“They sound like worthless fellows to me. What was that other name you mentioned?” he said.

“Clete had a bad period in his life and got mixed up with some gamblers in Vegas and Tahoe. One of them was Sally Dio.”

“You talking about the Dio family out of Galveston?”

Oops.

“That’s the bunch,” I replied.

“They weren’t gamblers, they were pimps. They ran all the whorehouses. Clete worked for them?”

“For a while. They held his hand in a car door and slammed the door on it,” I said.

Albert set his boot on the bottom rail of the fence and gazed out at the pasture. His wife had died of Parkinson’s three years past, and he had no children. His whole life now consisted of his ranch in the valley and another horse ranch he operated on the far side of the mountain. I wondered how a man of his extreme passions lived by himself. I wondered if sometimes his private thoughts almost drove him mad. “If those fellows come back around, send them up to the house,” he said.

Not a good idea, I thought.

“Are you hearing me, Dave?” he said.

“You got it, Albert,” I said.

“Look at the horses out there in the grass. You know a more beautiful place anywhere?” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if a man tried to take this from me.”

I’M NOT SURE I believe in karma, but as one looks back over the aggregate of his experience, it seems hard to deny the patterns of intersection that seem to be at work in our lives, in the same way it would be foolish to say that the attraction of metal filings to a magnet’s surface is a result of coincidence.

On Saturday morning Molly and Albert drove into Missoula to buy groceries at the Costco on the edge of town. They stopped on the way home to pick up a new Circle Y saddle Albert had ordered from the tack shop in the back of the Cenex.