Free From Here to There by Rain Trueax

try, I’ll find out. People can work about anywhere these days."
     Amos smiled again, shaking his head. "That mean I need a computer line up here?”
    “There are internet dishes that don’t even need a phone line. I will, of course, pay for it.”
    “I can't keep up with all this modern stuff." His tone grew more somber. "Not on ranching or nothing else. We don't live far enough in the woods. Progress keeps coming up and nailing me."
     Helene slipped on a leather jacket. With jeans and boots, she knew she looked like most of the other ranchers' wives she occasionally saw.
    "I'll be back before it’s time for dinner," she said as she headed out the door into the crisp air. Although fall had not yet come to the valley below, it had nipped the trees around the ranch house. She could feel that new crispness to the air, feel it in the crackling of the leaves underfoot. Change was in the air.
     
    #
     
     Stepping from his newly purchased, four-wheel drive truck, Phillip leaned against the cab, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he took a moment to look around. He had to admit to a sense of awe, a feeling new in his experience. Partly it came from the fact he was in Montana at all--something which still seemed a little insane to him--and partly at the beauty of the setting in which he stood.
    He had pulled the truck up in front of a brown, two-story ranch house. Encircled by porches, the home showed careful tending, even down to the frost blackened but weedless flower garden behind a white picket fence. The cottonwood and ash trees behind the house were in full fall colors, Yellow and brown leaves dropped at the faintest touch of the breeze.
     To the east timbered hills rose with a powerful upthrust, rugged, high mountains, a fitting backdrop for this pioneer ranch perched at their base. The air at this elevation was clear, almost painfully so; the sky a blue he didn't remembering seeing often in Boston, but then maybe he'd always been too busy to look up.
     He thought of Helene and her likely reaction at seeing him. He smiled sardonically. The bad penny returns. She wouldn't be the first who had thought it.
     Whatever her reaction, it wouldn't be a kiss. The last kiss he gave her had been intended to teach her a lesson, but he was afraid he was the one who'd learned the lesson as he'd been unable to get it out of his mind. He doubted he would be standing at the foot of her gate if he'd resisted that kiss. He definitely knew he would have slept better the last two weeks as he had wrestled with the decision of coming.
     He took a last, long drag on his cigarette before tossing it into the dirt to grind out with the toe of his boot.
     "Hey you!"
     Turning, Phillip looked toward the assortment of barns below the house. A man he didn't recognize was striding toward him, an irritated expression on what was visible of his face; his eyes nearly hidden by the battered brim of a cowboy hat. Phillip wondered if he'd incorrectly followed the primitive map Amos had drawn. The roads had wound back into the hills farther than he'd expected, and the wood-burned sign where private road turned off of county had no name, only a brand, which to Phillip's inexperienced eye had seemed might have indicated a Rocking H. Maybe not.
     Puffing by the time he got to him, the tall, skinny old man looked at him belligerently. "What yuh want, young fellow?"
      Got me cased as a city slicker, which he doesn't like and which is, of course, exactly what I am. "I'm looking for the Amos Hartz place."
     Before the old man could respond, Amos emerged from a large, log barn, a mammoth dog at his side and a broad grin on his face. "So you came," he said, reaching out to shake Phillip's hand.
     Phillip smiled. "I flew into Bozeman early this morning. This is quite a place you've got here."
     "Yeah, we like our little spread."
     Phillip looked a little uneasily at the big dog. Was the dog friendly or trying to decide where to take a bite? Phillip