Back in the day, before mechanization, there was seemingly no shortage of hired hands. It was a time before the persistent admonition to stay in school if you don't want to dig ditches for a living had become dogma. But these things wouldn't have mattered to Teddy Walker anyway as he really didn't have a choice. From afar, the naïve person who knew only that Teddy Walker had lived and worked on ranches for a large part of his life might get the romantic notion that it had been all peaches and cream. They might erroneously equate rural solitude and nature with happiness. Granted, not all hired hands had a past like Teddy Walker's. There'd been good times, but they did not last. Their demise had left Teddy with a skepticism of what life held for him that he occasionally tempered with Olympia beer. So far, that approach to life had proven itself to be pretty much justified. And in spite of everything that had happened, life had been tolerable, until now. Damn the bad luck.