The Horseman's Secret

I've just finished reading my third Jeannie Watt romance novel, The Horseman's Secret. I said my third, not Jeannie's third. Her third was The Brother Returns, a sequel to Horseman, which I read first followed by A Difficult Woman, her first published novel. Confusing, eh? Sorry. That's just the way my mind works.

How come I didn't read the two intertwined stories in sequence? I couldn't locate The Horseman's Secret. My daughter was kind enough to scout around for me until she found one at a Barnes and Noble. She mailed it and I received it yesterday, opened the box and began reading.

I wasn't at all disappointed that I read it out of sequence. Both The Brother Returns and The Horseman's Secret are stand-alone novels. No prior knowledge of the story lines is needed for the full enjoyment of either.

However, since I already knew the horseman's secret, I took a different tack when I read the book. At first, I scanned through it, and then I decided to read it more thoroughly not for the romance between the two main characters, Regan Flynn and Will Bishop, but for the atmosphere that Jeannie Watt so eloquently and familiarly weaves into her stories.

As luck would have it, I fell in love with one of the characters despite my initial resolution. A special horse captured my attention as soon as it came into the story, a horse named Skitters, so called for its tendency to jump and buck unexpectedly. Will Bishop bought Skitters for his daughter Kylie, but soon realized that the horse wasn't suitable for her. He resolved to get rid of Skitters, but Kylie had already fallen in love with it. So here we have Will conflicted between Kylie's happiness and her safety. The ending to Skitter's story is just absolutely pluperfect. If you want to know what it is, you'll have to beg, borrow, or buy the book.

While reading for cowboy atmosphere, a couple of terms popped up in the novel that brought back some old memories. One was Bluetick, as in a hound dog used in the South largely for hunting 'coons, raccoons. I wondered what the heck Nevadans used Blueticks for. Still do. Gotta do some research on it.

The other term Jeannie used was hay flake. At first that one puzzled me. Then I shifted into image mode and tried to visualize a hay flake. Was it loose hay stirred up in the wind and drifting to Earth like snoflakes? Obviously that wasn't it because Jeannie mentioned feeding a small horse one hay flake and a larger horse two snow flakes.

Then it came to me. A hay flake is a section of a bale of hay. When the wire holding a bale together is cut, the bale spreads apart much like an accordian. Those spread-out segments are hay flakes. I'd seen them as a kid.

None of this has much if anything to do with romance to most folks, but I'm reminded that the West and cowboys occupay a special place in the mythology of America. The American West is a romanticized vision of the founding myth of America, a solid, determined, indepentent individual braving the odds to make a new life in the West.

This vision is embodied in novels and stories and movies galore. My first exposure to the romantic West was the old Saturday afternoon Western. That was followed by the novels of Zane Grey.

Now, we have authors like Jeannie Watt presenting great romances set in the modern West. I'm eagerly awaiting her Cop on Loan scheduled for release in October 2008. I don't know anything at all about the book's plot or setting, but I've spent some time speculating. We'll see how close my thoughts are to the actual story. One thing I am almost certain about. It will be set in Nevada, a very special spot with cowboys and beautiful maidens galore. If she shifts the location elsewhere, I would be greatly surprised.

Okey, dokey, good reading.