleven of my horses, one by one, in the middle of the night, to buyers in three states, and had told me each time that a mare had gone lame or a gelding had been put down. Becky read the page over the shoulder of Lorna. “The bay gelding,” she whispered. “You told me he had colic.” Down in the arena, my granddaughter circled with her flag. Troy sat on the other side of Becky holding a beer and staring at his boots. The music from the loudspeaker was a waltz.
A registration paper set on a rodeo bench gave one old rancher the grand finale to bring his son in law back to his family in Cheyenne.
I gave my terms in a low voice, so that only the family heard. “Troy, you will not say a word tonight, because that girl down there is the happiest she has ever been, and I will not have you spoil it. Tomorrow morning you will bring back what you can, and you will tell Becky the rest. The thirty five thousand dollars will be torn up. You will go to the clinic in Cheyenne on Monday, where the whiskey in the coffee can be cured. If you do all that, I will say nothing to the sheriff.”
The tears of Becky were falling onto the page, and she did not wipe them. “Troy, I have been waiting for you to tell me for three years,” she said. “I smelled it on you every morning. I told myself it was the stress of the job.” Troy raised his face. It was gray, and his chin shook like a child. “Hank, I did not mean to sell Sunday,” he said. “I meant to find the money before the rodeo was over. I swear to God I meant to.” He broke, there in the bleachers, in front of three hundred strangers.
Then the worst in him made one last run. Troy snatched the list of horses and the registration out of the hands of his mother, leaped down the bleacher steps three at a time, and bolted along the rail toward the stock gate, intending to disappear into the parking lot. He got no farther than the end of the aisle. Through the gate, in a line, came the court of the rodeo queen, six girls in sashes and silver hats on horseback, riding in to line up for the grand finale. The lead rider, my granddaughter, drew her mare across the aisle and stopped.
Troy ran into the shoulder of Sunday, who tossed her head and blew in his face. The five other horses closed the aisle like a gate. Kaylee, sitting very straight under her crown, leaned down from the saddle and held out her gloved hand. Troy, trembling, put the papers into it. She folded them in half, tucked them into her sash, and turned the mare in a slow circle for the crowd, who thought it was part of the show and roared. Troy covered his face. Becky stepped down the steps and stood beside him.
The consequences were as I had promised. Troy entered the clinic in Cheyenne on Monday morning and finished sixty days later. Of the eleven horses, we recovered seven, and the buyers of the other four were repaid out of my pocket. The twelve million, six hundred thousand dollars from the ranch I placed in a trust for Kaylee and the grandchildren. I kept a small house on the Laramie River and the sorrel mare Sunday, who is registered, this time, to the girl who rode her.
In the name of my wife Ellen, who passed in 2015, I started the Ellen Mueller Fund. It pays for rodeo scholarships for young riders and for treatment for ranch families struggling with drink, in Platte, Goshen and Laramie counties. In the first year we sent twenty three young people to college rodeo programs and placed thirty seven in treatment. One was a ranch hand from Torrington who had been drinking alone for twelve winters and who now teaches roping to children on Saturdays.
This past July, at Frontier Days, I took a seat in the family section and Troy, eight months sober and sunburned, sat down beside me with two paper cups of lemonade. Becky was on his other side. In the arena, Kaylee, a college freshman, was handing the crown to the next queen. Troy took the broom out of my hands, which I still carried out of stubbornness. He laid it across his own knees. “Pops,” he said, “let me.” I looked at him a long while. “Go on, son,” I said. “Clean up the stands.”
