Behind her, down the canyon, a shout went up. Dust bloomed at the main mouth, far off and small. Salazar was in, and finding an empty bowl of trampled grass and cooling dung and forty sets of tracks that went up a wall no horse should climb.
Etta did not smile. She was too busy not falling off the benchland in the first hard light, with thirty-nine horses stringing out behind her lead mare down the long grade toward the valley road — toward Cedar Bluff, where the sun was just touching the church steeple and the town was sitting down to breakfast, not one soul of them knowing what was coming down their street with the morning.
She looked back once, at the rim, where a rider sat his horse against the sky, too far to shoot and too late to matter.
"Come on then," she said to Petra, and to all of them. "Let's go home the loud way."
Chapter 22 — Horses in the Main Street
The baker heard them first.
Emil Brandt was sliding the morning's second tray into the oven when the sound came through the floorboards — not thunder, though every soul in Cedar Bluff said thunder afterward, but that deep, rolling, many-footed drumming that a man who has lived near horses knows in his spine. He came out onto the boardwalk with his apron on and the peel still in his hand, and stood with his mouth open as the herd came around the livery bend and poured into the main street of Cedar Bluff at a long, ground-eating trot.
Afterward nobody could agree on who shouted first. What they agreed on was the light. The sun stood full over the valley rim by then, and the street ran east and west, and the horses came down it out of the glare with the dust rolling up gold around them — mares, geldings, two-year-olds, an old gray with a head like a hammer — and every one of them wearing, on the left hip, the Association's Flying S.
And under it — where the summer coat had shed thin, where the sweat darkened the hair, where a body had to look, which in that light everybody did — the ghost of another brand beneath. Burned first. Burned older. A Rocking M.
"Lord God," said Old Man Teague, who had come out of the harness shop with a strap half-mended in his fist. He said it quietly, the way a man speaks in church. "Lord God, look at the legs on them."
For the foals and yearlings running at their dams' sides wore no brand at all, and needed none. The splash ran up their left hind legs like spilled milk, white and unmistakable, the marking three generations of valley children had learned at their grandfathers' knees. Marlowe horses threw that splash. Everybody in Cedar Bluff knew it. Everybody in Cedar Bluff had agreed, for eight years, not to say it.
A boy — it was young Seth Albright, twelve years old and quick as a whip — climbed the water trough and counted out loud, the way boys count anything worth counting, and got to forty before the last stragglers came through at a walk behind a woman on a red roan mare.
Etta Marlowe rode the drag with her hat in her hand and the dust in her hair, and she did not hurry, and she did not hide. Petra came down the middle of the street as though she owned the town and had merely been away on business. The crowd on the boardwalks — miners' wives with baskets, the schoolteacher with her bell forgotten, Ben Herrera with his hat crushed in both hands and Luisa crying beside him, Jasper Whitaker brought out in his chair by two grandsons and set in the sun like a king in a story — the crowd made a sound that was not cheering and not weeping but something older than both.
The schoolteacher, Miss Doyle, came out with her bell still in her hand from ringing the children in, and rang it once more without knowing she had done it, and the children boiled out of the schoolhouse door and lined the fence with their primers forgotten, and nobody sent them back. The telegraph operator ran his fastest message of the year out to the wire on his own authority — HERD IN MAIN STREET STOP FORTY HEAD STOP COME AND SEE — and signed it with his own name, which operators were not supposed to do, and did not care.
Up at the big house at the head of the street, where Colonel Stanton's housekeeper kept the curtains at half-draw all the year round, a curtain moved. Just once. Then it was still again, and the house sat in the full morning sun with its shutters open and its yard empty, and looked, for the first time in eight years, like a house whose master had not come down to breakfast and was not going to.
One man tried to laugh. There is always one. A freighter in from the railhead, beholden to nobody and worse for drink at nine in the morning, said loudly that brands could be burned by anybody with an iron and a fire, and what did a street full of horses prove except a street full of horses? Old Man Teague turned and looked at him the way a man looks at weather he has seen before and not enjoyed.
"Son," he said, "a brand can be faked. A bloodline can't. My granddaddy watched Thomas Marlowe breed that splash into them horses out of a pinto mare and a prayer. You'd have to fake forty years." He turned back to the pens. "Ain't an iron made that can do that."