Chapter 1 — The Stranger on the Roan Mare
Eight years gone, and the valley had kept its shape the way a face keeps its bones under new scars.
Etta came down off the bench land in the last of the afternoon, riding easy, letting the mare pick her way through the sage and the first fallen leaves. Below her the river went green and slow between the cottonwoods, and the hay meadows lay cut and stacked, and smoke rose from the chimneys of Cedar Bluff in a thin blue line. Roundup season. She could smell it before she could see it — dust and cattle and woodsmoke and the iron tang of coming cold.
What was new was the wire. She counted three fences on the descent that had not been there when she was a girl, barbed wire strung tight as banjo strings across ground that used to run open from the river to the rimrock. On a gate post by the trail someone had nailed a printed notice, weather-curled. She reined in close enough to read it without dismounting. BY ORDER OF THE CATTLEMEN'S ASSOCIATION. ESTRAYS AND UNBRANDED STOCK WILL BE GATHERED AND HELD PENDING PROOF OF OWNERSHIP.
She read it twice. Then she rode on.
The mare under her was a red roan, nine years old, deep through the chest and clean-legged, with a face that missed nothing. Up her left hind leg ran a splash of white, bright and irregular, as if someone had tipped a bucket of milk down that leg in the dark. It was a marking you could pick out of a herd at half a mile, and Etta knew men in this valley who had once picked it out of foal crops the way other men picked out their own children's faces. She had timed her coming for roundup on purpose. A valley looking at horses was a valley that would have to look at this one.
Cedar Bluff had grown by a seed store and a second saloon and shrunk by a church, which stood empty with its windows boarded. The boardwalks were busy with the day's end. Men stopped talking as she passed, which she had expected, and some of them did not start again, which she had also expected. A woman riding in alone, astride, in a split skirt and a man's flat-crowned hat, with a bedroll behind her saddle and no wagon, no husband, no explanation — the town took the whole of her in the way it would take in a weather sign.
She stopped at the trough in front of the livery because Petra wanted water and because a stranger's first business in any town is to be ordinary. The hostler came out wiping his hands on his apron, a young man with a sunburned nose.
"Evening," he said. "You lost, ma'am?"
"Not yet," Etta said, and swung down. Her legs were stiff from two days of trail and she was glad of the ground. "I'll grain her and put her up for the night, if you've got a stall that isn't spoken for."
"We got stalls." He was looking at the mare, at the gear — good rig, plain and kept like somebody cared — and then, despite himself, at the mare again. "That's a fine animal."
"She thinks so too."
While Petra drank, Etta stood with one hand on the mare's neck and let the town look its fill. Across the street, on the boardwalk outside the mercantile, an old man had come down off his chair and stood with his hat in his hands, staring. Not at her. At the mare's left hind leg, where the white splash caught the last of the light. He stood a long moment. Then he sat back down slowly, like a man whose knees had made the decision for him, and turned his face away toward the river.
Etta noted him the way she noted everything — without moving her eyes much, and without forgetting.
"I'm looking for work," she said to the hostler. "Breaking horses, roundup work. Who's hiring that won't waste my time?"
He considered. "Association's got crews out stringing fence, if you fancy wire." His tone said what he thought of that. "Whitakers lost their breaker Tuesday — Jessup come off a snorty colt and broke his collarbone. The Lazy J's shorthanded and roundup's on them. Old Jasper Whitaker owns it, his nephew Dan runs it. West end of the valley, follow the river road, you can't miss the gate." He jerked his chin. "They'll work you hard and pay you honest, which around here is getting to be a short list."
"Then I'll start there," Etta said.
She led Petra to a stall, forked hay, curried the road dust out of the roan coat with long, practiced strokes, and checked the mare's feet one by one the way she had done every night of eight years of other people's corrals. Supper was beans and coffee at the little hotel, eaten alone and without hurry. She did not ask anyone any more questions. Questions were for later; tonight she only needed the valley to have seen her, and the mare, and to be wondering.
In the morning she saddled before the town was fully awake, rode west on the river road with the light coming up behind her, and did not once turn her head toward the north end of the valley, where a blackened chimney stood alone in a field going back to grass.
Not yet, she thought. First the work. First the name in a payroll book.
The Lazy J gate stood open. She rode through it sitting straight, the roan mare walking out free and handsome under her, and whatever the valley had buried, it was going to have to watch her come.