The phone was ringing when I opened the door. “Howdy,” Billy Ray said when I picked it up. “Guess where I am.”

“In Wyoming?” I said. Billy Ray was a rancher from Laramie I’d gone out with a while back when I was researching line dancing.

“In Montana,” he said. “Halfway between Lodge Grass and Billings.” Which meant he was calling me on his cellular phone. “I’m on my way to look at some Targhees,” he said. “They’re the hottest thing going.”

I assumed they were also cows. During my line dancing phase, the hottest thing going had been Aberdeen Longhorns. Billy Ray is a very nice guy and a walking compendium of country-western fads. Two birds with one stone.

“I’m going to be in Denver this Saturday,” he said through the stutter that meant his cellular phone was starting to get out of range. “For a seminar on computerized ranching.”

I wondered idly what its acronym would be. Computerized Operational Wrangling?

“So I wondered if we could grab us some dinner. There’s a new prairie place in Boulder.”

And prairie was the latest thing in cuisine. “Sorry,” I said, looking at the trash can on my lab table. “I’ve had a setback. I’m going to have to work this weekend.”

“You should just feed everything onto your computer and let it do the work. I’ve got my whole ranch on my PC.”

“I know,” I said, wishing it were that simple.

“You need to get yourself one of those text scanners,” Billy Ray said, the hum becoming more insistent. “That way you don’t even have to type it in.”

I wondered if a text scanner could read crumpled.

The hum was becoming a crackle. “Well, maybe next time,” he sort of said, and passed into cellular oblivion.