“We open in two weeks, Charlie.”

“What is that? Like a bank? You give out toasters and balloons and party hats?”

She smiled into the phone. For the past five months, he had done nothing but encourage, and it had been a long haul. In the course of a lifetime five months was nothing, but her working sixteen and eighteen hours a day made it seem like ten years. They had torn down small buildings, put up new sheds, altered cottages, put in ramps, built a swimming pool, sold the livestock for the most part, except for a handful of cows to give them milk and to amuse the kids. There had been therapists to hire, nurses to see, doctors to contact, and then inevitably there had been the traveling. Sam had flown to Denver to see the doctor who had first operated on her back, to Phoenix, to Los Angeles, and to San Francisco, and then finally to Dallas and Houston, and in each city she had seen the top orthopedic men. She had hired a secretary to travel with her, which made it easier for her and made it look more businesslike. She wanted to explain her program to the doctors, so that they would refer patients to heir, children who would spend four to six weeks on the ranch, learning to enjoy life again, to ride horses, to be with other children with similar disabilities, and to be independent of their parents and able to take care of themselves.

In her presentation she showed photographs of the ranch as it had been and architectural renderings of what it was going to be. She detailed the facilities and the plans for physical therapy, gave resumes of the staff and detailed references for herself. And everywhere she went, she got a warm reception, and the doctors were impressed. All of them referred her to other doctors, most of them invited her to their homes to meet their wives and families. And in Houston she could even have had a date, but she declined graciously, and still won the doctor over. By the time she had finished her travels, she was certain that at least forty-seven doctors in six cities were going to refer patients to her ranch.

She still called it the Lord Ranch and she had kept on a handful of the old cowboys. Josh was, as promised, made the foreman, and she had even given him a bronze plaque to put on his front door, and he had been thrilled. But what she needed was a new breed of ranch hands, and she and Josh had picked them all carefully, for their attitudes about children, about handicaps, about horses. She didn't want anyone too old, or impatient, or ornery, or willing to take risks with the children or the horses. Just hiring the men had taken them almost two months. But she had a dozen ranch hands now, two of them from the old days, and the other ten all new. Her favorite among them was a broad-shouldered, handsome, redheaded, green-eyed “young'un,” as Josh called him, named Jeff. He was shy and closed up about his own life, but he was always willing to talk for hours about what they were going to do with the ranch. His references told her that at twenty-four he had been working on ranches since he was sixteen, and in eight years he had been on five ranches in three states. When she asked him why, he said only that he used to travel a lot with his father, but now he was on his own, and when she called the last two ranches he had worked at, they told her to do anything she had to to hang on to him, and if he didn't stay with her, send him back to them. So Jeff Pickett became assistant foreman, and Josh was pleased with his new team.

The only problem Sam had had for a while had been the money she needed, but it was amazing what could happen if you really wanted something badly enough, and she did. Caroline had left her a small sum of money, which had been absorbed by the alterations on the ranch within the first few weeks. After that the sale of the cattle had been a big help, and then Josh had come up with an idea to help her. They weren't going to need a lot of the fancier pieces of ranch equipment anymore, tools and tractors and trucks to transport the cattle, so she sold those and that paid for six new cottages and the swimming pool. After that she began to look into grants and discovered a wealth of untapped resources she hadn't considered, and once she'd gotten three of those, she applied for a loan at the bank.

Only a month before, Harvey had called her from Palm Springs, where he and Maggie were on vacation while he played golf in a tournament with some old friends, and he had asked if they could come to see her, and when they had, he had insisted that he wanted to invest fifty thousand dollars in her ranch. It was just over the final amount that she needed, and it was a godsend for her, as she told him when he wrote the check. And now she was going to be all right until they opened, and hopefully after that, within a year or two they'd be in the black and totally self-supporting. She didn't want to get rich on what she was doing. She just wanted to make enough money to be comfortable and support the ranch.

The opening date, as she now told Charlie, was June 7, and in a few days the rest of the physical therapists would be arriving, along with some new horses. The Jacuzzis were all installed, the pool looked terrific, the cabins were cozy, and she already had reservations for thirty-six kids over the next two months.

“When can I come?”

“I don't know, love, anytime you want. Or maybe, just give me a chance to catch my breath after we get started. I think I'm going to have my hands full for a while.”

As it turned out, that was the understatement of the century. She hadn't counted on being nearly as busy as she was. She was snowed under every morning, after they opened, with mountains of paperwork, letters from doctors, requests from parents, and she spent the entire afternoon teaching children, with Josh. One of the grants had gone toward having special saddles made for the children. They had fifty now, and had already applied for another grant for another fifty saddles, which Sam suspected they would soon need. Her patience with the children proved to be endless, as she taught them in groups of two or three. And invariably each time, after the initial terror as they sat there clutching the pommel, the horse would begin to walk as Josh led them, and the feeling of freedom and movement and actually walking would so completely overwhelm the children that they would squeal with glee. Sam never got over her own feeling of excitement and jubilation as she watched them, and time and again she watched Josh and the other cowboys stealthily brush away a tear.

All the children seemed to love her and, as the old ranch hands had more than two years before, they began calling her Palomino because of her sun-bleached fair hair. Suddenly everywhere on the ranch were shouts of “Palomino!… Palomino!” as she wheeled herself about, checking on children in therapy, at the pool, making their beds, or sweeping their rooms in the pretty little cottages. Sam kept an eye on them everywhere, and at night, in the main hall where everyone ate now, including Samantha, there were endless discussions about who would sit at her table, who would sit at her right or her left, and at the campfire, who would get to hold her hand. The oldest child there was a boy of sixteen, who had arrived surly and hostile from twelve operations over nineteen months, after injuring his spinal cord in a motorcycle accident in which his older brother had been killed. But after four weeks on the ranch he was like a new person. Redheaded Jeff had become his mentor, and the boy and he had become fast friends. The youngest was a little girl of seven, with enormous blue eyes, easy tears, and a lisp. Her name was Betty and she had been born with stumps instead of legs and she was still a little afraid of horses, but she was having a great time with the other kids.

Sometimes when she looked around herself in amazement, as the summer wore on and the numbers of children grew, Sam marveled at the fact that the handicaps didn't upset her. There had been a time in her life when only perfection seemed normal and when she wouldn't have known how to handle any of the problems that were now part of an ordinary day: children who wouldn't cooperate, artificial limbs that didn't fit, diapers for boys of fourteen, wheelchairs that got stuck, braces that broke. The mechanics of it all sometimes struck her as extraordinary, but most extraordinary of all was that it had become a way of life. And for a woman who had once longed for children, her prayers had been answered: by the end of August she had fifty-three. And now a new aspect had been added. They had bought a specially equipped van, with yet another grant, and made arrangements with the local school, so that after Labor Day the children who came to her, or stayed on, would go to school. For many of them it would be a reintroduction to schooling with normal children, and it was a good place for them to make the adjustment before they went back to their hometowns. There was almost nothing that Sam hadn't thought of, and when Charlie and Mellie came out in late August, they were absolutely stunned by what they saw.

“Has anyone done an article about you yet, Sam?” Charlie was enthralled as he watched a group of advanced senior riders cantering back from an afternoon on the hills. The children, for the most part, loved the horses, and even the horses had been specially picked by Sam and Josh for their docility and the steadiness that they showed.

But now, in answer to Charlie's question, she shook her head. “I don't want any publicity, Charlie.”

“Why not?” Living in the vortex of visibility in New York, he was surprised.

“I don't know. I like it this way, I guess. Nice and quiet. I don't want to show off. I just want to help the kids.”

“I'd say you're doing that.” He beamed at her as Mellie chased baby Sam down the road. “I've never seen kids look so happy. They love it, don't they?”