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When we were young, the path to success was clear.

Smooth as the straightaway at the Kentucky Derby, it would vault us over the finish line, into the winner’s circle. Trophies. Roses. Champagne.

How clear that path appeared at Henson Farms in 1999, after a moneyed landowner went to his reward, leaving 176 acres of prime real estate to the trustees.

They sold, post haste, to a developer with plans for million-dollar Tuscan villas and a stone entry promising “the charm of rural living close to town.”

And they all lived profitably ever after. Surely, they did.

But we’re older now, and we know that rose-colored villas with lopsided mortgages sometimes end up in the weeds. And that carving up a 176-acre spread like a goose is invariably at the expense of a golden egg.

In this case, the golden egg was Henson Farms itself: namesake of a horseback riding school run for years by Cammie Bell and her daughter Tami Batts.

An affable, old-Greensboro family, they hosted Special Olympics and played benefactor to the Oak Ridge Horse Show. They also brought home blue ribbons from international horse shows to the pastures of Summerfield.

Abruptly losing their longtime lease, the family was about to embark on a road less traveled. Moving hay barns, dismantling an arena, steel girder by steel girder, they relocated every last dog and cat.

And, of course, the horses: There were 51, including a blind Appaloosa named Zeke, moved trailer by trailer — “like the Beverly Hillbillies,” Batts recalls — to a 95-acre cattle farm south of Greensboro.

The way to Fellowship Farm would be neither straight nor smooth, but rutted as the gullies that heavy spring rains leave in the horse trails.

Then again, there is something to be said for leaving the beaten path. For breaking the unwritten rule that in America, bigger is better. And the rule that is written: There are no second acts in life.

Or a third, fourth or fifth act, in the case of Zeke — today 41, in human years, and living out a tranquil retirement among the younger horses at the now-thriving farm.

“Things,” says Bell, 73, wiping her brow with the back of a work glove, “have a way of working out.”

But if you are waiting for her to tell the story of how a broken-down, barbed-wire-ridden cattle drive was resurrected to a lush horse farm, home to the nation’s No. 3 rising dressage stallion, good luck with that.

Bell is already gone, on her 4-by-4 Kubota cart, to the next chore in a day that starts at 5 a.m. and ends at

7:30 p.m., her bedtime.

And Zeke gives no clue. He stands in a patch of clover, nose turned to the wind, feeling the angle of the 1 o’clock sun on his spotted back. Mostly deaf, he listens.

He might have heard the faint creak of a hinge on the barn door, or the engine of Bell’s cart grow fainter. Sensing that Bell has brought mashed oats for his lunch pail, he finds it in the pasture.

But whatever the old blind horse knows, he isn’t telling.

* * *

“I talk to them,” Pat Curran admits as she shovels out a horse stall with a manure fork. “Only rarely do they answer.”

At 52, the barn manager at Fellowship Farm speaks in the clipped accent of her hometown, Massapequa, Long Island. But make no mistake. She is not moving back.

Four years ago, she left a Bronx, N.Y., elementary school teaching job midyear. It was something she thought she would never do. The lack of discipline, the loss of respect, affected her health. She began to have heart palpitations and lost weight.

“It was them or me,” she said of the students. “I went on vacation. I didn’t come back.”

A former banker who wanted out of a desk job, Curran had started over as a teacher. She then turned to her next best friend after dogs. Horses.

She put a resume on an equine “help wanted” Web site and heard from Bell’s daughter, Tami Batts.

Batts, 43, owns a boarding business at Fellowship Farm and teaches dressage, the formal, stylized competition riding. Curran sold her house and moved to North Carolina, though Batts advised her to try it out first.

The move meant a hefty pay cut, but there was no question.

“I make less money. A lot less money. But look at all the people who have all this money. How many of them are truly happy?” Curran asks.

On a Friday morning, after her boss has left with the stallion for a dressage show in the Sandhills, Curran methodically cleans the stalls, leading each horse out, explaining the drill.

Unlike Curran’s unruly Bronx grade-schoolers, the horses weigh not 80 pounds but 1,000 to 1,500 pounds each. But if Curran does her job right, these charges listen.

“There’s nothing I don’t like doing here, and I go home tired. Tired is good. Sleep is good. I don’t have to go to the gym anymore,” Curran says, hoisting a forkful of manure into the farm cart.

“Some people are afraid of change. For a while, I felt like that,” Curran says. “But this opportunity came along. I decided, at forty-whatever I was, I was not going to spend the rest of my life like that.”

Finished cleaning stalls and treating a mare’s leg with antibiotic, Curran gathers a bridle and walks out of the shaded barn. It is Friday, the week almost over, and she has yet to don a pair of pantyhose, grade a paper, file a financial report, attend a staff meeting. Therein lies one measure of success.

Another? Sleeping well. So well that Curran plans to get up early Saturday, put her dogs in the car and go to Southern Pines to watch her boss compete in dressage with the stallion Batts co-owns with a local neurosurgeon. Watching Batts show Romeo is not what she calls work. 

* * *

Two people sit under the tent, but only one is the judge, never taking her eyes off the horse and rider. The second is a scribe, writing it all down. Every impulse, every muscle.

Tami Batts has ridden since age 3, trained in the fundamentals by her mother, raised to horsemanship.

To Henson Farms and now Fellowship Farm, she and husband Steve, a Greensboro home builder, have brought horses from traders all over — Ocala, Fla.; Middleburg, Va.; even Europe.

There is Jacob, once half of a pair of massive Belgian draught horses Batts and father John Bell, a retired Guilford College administrator, used to hitch to a carriage and hire out for weddings. Jacob still tends a herd in a back pasture on Beaver Creek.

May, a Belgian fjord, is the more exotic — a cream-colored pony with a mane that grows thick as a hairbrush, with a delicate gait, ideal for the balletic steps of dressage.

Jack arrived in a tractor-trailer from New York, a registered quarter horse. Batts’ first thought was his head belonged on a magazine cover. And could he run, in his younger days.

But of all the horses that have come and gone, hot-blooded racehorses, lean, nervous thoroughbreds, nearly ballistic, nothing prepares one for the American Warm-blood Ranco. At least, that was his registered name, a name that did not do him justice.

So at the farm, they call him Romeo, a black stallion who is not so much large as magnificent. He puffs his chest, hunches his shoulders and tucks his head, in a profile out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.

And with Batts in the saddle, dressed in dressage top hat and tails, in expert sync with the stallion, the effect in the Sandhills arena is dramatic. Batts nods to the judge, lowers her reins to signal she is ready. The whistle blows.

This is the stallion’s moment in the sun. He performs flawlessly to the music, movements sharp, muscles taut, the rider so fluid in the saddle, she’s almost an afterthought.

On the diagonal, Romeo rears his head, twice, and the judge reflexively raises her head in response.

A perfect ride, dashed.

Back in the warm-up area, Batts’ smile is thin. In the hall, the scores are posted. Despite the gaffe, probably due to a sore shoulder, the stallion has nevertheless won his individual competition with a high score of 65 plus, down from 67 the day before.

But to Batts, who is back at Fellowship Farm by Monday, practicing in the ring with the stallion, no matter.

Ranco rides another day, another show. Or do we call him Romeo?

* * * 

Purgason’s western store, with the 25-cent mechanical quarter horse out front, still sits on 220 north, a mile or so from Henson Farms and Henson Forest subdivisions.

But the spot where Cam Bell’s office and hay barn used to be is a private clubhouse for residents of the shoulder-to-shoulder McMansions, overlooking a roundabout with deer sculpted of metal.

When the sale went through so quickly, Bell’s family, and riders at Henson Farms, felt the ground crumbling under their feet.

“To see something you loved,” recalls Kit Ravenel, Bell’s fellow rider and childhood neighbor, “and watch that happen, was hard.”

Yet it wasn’t the finale, only intermission. In retrospect, Bell’s son-in-law Steve Batts began to see the downside of leasing prime land, locked in by truck traffic.

“You think at the time, 'Why is this happening to us?’ ” But we’re actually better off,” says Batts, 45. “The developers want places for the 'character.’ But they end up running everybody off.”

Still, relocating 51 horses was a formidable task, akin to loading Noah’s Ark. When it was time to go, Bell herself was ill. And, Zeke, one of the oldest and least seaworthy horses, was half blind.

Why not just put him down? someone asked Bell.

She fixes her listener with an intense, blue-eyed gaze, mulling the question.

But before she answers, a few things about Bell, the daughter of a woman who was friends with Annie Oakley, and once let the legendary markswoman shoot the ashes off a cigarette clenched between her teeth in a Wild West show.

But Bell wasn’t born to horses, unlike daughter Tami. She was born in Fisher Park — not smitten until a girlhood summer at Love Valley in the Brushy Mountains, where she rode her first horse, and later got a horse to “winter.”

That means taking care of the animal when it is not earning income for someone during the summer camp season.

In fact, horses were not Bell’s first career. She was a social worker at Children’s Home Society, the private adoption agency, and only later started the riding program using retired horses.

They were steady, less likely to throw a rider or take off running when the unexpected happened — a bee sting, say.

“I call these million-dollar horses, but you can’t put a monetary value on a horse,” says Bell, surveying the calm occupants of her lower barn, older horses here to retire.

Above each stall, she has nailed a principle hand-lettered by the children from summer horse camp. Patience. Goodness. Kindness. Faithfulness.

Patience is first, and outlasts everything else. The way Zeke does, more than Bell ever expected him to.

She had to put the last of the retired race horses, Raymond, down over the winter — he had cancer — and that left Zeke alone in his pasture.

Lonesome, Zeke called out at first, then took it in stride and went on.

Sometime back, Bell ran into a horse owner from Burlington who vaguely remembered a gray Appaloosa she had traded away — it had to be 40 years back — named Zeke.

To the horse trader, he was nothing special. He’s not registered, not a show horse, never made the inside track to the straightaway.

But to answer the question: Why not just put him down?

“How can you?” Bell says. “He’s just a nice creature. I call him a backyard horse. He can walk, trot and cantor. He just needs a special rider.”

At suppertime, she brings the Appaloosa his mashed oats.

Somehow, he finds his way to the pail before the moon rises over Thacker Dairy Road, and a herd of deer comes out of the woods, leaping over the electric fence, unseen.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorrine.ahearn@news-record.com