Kinda slow out here so I thought I'd share a really good story I found recently...a true story at that.
It's rather long so I'll just post some excerpts to set the scene and you can visit the link to read in full....

""On the morning of March 1, Todd Lindley, a forty-year-old science and operations officer with the National Weather Service, walked into his office in Norman, Oklahoma, and sat down in front of his four computer screens. Lindley specializes in weather on the southern Great Plains, a mostly flat five-hundred-mile expanse that runs from Kansas to just below the Panhandle of Texas. That morning, on one of the screens, he noticed a storm system that meteorologists call a “midlatitude cyclone,” a pinwheel of clouds spinning counterclockwise over the open waters of the Pacific, two thousand miles away. Lindley wheeled his chair closer to that screen and typed a few commands on the keyboard. The computer projected that the midlatitude cyclone would reach the northwestern coastline of the United States by March 3, head toward the Rocky Mountains, and swoop down on to the southern Great Plains on March 6, bringing with it wind gusts of at least 50 miles an hour.
Lindley stared at his screen for several seconds. Then he murmured a single word. “Fire.”

I GUESS YOU KNOW WHAT A STRONG WIND DOES TO A FIRE. IN DRY WEATHER, IT WILL TURN A LITTLE FIRE INTO A ROARING MONSTER...A ROARING, LEAPING, HISSING MONSTER.


As Lindley was sending his email, Cody Crockett, a twenty-year-old cowboy, was at work on the nine-thousand-acre Franklin Ranch, seventy or so miles northeast of Amarillo. The Franklin is one of the more famous ranches in the eastern Panhandle. Purchased in 1936 by Oliver Morris Franklin, the inventor of the vaccine for blackleg, a virulent disease that kills cattle, the ranch is now owned by three of his granddaughters (two of whom live in Amarillo, the other in Pampa), who tend to bring their families to visit on weekends and for vacations. The Franklin is a beautiful spread, its main house and guest house nestled in a tree-lined draw, near a pond and a gurgling creek. There’s a swimming pool and a tennis court. Throughout the ranch, wildlife abounds: white-tailed deer, roadrunners, quail, doves, and wild turkey. In the distance, cattle quietly graze on pastures that stretch out like a vast sea.
Cody was as lean as a sapling, six-feet-one and 185 pounds. He lived in a two-bedroom foreman’s house about a half mile from the ranch headquarters. He was almost always up and dressed by sunrise. He’d down a bowl of cereal—he preferred an off-brand version of Lucky Charms—walk outside to feed the ranch’s horses, and then saddle one of the horses, load him into a trailer hooked to a flatbed pickup truck, and head for the pastures.
That morning, Cody drove to the Franklin’s north pastures so he could check on eight hundred steers that had been shipped to the ranch a couple of weeks earlier. Each of the steers weighed around 450 pounds, and Cody’s job was to have them fattened up to at least 750 pounds by October, when they would be shipped to a feed yard and then on to the slaughterhouse. He drove slowly through the pastures, blowing the truck’s horn to get the steers’ attention. Attached to the bed of his pickup was a large metal feeder that dumped pellets of high-protein cow cake on the ground for the steers to eat. At some point that morning he untrailered his horse and went “prowling,” as cowboys like to say. Whenever he saw a steer with its head down or ears drooping—signs of illness—he grabbed his long rope, made a loop, swung it into the air, fired it around the steer’s neck, dismounted, grabbed a medicine kit from his saddle bag, injected the steer with an antibiotic, and within minutes was back on his horse, prowling some more.


AT THAT MOMENT, IT WAS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE THAT SOMETHING AWFUL WAS ALREADY HEADED THE FRANKLIN'S WAY.""


Read in full here.

Wow!! The last sentence tug at my heart strings. What a tear jerker.

@Critter1211: It's a really good read.

@MrWalkSoftly: yes, i agree