It is 5:45 am, March 6, 1940, and Pete Salverson, owner of the roadside café in West Texas, is opening for business. As he sweeps up in the kitchen, he hears a sound outside the back door and discovers a beat up and hungry dog there with a strange kind of leash on it like a harness — the kind a blind man's dog might wear. When the sheriff turns up, he remembers that he had a missing persons bulletin on a blind man three days ago. The sheriff had a hunch that they needed to find the dog's owner quickly.