"Señora Marlow," he said. "I have been practicing." And out of his pocket he produced, with enormous ceremony, half an apple, cut with a knife in that careful way children cut things, one half larger than the other.
"You practiced on the apple?" Etta asked, dismounting.
"I practiced waiting. The apple is for her. The big half. I decided it yesterday."
Petra decided it faster. The mare came down the fence line at a businesslike walk, put her great red head over the wire with the ease of long practice, and took the large half of the apple off the boy's flat palm exactly as she had been taught by someone — long ago, and far from here — who believed horses should be gentled and not grabbed. Her lips worked over his hand like velvet. Mateo stood perfectly still, shining.
"She does it like a lady at a table," he said, awestruck.
"She has opinions about manners," Etta said. "Mostly other people's."
Luisa came out of the house with coffee and stood watching her son talk to the mare in a low, constant stream of Spanish and English, one language for the facts and the other for the poetry. He told Petra about his father's cattle and the new calf and the wire and a hawk he had seen. He showed her his treasures: a blue stone, a hawk's feather, a nail bent into a ring. Petra examined each with her muzzle, courteous as a queen receiving ambassadors, and when Mateo at last laid his forehead against her cheek — just under the eye, where the coat was finest — she stood for it without a flicker, and sighed, and the boy's whole face changed into something Etta had to look away from for a moment, because she had been that child once, in a corral that no longer existed, against the cheek of a mare with the same white splash climbing her leg like spilled milk.
"She lets the gate herself, did you know?" Mateo said suddenly, as Etta was checking the mare's feet. "At your ranch. The men told my father. She opens the latch with her mouth."
"She does. It's a poor habit and I can't break her of it, because between you and me—" Etta straightened up and lowered her voice to the level of conspiracy. "—I'm proud of her. A horse that can open a gate is a horse that can get herself out of trouble. Never discourage a creature from knowing the way out, Mateo. Not horses. Not boys either."
He considered this with the gravity of a much older person. "My father says the Association men ride at night now. He sleeps with his boots by the bed."
"I know, hijo." She had not known she was going to call him that. "Your father is a careful man."
She rode home in the long evening with the message delivered and the boy's apple smell still on the mare's breath, and she was most of the way to the Lazy J, with the light going red on the rimrock, when she heard hooves coming hard behind her — one of the Lazy J hands on a lathered horse, hat gone, voice arriving before he did.
"Miss Marlow — Dan says come quick — it's Herrera's—"
She was turned and galloping before he finished it.
They found the Herrera fence down in three places where the wire had been cut clean and recently — cut, not broken, the ends bright and curled — and the pasture beyond it empty under the first stars, and the cattle gone out through the cuts like water through a broken dam, scattered toward the breaks with the dark coming on. Ben Herrera was out in the wash on foot with a lantern, calling, hoarse already, and Luisa stood in the yard with her shawl over her head and Mateo beside her holding the rifle he was too small to fire, his face set like a man's. One calf, too young to keep up with its mother, lay bawling in the dry wash with a leg through the cut wire, and it was Etta who went down on her knees and worked it free while Dan held the light and Ben held the mother off, and the calf scrambled up bawling and bucking, alive, which was more than the night had promised.
"Cut," Ben said, looking at the bright wire ends in the lantern light. His hands were shaking and he made no attempt to hide it. "In the night they come, like thieves, and cut an honest man's fence, and scatter his living to the wolves. This is the ordinance, señores. The ordinance has just not waited for its paper."
Dan looked at the wire, and at the dark hills, and at Mateo standing with the rifle. "This is how a range war starts," he said quietly. "Not with armies. With a poor man's fence cut in the dark, and a boy holding a gun too big for him. Come on. We'll gather what we can by lantern and the rest at first light. Nobody rides alone tonight — nobody."
Etta swung up onto Petra, and the mare, who hated commotion as a rule, stood rock-steady under her, one ear turned toward the boy with the rifle.
"Put that down now, Mateo," Etta said gently. "And come and hold my horse's light. We've got cattle to find, and I need a man I can trust with the lantern."
The boy set the rifle down like it weighed a hundred pounds, and picked up the lantern, and held it high.
Chapter 11 — The Day Book