It was a bad sound and getting to be a familiar one — deep, tearing, with a long thin whistle at the end of it where the air ran out. Dan lay a moment in the dark of his own room, doing the arithmetic he did every morning now. Jasper was seventy. The doctor over in Helena, fetched at a price Dan did not tell him, had used the words take the winter easy the way men use the words the roof wants tar — as if the naming of it were a small thing and the doing of it smaller. Jasper had heard him out, thanked him politely, and gone back to sitting on the porch ten hours a day watching a valley he'd known for fifty years turn into something he didn't.
Dan got up and made coffee in the cold kitchen and carried a cup in to the old man, who was sitting up against his pillows with a ranch ledger open on his knees and his spectacles down his nose.
"You're at figures before daylight again," Dan said.
"Figures don't sleep, Daniel. They just wait till you're tired." Jasper took the coffee with a hand that trembled only slightly, and Dan pretended not to see it, the way they both pretended about most things now. "Association's note comes due at the bank in November. They've offered to buy it up off the bank twice. I expect they'll own paper on half this valley by spring, one way or the other."
"They won't own this one."
"No," Jasper said. "They won't. But they'll make it expensive to be us." He looked out the window toward the corrals, where the dark was beginning to thin. "That new breaker of ours eats breakfast before the hands."
"She does everything before the hands. She's remade the remuda in four days, Uncle. Horses Jessup swore were ruined are standing quiet for her." Dan hesitated. "She's too good."
"Too good is a complaint I haven't heard on this ranch in some years."
"She's too quiet, then. About herself. She asked me the way to Miller's Crossing the first morning — then rode it like she'd crossed it a hundred times. She knew the north gate sticks in wet weather. Knew it, Uncle. I watched her shoulder it open without even trying it first."
Jasper was silent a moment, sipping. "There's valleys all over this territory laid out like this one. Gates stick everywhere it rains."
"That's what I tell myself."
"You keep telling it. A hand that works is a hand that works. I've known you to brood about a gift horse till it died of old age, Daniel."
Dan let it go because there was nothing to hold onto — a feeling, a gate, a ford. But it stayed with him through the day the way such things did. He rode the rim fence in the morning with two hands, and the feeling soured into the day's real business: wire. The Association crews had strung another half mile along the bench in the night week, good tight four-strand work, cutting across the old drift lanes the whole valley had used since before there was a Cedar Bluff. At the section corner somebody had nailed up another of their printed notices. ESTRAYS AND UNBRANDED STOCK WILL BE GATHERED. Dan thought about the Herreras, whose little place sat square in the path of it, and about the dozen other small outfits reading that notice over their coffee, and about how a range war did not start with shooting. It started exactly like this — with wire, and paper, and patient men with money waiting for other men to get tired.
He was four years a widower. Coming home at dusk he passed the yard gate Sarah had always kept painted, and out of habit he stopped and worked the latch once, though there was no garden behind it now worth the name, only her rose gone wild over the fence wire and the grass. He had loved her in the plain way of a man who was not built for speeches, and the house had kept a quiet in it ever since that none of his work could fill. Sometimes, nights, he understood exactly why a man like his uncle would sit on a porch watching a valley — because the watching was the last job left.
At supper the new breaker sat at the end of the table with the hands and ate like a working person and answered what was asked of her — where she'd ridden (everywhere), who she'd worked for (names in three territories, all checkable, all far away) — and gave up nothing else at all. Afterward, from the porch, Dan watched her in the last light gentling a two-year-old that had never had a rope on it, standing in the round pen with the colt loose and her hat off and the patience coming off her like heat off a stove.
"She handles them like she was raised in a corral," Jasper said beside him.
"She was raised somewhere," Dan said.
"Most folks are." The old man's eyes stayed on the mare in the horse corral — on the red roan with the white splash standing hip-shot and asleep in the dusk. Something crossed Jasper's face then, too brief and too far in shadow for Dan to read, and was gone. "Let her alone, Daniel. Whatever she's carrying, she'll set it down when her arms give out, same as the rest of us."
Dan said nothing. But that night, doing the last round with the lantern, he found himself looking at the roan mare longer than the work required — at that spill of white up her left hind leg — with the nagging, tip-of-the-tongue feeling of a man trying to remember a name he had once known very well.
Chapter 4 — Hands and Horses