"Forty," she said. "More or less. All ours. And Dan — there's a yearling in there wearing the splash like a flag." She swung up onto her horse and her voice went quiet and businesslike, which for Etta Marlowe meant the thing was decided. "Paper can be burned and clerks can be bought. But I want to see the man who argues with forty horses in front of the whole valley."
Chapter 20 — Guarding the Proof
They made the plan sitting their horses in the slot of the canyon mouth, speaking low, with the hidden herd grazing at their backs and the whole of Cedar Valley spread out ignorant below.
"We can't move them ourselves," Dan said. "Two riders, forty head, half of them foals — we'd scatter proof from here to the county line, and that's if Stanton's people gave us the day to do it in."
"No. We don't move them at all. Not yet." Etta looked up at the rim above the canyon mouth, where the rock broke into a natural shelf behind a screen of juniper — a place she had lain at fourteen with a stolen apple and a library book, watching her father's herd, in the years when the worst thing in the world was being called in for supper. "One of us stays here and keeps the door. The other rides for Marshal Ford."
"And the day book."
"And Mrs. Fenn, and the day book — but the book doesn't travel, Dan, not in a saddlebag, not with Salazar alive and curious. You tell her to be ready to bring it herself, to Ford, when he comes. You tell Ford forty head of altered brands in a box canyon behind the Marlowe place, and a mare with a Rocking M under the Flying S standing in the Lazy J remuda, and a roomful of witnesses who heard Avery Stanton offer me a thousand dollars yesterday to leave the territory." She held his eye. "That's a rope a marshal can pull."
Dan studied her the way he had the first day she'd ridden into the Lazy J yard — adding sums. "You'll be the one staying."
"I'll be the one staying."
"Salazar's men will come back up here. They lost the mare somewhere below, and he's not a man to leave a trail unread. When they find this mouth—"
"They'll find brush and stone and an empty slot, if I do it right. And if they come through it, they'll find me across it." She shifted the rifle where it lay in its boot under her knee — the rifle she'd carried across three territories and used for meat and warning shots and nothing else, ever. "I won't shoot a man over horses, Daniel Whitaker. Not even these horses. But a man who has to climb a slot in the rock with a woman above him he can't see does his arithmetic slow, and slow is all Ford needs."
He was quiet. Below them a meadowlark went off like a struck match. "It should be me staying," he said at last. "It's my place to—"
"It's my herd," she said, not unkindly. "My father's canyon. My eight years. And you're the better rider for the road, and Ford knows your name and trusts it. Take the long way down — don't cross the homestead flat in the open. Water at the creek where the cottonwoods bunch. Ride, Dan."
He rode. She watched him down the trail until the rocks took him, and then she did the work: horses unsaddled and turned into a side draw with the sign brushed out; her camp made in the shelf above the mouth with no fire and no smoke; the brush screen at the slot checked and threaded tighter with cut juniper until a man would have to know it was a door to find it. She laid the rifle across a flat stone with a clear lane down the slot, and a canteen, and a twist of jerky, and she settled into the juniper's shadow to do the hardest labor there is, which is waiting with your whole heart in your throat.
They came in the middle of the afternoon, when the heat had gone still and white.
Two riders, working the old horse trails the way men work who are looking for something they've lost and are ashamed of losing. She knew the lead man's seat before she knew his face — it was the younger of Salazar's two from the corral, the one Mateo's boot had found. They came up the trail slow, reading the ground, and at the place where Petra's tracks and her own had braided together and parted, they stopped, and the lead man got down and walked the slot's approach with his head bent, not fifty paces from where Etta lay.
She did not move. The rifle lay across the stone. She did not touch it — there was nothing yet to do with it, and her hands were for keeping still with. Through the juniper she watched him find the mouth, watched him stand in front of the brush screen with his head cocked, watched his hand come up and part the woven limbs — and stop, at the sound of a horse blowing softly on the other side of the wall, where one of the old stallions had caught a scent or a memory on the canyon air.
The scout stood a long time. Then he let the brush fall back into place, and stepped away, and she heard him say to his partner, in the tone of a man talking himself out of a graveyard at noon:
"Nothing up there but rock. Old man kept sheep in it, likely, before my time. Sign's all yesterday's and older."