I went downstairs from my office to meet Demi, Mal, and Wyanne. They had Jaina and Humphrey already cross-tied on the aisle.
“I grabbed them both for us,” Mal said from where he was grooming Jaina.
“Thanks, man. Sorry I got dragged into that phone call.”
Demi came in from the tack room with the paints in her hands. “So, we’re thinking that we need to braid their manes out of the way.”
“Makes sense.” I grabbed a brush and started to work on Humphrey.
“Is this door fine?” Wyanne asked, pointing at a stall door where she was about to tape a large poster of a horse.
“That’s good.” It didn’t matter much. “Where’d you get the poster?”
Demi grinned. “Amazon, where else?”
It was a nice one, with the outline of the horse and the bone structure visible. It was so damn convenient for a reference.
We groomed the horses together, then Demi used some sort of a chalky pen thing to outline the areas that needed to be painted on both of them while the rest of us started with the actual painting.
“Oh, remind me to grab the UV lights from the tack room before we get going,” Wyanne said when we were about halfway done.
“I’m impressed we remembered to paint the same side on each horse,” Mal deadpanned.
We laughed, because yeah, with how they were cross-tied nose to nose on the long aisle, we could’ve easily painted the opposite sides and then the whole thing wouldn’t have worked the way we trained them.
They’d run sort of around the broodmare barn that would be dark for the occasion, and then we could grab them and lead them back here with the unpainted side showing to the people and no one would see them in the dark. The crowd would be conveniently gathered on the road on the other side of the field they’d run across.
We’d made absolutely sure that there were no obstacles for the horses or for us for the sections we had to move with no light to guide us. It would be easy enough, it wasn’t pitch black anyway, and these two horses, well, they were the best and calmest ones and knew what to do.
Once we were almost done with the painting, Demi looked at me. “Hey, you go have something to eat while we finish this and they dry. Once you come back, you and Wy can walk them to the broodmare barn while Mal and I go to our kids.”
“Sounds good, thanks.” I glanced at Wyanne. “You coming?”
“Actually, sure. I could eat.”
We took an ATV to get closer to the food trucks faster.
It was barely opening time, but there were already people gathering around, parking for the trunk or treating, and as soon as we looked toward the long driveway, we could see a cloud of dust above it.
“I feel like this’ll be our biggest year,” Wy commented.
“Oh, totally. Fern’s social media marketing on the ranch side and tagging the town and such more seems to have done it.”
She grinned. “And our ghost horses.”
“Here’s hoping it’ll look as great as we think it will.”
We’d done a test run and it did look awesome, but who even knew what could go wrong. Even the calmest, best trained horses were still prey animals and could spook, for example.
I parked the ATV behind the barrier on the road to the barns where Tommy was hanging out to make sure nobody tried to go past it.
“Oh hey,” he said brightly, then his expression dimmed. “I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to help with the ghost horses stuff.”
Wyanne patted his shoulder and walked off to likely find her wife and/or their boyfriend who were supposed to come over, too.
I shook my head at Tommy. “You had other responsibilities off ranch, Tommy. It’s fine.” There’d been illness in the family or something like that. “Staying here is more than enough. Shit jobs, right?” I grinned.
He blushed lightly and looked around the folding chair and his travel mug on top of it where he’d be stationed until someone relieved him from it later. “Yeah.”
