Chickens for company

The solitude and the wind were trying for a woman, and it was quite a domestic blessing when one day a cowboy rode in with three chickens in a sack. “No one can ever know how much pleasure and company they were to me,” Mrs. Goodnight once said. “They were something I could talk to; they would run to me when I called them and follow me everywhere I went. They knew me and tried to talk to me in their language. If there had been no outside danger, the loneliness would not have been bad.

Charles Goodnight Cowman and Plainsman by J. Evetts Haley