"Why hello Annie," he said, smiling through his grey mustache.
"Hi Sam."
"Come for shells ennit? I told you you wouldn't make it with the two boxes."
"I needed the ride."
"I magine you did. Thomas showing up alright?"
"He's been real good."

Sam had bright blue eyes and wild white eyebrows. He was almost sixty years old but he was still a strong and upright man. He liked Annie Quinn for a lot of reasons, and Annie liked him back. He treated her with the same respect he gave the other ranch bosses but with an added tenderness that felt fatherly at times and other times like the recognition of a kindred spirit. Annie was not attuned to male attention and she would not have guessed that Sam had any other kind of affection for her. He was married to an Oglala girl who lived down on the reservation. Sam still looked after her and gave her money, he still loved her too, but he'd finally given up on the hope that she'd ever make him a wife and begun to acknowledge that the marriage was a way for her to look after her own family. The only thing that kept her in Sam's life was her need to pick up money every month and her sense that in return Sam could have her body when she came for it. Sam had stopped enjoying that trade the minute he realized what it was. There was no sense in trying to divorce and Sam just chalked the marriage up as a mistake resulting from loneliness. There were not many women in that part of the world.

Sam followed Annie to the front of the store where he kept the shells in a lock box behind the trading counter. He got three boxes of the .30-.30 cartridges out and opened all three of them and showed them to Annie.
"Sam," she said. "You ever have a day when it feels like you're missing something?"
""I feel like I'm missing something all the time," he said. "What are you missing?"
"I don't know. I woke up angry and I been all up and down since. Everywhere I go seems like I'm being spoken to and not getting the message."
"There ain't but one message that ever did me any good, Annie, and that's put one foot in front of the other and don't step in it when you can help it."
"Maybe I'm just worried about rounding up the stock."
"Maybe."
Sam looked Annie over, studied her face as she was fingering through the ammunition.
Annie looked up, and caught him studying her. She squinted at Sam.
"You figure I'd be better off if I didn't spend all our money shooting at nothing."
Sam smiled.
"I don't figure a damn thing Annie. I reckon you hit what you aim at."
"I'm just trying to get through the season. Some days I wake up and it feels like we aren't gonna make it. What is Noreen gonna do if we don't make it?"
"I speck you'll both manage alright," Sam said.

Sam watched Annie. Something in her eyes was saying she was lonely and Sam had seen the look before in a lot of faces. It was a dangerous look and one he had seen most often in the eyes of men who were deciding whether or not to break it all to pieces.
"If you all need me," Sam said. "I'll come down for a while. Dave can run the store alright. People don't hardly pay anyhow."
"I wouldn't have that," Annie said. "Thomas has two brothers he said would help with the rounding up. We'll do fine once we get the cattle in."
Sam nodded.
"Careful of Tom's brothers," he chuckled. "He's the reliable one in that family."
Annie smiled.
"You better give me some of that rose water for Noreen. She won't shut up if I don't bring her something back."
Sam took out two glass bottles from his medicine cabinet and poured some fluid from one to the other, which he stopped with a whittled cork and then wrapped in butcher paper. He worked slowly and without any wasted movements. Annie watched him as he worked.
"Sam, I appreciate you acting fatherly toward me. I don't want to waste on asking your help before I need it."
Sam finished wrapping the package up.
"It's on offer," he said.

Annie took her things in her arms and walked outside and past the men on the bench out front. Spider was lying on his side in the thick dusty shade at the side of the store.
"You're the only damn horse that'll lay on his side with saddle bags on," she said.
Spider stood and up and shook himself off. Annie put her parcels down and adjusted the saddle, then put her boxes of cartridges and her parcel away in the saddlebags. She started to get on Spider but she could not bring herself to throw her leg over the horse.

"Hell," she said.
She tied Spider to the hitching post so he would not lie down and she walked back up the three wood slat steps onto the porch. Sam had taken a place next to the other men.