IN THE STILL-DARK morning of March 6, everything changed for the Hext family. Everything.

Dessa Hext and cousin Liza Cooper had returned home late Saturday evening from a trip to Fort Worth. As is usual, they had been rodeoing, and the trailer full of horses they hauled had to be unloaded and fed before they could get some sleep.

“We put all the horses up, like normal,” said Dessa, “and went home to bed. At 4:45, I woke up to my mom screaming. ‘Get up,’ she said. ‘The barn is on fire.’”

Still half asleep, they headed for the barn on the Bill Hext Ranch about 3 miles away. “It felt like a dream,” Dessa said, “until we were driving over the hill, and I saw the flames and the smoke and the firetrucks. That’s when my heart sank. That’s when I knew it was real.”

Bill Hext is the patriarch of this rodeo family, and the tough-loving grandfather of Dessa and Liza. “He and my grandma are probably our two biggest supporters,” Dessa said. “They do everything for us. They’re the first to say, ‘OK, don’t worry. We’ll get it.’”

“They never let us down,” Liza said.  

BILL AND VIRGINIA'S RANCH is located just east of Glazier, off of US 60. The terrain is mostly flat and treeless. The kind of country where you can watch your dog run away forever, as a local cowboy likes to say, only half-joking.

Just the other side of the highway lies the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks. A crew member on a passing train had had no trouble—in the empty pitch dark—spotting the flames. He had reported it to the Hemphill County Sheriff’s Office, and within minutes, firefighters from Canadian, Locust Grove, Lipscomb, and Higgins had all converged on the scene. 

There was nothing any of them could do, though, except contain the damage.

In the home upwind from the barn, Dessa’s grandparents were unaware of the danger, until something—the lights of emergency vehicles, the thin wail of approaching sirens—woke them. 

“My grandma called my mom and said, ‘There’s flashing lights here and we don’t know what’s going on.’ When she walked through the house and saw the fire, she just started screaming.”

Dessa and Sanja arrived quickly and made a run for the barn. Bill stopped them, saying, “You couldn’t save anything.”

“I broke down,” Dessa said. “I went numb and started screaming at the top of my lungs.”

ShanTil Hext  and her daughter, Liza, had awakened to the news that the barn was on fire. By the time they arrived, 25 minutes later, it had burned to ashes. Everything was gone.

There was an apartment on top, Sanja said, and it just collapsed. There were six horses inside that barn. All were lost.

“One of them was what you would call ‘my heart horse,’” Dessa said. “One in a million.”

WE WERE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION at The Record office, where Sanja and ShanTil and their daughters had agreed to join friend and fellow barrel racer, Tamara Reinhardt, for an interview. We’d assembled in the middle room around a small dining table. I set a box of Kleenex in the middle of it, and started the recorder.

“We’re going to talk about a sad thing that happened,” I began, “and then we’re going to talk about the good things that came out of it. Let’s talk first about the sad thing and get that out of the way.”

We are all eyeing the box of Kleenex.

I ask Dessa how long she had had her heart horse, Leading Code. “Tamara actually helped my sister, Chaley, train him when we bought him,” she said.

Chaley had bought Code when she was only 8 or 9, Tamara explained. “He was a plain bay, no white on him, nothing that would catch your attention,” she said. “Yeah, she raised her hand and bid on him. It was just a magical opportunity for a family to get such a nice horse and start riding fast, fast horses at a very young age.”

Chaley eventually passed Code down to Dessa. “Me and him clicked so well,” Dessa said. “It was insane. He ran and took me so many places, won so many things.”

Liza got to ride Code once at a rodeo. “I was kinda’ scared,” Dessa said. “I don’t know if he’s gonna’ run off or throw her off, but he loped the pasture with her and took care of her. I don’t know what made him think he had to do that.”

“I just kind of threw her on, and said, ‘Kick, Liza, kick!’”

They all began to laugh—and the tears flowed. “One in a million,” Dessa said. 

“I often got told, ‘Mom, you love that horse more than you love us,’” Sanja said. “There was a lot of truth to that.” 

Code was gone, though. They had had him for 11 years.

LIZA IS ONLY 9 YEARS OLD, but already a veteran of the arena, having started riding at the age of 2. She entered junior rodeos on a horse named Hatch, alongside Dessa and Chaley. But for the last year and a half, she had ridden Gunner. 

“We called him Gunner,” she said, “but his registered name was Wrangler Biankus.”

Liza had already qualified on Gunner in barrel races in both Vegas and Amarillo. “He was just amazing, Tamara said. “He was older. He had been successful for another teenage girl. They were very fortunate to find him…”

“We were just starting out,” Liza admitted, “but we were really close.”

“If he bit Liza before she ran,” Sanja said, “you knew you were gonna’ do good. And if he bit her on the shoulder, it was game on!”

“Manners are never a requirement when you’re on the ground,” Tamara said. “They come with an attitude. They just do.”

“You learn to love their quirks,” Sanja said. “Even more when they’re gone.”

Gunner died in the fire, too. In fact, Liza and Dessa lost not only their barrel horses, but their cutting horses, too. Dessa had only two weeks to find another horse before her first high school rodeo was scheduled. 

What happened next was more than a miracle.

TAMARA REINHARDT IS well-known in the barrel horse world. Or, as Dessa explained, “She has very nice horses and is very well-respected. Every time you go to a barrel race, and Tamara is there, [you’d think], ‘Tamara is about to win. Why did we come?’”

So when Tamara called Dessa’s mother a couple of days after the fire and said, “I have Flair, and Dessa needs a horse,” everything changed again. 

“She’s more than welcome to ride Flair,” Dessa remembers Tamara saying. 

“Oh, my gosh,” she thought. “There’s no way.”

Tamara did more than just make the offer. She was going to a barrel race that weekend and wanted Dessa to come and ride Flair, “just to see how everything worked out.”

Tamara calls him Flair, but her gelding’s registered name is Imareddie Ta Fly. He has proven to be a reliable stand-in for her already famous mare, Yessir Imareddie. So reliable, in fact, that when her mare got sick before she was scheduled to run in the Oklahoma National Barrel Horse Association’s state finals last summer, Flair’s number got called. 

Reinhardt and Flair placed second in the finals and picked up both the Senior Champion—out of a field of 56 contestants—and the Open Reserve Champion Awards. “My gelding,” she reported, proudly, “made four beautiful, consistent runs, and won a check with every run. Mr. Consistent.”

Dessa accepted Tamara’s invitation to “see how he feels,”  and the first test came a couple of days later, on a cold, blustery day, riding in pasture sagebrush and sand. 

“Don’t pull up,” Tamara told her young protégé, as she mounted Flair. “He might run out from under you, but don’t pull on him.”

“We just went to her little dirt arena, and I loped circles, and I think we could all tell I was a nervous wreck,” Dessa said. “Flair was kind of wondering, ‘Who is this? I mean, what is she doing?’”

“I just rode him out there for a while and got more comfortable, and Tamara said, ‘OK, you can cruise him through.’”

“When she told me that he’s fast, you might fall off, I thought she was kinda’ joking,” Dessa said. “But he is. He just takes off out from under you. And honestly, I thought I was going to fall.”

And what happened? The next Saturday morning, we left really early to go to Scott City, Kansas,” Dessa said. “And I ended up winning the barrel race both days!”

“We were both in tears,” she said. “It was insane.”

ANYONE WHO KNOWS TAMARA REINHARDT knows there’s not one competitive bone in her body. Nope. Not one. They’re all competitive. 

“I didn’t take a horse to enter,” she said, “because I kind of joked…if I take one to enter, I will want to outrun her. And that’s not the purpose of this trip.”

Reinhardt had a reason for choosing the Kansas event. “We were four hours from home,” she said. “Nobody knew her. Nobody up there really knew what had happened the Sunday before. I felt like she wouldn’t have to answer questions. She wouldn’t have to be emotionally upset all weekend, with people offering condolences.”

When she explained to her friends there that she wasn’t running—that she was there with a young girl, and she was competing on Flair—they all were astonished. “Are you selling him?” they asked.

“So the concept that you would let somebody ride…oh, no, that’s not done. No, it’s not done,” Tamara said. “But I didn’t realize it was so uncommon until we went up there.”

“He’s not for sale, and we’re just going to see what happens,” she told her friends. “When we left there, people were praying for Dessa, and praying for Flair.”

How did it go—that first competitive ride on Flair? “She rode him so beautifully,” Tamara said, “and almost set an arena record. That’s how well she rode him.”

“She won the first day,” Tamara said, “but I’m kind of like, ‘But Dessa, he’ll be faster tomorrow.’ And her eyes got kinda’ big. To have a horse feel like he’s gonna’ explode out from underneath you, if you’re not hanging on to the saddle horn…”

“You’re going out the back,” said Sanja, laughing.

“HE CAN’T FILL CODE’S SHOES,” Tamara said, “but my biggest concern was that he would disappoint the family.” 

Tamara told Dessa that day, “Whatever effort you get out of him, don’t go back to that stall and let him know you’re disappointed…because he’s that sensitive.”

And how would he know? I wondered.

“Oh, your posture, the tone of your voice. How you flip that lead rope. How you bang the buckets around. How you slam the stall door. Oh, yeah, there’s ways. How you make a phone call, or your texting speed…just, no.”

They know?

“Oh, my gosh. They know. Him times 10, times 10…he would know.”

So, Dessa, how did that first ride in competition feel?

“I was just so focused on doing the right thing and not messing up, I don’t really know,” she said. “I mean, I enjoyed it…but then afterward, when I ran out of the arena and they said my time, I just broke down into tears.”

“And Tamara was walking. She said, ‘Just go to the trailer.’ We were both crying. She said, ‘Just go to the trailer.’”

Did it feel like something you had done? Or like something the horse had done? Or the two of you had done it together?

“I feel like it was more him, and me just holding on,” Dessa said.

Powerful horse.

“Very powerful, yes.”

And fast. 

“Yes.”

But it clicked. 

“It clicked really fast.”

How about the second ride?

“I guess I wasn’t expecting more,” Dessa said. “I was expecting more of myself. To ride him better.”

Whatever she was expecting, the second run was half a second faster. 

“Tamera told me that the arena record is 14.03,” Dessa said. “OK. Cool, I guess.”

Then Tamera told Dessa she had run 14.03. “Whoa, we actually did that. And that’s when I went to Tamara, and she said, ‘Just get to the trailer.’ I was crying. She was crying.”

SO, LIZA, WHAT HAVE YOU learned from all of this?

Liza doesn’t even hesitate. 

“Don’t take anything for granted,” she says. “Because I didn’t really get to spend that much time [with Gunner], and every time I came out at the arena, I know I was either disappointed about what I did or disappointed about what he did.”

“And what I’ve learned is, just don’t take anything for granted.”

Nine years old. I checked again.

Still looking for that horse?

“Yes, ma’am,” Liza said. 

“We’ve got a unicorn out there somewhere,” ShanTil said. “We just got to snag him.”

I’m betting that horse is looking for you, too.

“Bet you’re right,” Liza said, so quiet it was like she was talking to herself.

“The whole point of this,” ShanTil said, looking squarely at Tamara, “is she is an angel. Unless you’re in the rodeo world, you do not know what this woman has done for our family, to heal our family. And she is above and beyond anything that anybody would have done for Dessa and for us.”

“I ride a horse by Flair to help her get in the arena,” she said, “and when Dessa runs, the rush I feel when she runs…it has been healing.”

“There is a verse,” said Tamara. “It is Hebrews 13:16. It is about sharing. And sharing is not the lesson I learned growing up. But it is so valuable in this.”

“I’ve tried to figure out the definition, the difference between borrow and share, and it’s kind of  difficult," Tamara concluded. “But I’ve never considered that they borrowed, I’ve considered that she and I have shared him, [and] that by her taking him, it has only made him better, because they’ve exposed him to things that I would not have exposed him to.”

“People who have experienced something like this don’t need you to say thoughts and prayers—they need you to step up and help them,” she said. “And that, for me, has been, you know, a softening of my heart, as well. That if there is a situation that presents itself, and this one did, that maybe you should do that thing that other people can’t.” 

HEBREWS 13:16. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.