"Not an army," Etta said. "Witnesses. Armies can be outbid." She rolled her affidavit and tied it with string. "Witnesses just keep being true."
Chapter 17 — The Mare Taken
Mateo Herrera had begged for the hayloft the way a boy begs for exactly one thing in the world, and Jasper Whitaker, who had a soft place in him the size of the valley, had said yes before Dan could make it sensible. So the boy slept that night above the Lazy J corral in the sweet dark smell of last summer's hay, with his boots off and one arm hanging down through the loft hatch, happier than any king.
What woke him was not a sound. It was the stopping of sounds — the corral gone held-breath quiet underneath him, the horses shifting and not settling, and underneath that, the small iron tick of a latch being worked by hands that were not hurrying.
He crawled to the hatch on his belly. Below, in starlight and the last of the moon, three men were in the corral, and one of them had Petra.
They had her the horseman's way, not the thief's — a halter slipped quiet over her head while she was half asleep, a lead shank through the ring — but Petra was awake now, all the way awake, setting her feet and throwing her head the way she did when she had decided a thing was wrong. The man at her head was big across the shoulders. Even in the dark Mateo knew the shape of him, because Salazar had once cuffed him away from the Association's wagon at the fair and he had remembered the man's hands ever since.
"Quiet, then," Salazar said, low, not unkind. "Quiet, mare. You've had the last of these folks."
A second man ran a rope around her barrel and made it fast, and the third went to the gate. That was when Mateo understood they weren't stealing her to ride her. They were tying her to take her somewhere, the way you take something you mean to be finished with.
He did the only thing a ten-year-old alone in the dark could do. He screamed.
He screamed for Dan, for Etta, for his father, for God, and he snatched up his boot and threw it down with all his strength and hit the second man square on the hat, which made him curse and look up, and Salazar said "Go — go now," and the gate swung and they were moving, Petra plunging between two mounted men with the rope on her barrel pulled taut, out of the corral and into the black yard. Mateo was down the ladder and running barefoot across the stones before the dust of them had settled, yelling the whole way, and the bunkhouse door banged and Dan came out in his undershirt with the rifle up and fired once into the air over the corral — a warning and a summons in one crack of sound — but the riders were already past the yard fence and gone into the draws, where the dark took them the way water takes a stone.
Etta came running in her stockings with her hair down, and behind her Jasper on the porch in his nightshirt, holding the lamp. Mateo told it all in one breath and then, to his shame, cried in the middle of telling it again.
"They'll slow at the creek crossing," Dan said, already pulling on his boots. "Heavy mare on a barrel rope, they can't run her. We can be on them in an hour."
"No," Etta said.
He stared at her. She was looking not at him but at the corral gate, standing open, and at the ground beyond it, and her face in the lamplight was the stillest he had ever seen it.
"No," she said again. "Petra's worked a gate latch with her teeth since she was two years old, Dan. I taught her nothing — she taught herself, and ropes are only latches she hasn't met yet. Those men have her tied for a horse that wants to stay tied. She doesn't." She put her hand, briefly, on Mateo's shaking shoulder. "You did right, son. You did the whole of your part. Now hers starts."
Out on the trail to the breaks, where the moon gave enough light to ride by and not enough to ride fast, Salazar's lead man felt the barrel rope go strange in his hand — slack, then taut, then slack in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the mare's stride. He turned in the saddle. The red roan was trotting with her head down and her mouth working, working, steady as a woman shelling peas, at the knot where rope met rope beside her cheek. The knot was half undone already. He shouted and hauled her up short, and at that moment the rope parted — not snapped, but unmade, loosened loop by loop by nine years of patience — and Petra went sideways off the trail and down into the brush like a deer, silent, gone, the halter trailing from her neck.
They hunted her an hour in the draws with curses and a lantern, and found nothing but her tracks doubling back on themselves, and at last Salazar, who knew the price of daylight, called it off.
"One horse," he said. "There's a hundred up there to cover her. Let her go."
He did not say what he was thinking, which was that the mare had not run at random. She had turned, the instant the rope gave, toward the north — toward the old burned place, and the hills beyond it.
Chapter 18 — Where the Mare Runs