My little girl, boy, and I walk up to the gas station next to Adelo's General Store in Pecos for our hot coffee and hot chocolate this morning while I fill up our mid-sized SUV with $50 worth of unleaded. It's still so cold we can see our breath. I clasp my arms tight around myself, trying not to freeze, kids hanging off my elbows. They are wondering out loud if the hot chocolate machine is working.

Two old cowboys perch on a bench near the door. One very fat. One real thin.

I smile and say good morning.

The little one has turkey feathers sticking out of the band of his beat-up hat and a beaded leather vest that's red, green, and gold with only a memory of fringe. His black eyes shine and dart like a magpie's, above a slightly crooked and probably ages-ago broken nose, pock-marked face breaking into a smile of Copenhagen-yellowed teeth. "I sees me two pretty women a'comin," he exclaims. And up he leaps, making a great big deal out of trotting ahead of my children and me like a skinny-legged crane flapping its wings, to get the door, which he opens with a painfully-thin bow and the grandiose swoop of his hat, strands of greasy dark hair trailing down over his forehead.

"Thank you," I say. My 9-year-old daughter J. clings a little more tightly to my sleeve, red cheeked, eyes down, grinning, speechless.

Inside the store, 8-year-old C. says, "Mom, that man was weird." He rolls his eyes around and around.

"No," I say, nodding to the cowboy who's now stiltwalking, hitching up his Wrangler jeans, across the parking lot towards his truck with his friend. "That's just being a gentleman."