In its prime, the Matador Hotel in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, hosted railroad barons, governors, foreign dignitaries, famous outlaws, and even a U.S. president. But by 1954, the Matador was a residence for those with nowhere else to go. Six men, who spent their young lives as cowboys in the Southwest, now gather at the Matador for weekly games of cribbage. One rainy afternoon, one of the men brings his ten-year-old grandson with him to the cribbage game. The boy has on his red straw cowboy hat, his cap gun, and wears his leather bullet belt with the silver-painted wooden bullets. They play cribbage and tell stories—and the boy listens while they pass down a way of life and western tradition that is quickly becoming extinct. Many years later, the boy looks back and remembers the stories he heard and the lessons he learned on that day when he became a Cowboy for a RainyAfternoon.
