By the end of her first week, Etta had taken the Lazy J remuda apart and put it back together the way it ought to be, and the whole ranch ran a half-step quieter for it.
It was not magic, whatever the hands said. It was looking. She went through the string horse by horse — teeth, backs, feet, tempers — and wrote nothing down and forgot nothing. The chestnut gelding with the girth sore went to light work and a sheepskin pad. The tall bay that Jessup swore was a bolter turned out to be half blind in one eye and bolting at shadows; she put him on the right side of the string where the world came at him from his seeing side, and he settled in a day. Two colts that had been started too hard and gone sour she turned out to grass for a month, over Dan's raised eyebrow.
"A horse you have to fight every morning is a bill you pay twice," she told him. "Once in time and once in the horse."
"You're making my remuda soft, Marlow."
"I'm making it last." She had a way of answering that closed a subject without slamming it. "You ride a horse the way you keep an account, Whitaker. Square and daily. It comes out the same either way."
The hands adapted faster than Dan did. Old Jessup, arm in a sling, took to following her around the corrals like a schoolboy with a primer, asking questions he'd have knocked another man down for implying he needed answered. The younger hands simply watched and copied. Within the week the whole crew was handling horses lower-voiced and slower-handed than they had in years, and losing less of every day to rodeos that didn't need to happen.
From her first morning, Petra had conducted an education of her own. She ran the corral fence the way a merchant runs a ledger, item by item — gate, latch, chain, hinge — and Etta, watching from the barn door with her coffee going cold, said nothing to anyone. Twice she found the mare at the hay-yard gate in the dawn with her lips curled back and her teeth gentle on the iron, working at it. Twice she led her away without comment. A horse studying a problem was like a man studying one: interrupt the lesson and you only postponed the answer. Besides, she wanted to know if the mare could do it. Professional interest, she told herself. It was not entirely a lie.
But it was Petra who gave the Lazy J its first real laugh of a hard autumn.
The mare had been put in the corral by the hay yard that morning, barred from the stack by a good gate with an iron latch — a latch that lifted and slid, the kind a horse worries at with its nose and gives up on. Petra did not give up on things. Etta heard the first shout from the barn and came out with a bridle over her shoulder to find half the crew standing in the yard gate helpless with laughter, and the gate standing wide, and Her Majesty in the hay yard up to her knees in the best alfalfa, eating with the serene concentration of a queen at a banquet she had arranged herself. Behind her, out of pure solidarity, a pinto gelding was making his own way in.
"She done it with her teeth," Jessup hollered, wiping his eyes. "I watched her. She mouthed that latch up slick as you please and pushed it with her nose. I been outsmarted by livestock before, but never in front of witnesses."
Etta leaned on the gatepost and looked at her mare. Petra looked back at her over a mouthful of hay, entirely without remorse, the white splash on her hind leg bright against the shadow of the stack.
"I didn't teach her that," Etta said.
"Where'd she learn it, then?"
"She came educated." Etta walked in, took hold of the mare's halter, and led her out past the grinning crew, the pinto following in disgrace. "She was raised someplace where the hay was kept interesting, I expect. A horse that wants a thing will study on it longer than a man will. Remember that, all of you, next time you hang a latch and call it done."
What sealed it was the porch. Dan, coming from the house with the mail, found his uncle sitting in the autumn sun with his lap robe over his knees, laughing — really laughing, head back, the years off his face — at the sight of the roan mare being marched out of the hay yard like royalty in disgrace. Dan stood still in the yard and listened to it the way you listen to rain after a dry spell. It was the first time he'd heard that sound since the wire started going up on the rim. Since before that, if he was honest.
"She's worth her wages for that alone," Jasper said, still grinning, as Dan came up the steps.
"She's worth them twice over, and the mare with her." Dan hung a chain on the hay-yard gate that evening and weighted the latch, a good stout setup, horse-proof by any ordinary standard. Petra stood at the corral rail and studied the new arrangement with her ears forward and her whole attention engaged, the way a banker studies a contract.
Etta saw her looking and hid a smile in her work. "Study away, girl," she murmured, forking hay. "Your education's going to matter before this is over."
She had meant it for comfort. It came back to her later with the weight of a promise.
Chapter 5 — The Fence Line