-- Eleven years ago, Larry Wayne Dixon Jr. was sentenced to 20 years' hard time for killing a man in a Mobile bar fight. But on a recent Wednesday at dawn, he was blazing across a pasture at the Farquhar State Cattle Ranch on a big brown quarter horse, his parries, feints and hollers moving a herd of recalcitrant cattle.

Out here on the low, lonesome hills of western Alabama, there is much to remind Dixon, 32, that he is a convict -- the unsavory food, the lack of privacy, the guards.

But there is also this: moments of hard work and hustle on the back of a good horse, the fresh sun spangling a denim sky, the thrill of the chase resonating in the muffled thud of hoofs on earth.


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