Chapter 2 — Hiring On
Dan Whitaker was shoeing a gelding in the corral gate when the woman rode in, and he knew by the way his hands quit their gossiping and came out to lean on the fence that she was worth the looking. Not the woman first — the horse. A red roan mare, moving like water over stones. Then the woman: thirty or so, sun-browned, calm-eyed, dressed for work and not for visiting.
She stopped at the corral and stayed mounted. "I hear you lost a breaker."
"You hear right." Dan set the gelding's foot down and straightened up, slow, because his back was forty years of other men's horses. "Jessup's arm's in a sling till Christmas. I'm Dan Whitaker. I run this outfit for my uncle."
"Etta Marlow," she said.
The name went into him and settled somewhere ordinary, and he filed it the way he filed all names, without knowing he would have cause to take it out again. Something about the way she said it — careful, like setting a cup down on a shelf edge — he noticed and then unnoticed again.
"You break horses, Miss Marlow?"
"I do. And I'll ride your gather, and I'll do it without crippling stock or men, which is more than most breakers promise. Thirty a month is the going wage. I hear you pay honest."
Dan laughed before he meant to. "You hear a lot for a stranger."
"A stranger hears everything. It's after you belong somewhere that folks quit telling you the truth."
He looked at her a moment longer. There were two sorts of riders who showed up wanting work in roundup season: the ones running from something behind them and the ones running toward something ahead, and in his experience the second sort worked harder and stayed quieter. She had the stillness of the second sort — or a very good imitation of the first.
"You want the job, there's a way we settle it here." He nodded toward the corral, where a black gelding stood at the far rail with his ears laid flat, watching them all like a creditor. "That's Crowbait. He's throwed Jessup, throwed our best hand, and near throwed me, and I'm too old to be proud about it. Nobody's finished a ride on him this week. You finish one, you're hired."
"Fair," Etta said. She swung down, handed him Petra's reins without a word — and the mare stood for him like a lady, which he marked — and walked into the corral with her own saddle over her arm.
What happened next, the hands talked about for the rest of the season. She did not rush the black. She walked him down in circles, talking low, until the gelding was following the sound of her; she let him smell the blanket, the saddle, her sleeves. When she finally stepped up, Crowbait gathered himself and came apart the way he always did — high, twisting, sunfishing toward the fence — and she simply stayed in the middle of him, quiet-handed, riding the storm out at its center without spurring, without hauling his head, without raising her voice. When the fight went out of him she walked him twice around the corral on a loose rein, dismounted, and loosened the cinch while he stood blowing like a gentleman.
She led him back to the gate. "He's not mean," she said. "He's scared of the saddle tree pinching, and he's learned men quit if he performs. Change the pad, ride him first thing before the others, and he'll make a horse."
Dan took the reins. His hands were grinning at the fence like schoolboys. "Thirty a month," he said. "Found, and the room off the tack shed is yours if you want it. It's got a door that locks and a window that opens, which is the best we can do."
"It'll do fine."
"You'll take your orders from me. Jasper — my uncle — he owns the place, but his health ain't what it was. He mostly watches from the porch these days."
Her eyes went to the porch, where an old man sat wrapped in a lap robe despite the mild morning, white-bearded, upright as a fence post. He had watched the whole ride. As she looked, Jasper Whitaker raised one hand — not a wave, more an acknowledgment, like a man checking a name off a list he kept in his head.
"She'll do," the old man called, in a voice thinner than she expected. "Put her name in the book."
Dan walked her to the tack shed room himself. "Supper's at six. Cook rings a triangle. You need anything, you ask."
"I won't need much." She unsaddled Petra in the yard afterward, brushed the mare down with the unhurried completeness of long habit, and when she came to the left hip she ran her palm once over the coat where the hair lay thick and winter-early — over what slept beneath it, that no one could see unless the coat shed or a clipper passed. Her face did not change. Her hand rested there a breath longer than the work required.
"Not yet, girl," she said, too low for anyone else. "We do this in order."
Petra turned her head and blew softly against Etta's shoulder, and the new breaker of the Lazy J went in to supper with the hands.
Chapter 3 — The Segundo
Dan Whitaker woke the way he always woke, before the light and before the cook, to the sound of his uncle coughing behind the bedroom door.