They watered their horses at the spring below the homestead ruin, mounts loose-reined, and rode away down the long trail toward Cedar Bluff, small and then smaller, and Etta Marlowe lay in the juniper shadow above forty horses with her cheek against warm stone and did not take a full breath until the riders were specks.
Then she took one. Then another. She checked the rifle where it lay — unfired, uncocked, dusty as the stone — and settled back to wait for Dan Whitaker and the marshal, while below her the hidden herd grazed in the gold grass, and the yearling with the white splash slept in the sun with his dam standing over him, in the last of the secret.
Chapter 21 — The Second Mouth
The light came up gray and then gold, and Etta lay belly-down on the rimrock above the canyon with her father's field glasses at her eyes and counted riders.
Three. Then a fourth, coming up the old horse trail slow, with the care of men who did not want to be heard. Salazar had found the mouth at last. She had known he would. A secret kept eight years by men who fed horses in the dark was still a secret written in tracks, and Vic Salazar could read tracks the way Walter Goss read a ledger.
Below her the herd stood in the blue shadow of the canyon, breathing steam into the cold. Petra was among them — the mare had come home to her own kind in the night and now stood hip-shot and easy beside a gray gelding twice her age, as if she had never left. The splash-marked yearling pressed his dam's flank and watched the light climb the walls.
Etta lowered the glasses and did her arithmetic the way her father had taught her: not what she wished, what was true.
The main mouth was a funnel of rock forty feet wide. Salazar's men would be in it inside the hour, and once they were in it, the herd was Association property again — driven where Association riders chose, scattered, sold, and lost the way it had been lost before, only this time there would be no girl on a rimrock to remember where it went.
The second mouth she had found at eleven years old, hunting a runaway milk cow with more temper than sense. It was not a mouth at all, properly — a crack in the canyon's back wall where a cedar had grown up through a rockfall and died standing, its roots holding a screen of fallen stone like a curtain. Behind the curtain the crack widened into a steep slot that climbed, switchbacked once, and spilled out onto the benchland above the valley road. Horses could pass it single file. A girl on a good mare had passed it. A herd, driven quiet and patient, might.
She had walked the slot once already in the dark, before Dan rode out, with a lantern shuttered to a crack and her hand on the wall like a blind woman. Eleven years old she had come down it chasing a milk cow, barefoot half the way, and found her father waiting at the main mouth with the lantern and no anger in him at all, only relief. You found the back door, Etta-girl, he had said. Every good house has one. Remember where it is. She had remembered for twenty years. She remembered now, matching the stones in the last of the night to the map her eleven-year-old hands had learned: the cedar, the chimney rock, the place where the wall wept water even in August. It would pass a horse. It would pass forty, if the one in front believed.
She went down the way she had come, hand over hand on the juniper roots, and dropped the last six feet into the canyon dust with her rifle slung and her heart going like a drum in a parade.
There was no time to be gentle and no need. These horses had been handled by Marlowe hands and Association thieves both, and what they feared was shouting and running men. Etta made neither. She worked them the way she worked a remuda at dawn — a low word, a swung rope's end against her leg, Petra turned first and shown the way, because where the lead mare went the string would follow, and Petra, God bless her contrary hide, had decided weeks ago that Etta's way was the way.
The geldings bunched. The mares called once to their foals and settled. The yearling colt, all legs and white-splashed wonder, glued himself to his dam's hip and would not be peeled off by anything short of judgment day.
Etta rode at the drag end with the string moving past her and counted them through the crack by the cedar curtain — one, two, three — the sound of hooves gone soft and strange in the slot, stone ticking under iron, a mare's breath harsh in the narrow place. Twice the string balked at the switchback. Twice Petra, from the front where the light was, nickered low — not a call, a statement — and the balkers leaned uphill and went.
At the top of the switchback she reined in and made the string wait, breathing, while she climbed the last rocks alone and looked down into the bowl she was emptying. From up there the canyon was all shadow and one blade of light — the grass, the seep, the walls going up red and gold — a corral God built and forgot to tell anyone about. Eight years the Association had hidden stolen horses in Thomas Marlowe's own back pasture and called it prudence.
"Sorry, Papa," she said under her breath. "We're done being quiet in your canyon."
Then she swung back down to the string, because sentiment was a luxury for the far side of the ridge.