She rode a while. "Then I spoke out of turn," she said, "and I'm obliged to you for stepping in." Which was true, and was also all he was going to get, and Dan knew it, and the two of them rode home in a silence that had changed shape — no longer the silence of strangers, but the heavier silence of a man deciding how much of the truth he could afford to ask for.
Chapter 6 — What the Old-Timer Said
Teague rode over in the last of the light, the way he had ridden over to the Lazy J for forty years — uninvited, unhurried, and expecting coffee. Dan met him at the corral gate and took his bridle while the old man climbed down one stiff joint at a time.
"Your uncle awake?" Teague asked.
"Mostly. He's on the porch, arguing with the sunset."
"He'll win. He generally does."
They left Teague's gelding at the rail and walked past the trough, where Petra stood hip-shot in the dusk, drinking deep and unhurried, one ear turned to the yard. The water shone on her chin. In the low light the red of her coat had gone the color of banked coals, and the white splash up her left hind leg showed plain as fresh paint.
Teague stopped walking.
Dan stopped with him, out of courtesy at first, then out of something else, because the old man's face had changed the way a man's face changes at a graveside when he finds a name he knows.
"Well," Teague said quietly. "Well, well."
"Something wrong with my horse breaker 's mare, Mr. Teague?"
"Wrong?" Teague shook his head, slow. "No. Nothing wrong with her. That's the trouble of it. Dan, I've seen that marking before."
"Lots of roans throw white."
"Not like that." Teague lifted one knotted hand and pointed with his chin, the way old men do when their fingers have quit being polite. "Up the left hind, like she'd stepped in a bucket of milk and it splashed. Not a stocking. Not a blaze. A splash, same leg, same shape, foal after foal. Thirty years I watched that line of horses come up in this valley, and I never saw that mark on any other blood. Not once."
Petra raised her head. Water dripped. She looked at the two men with the mild interest of a horse who has been discussed before and found it harmless.
"Marlowe horses threw that splash," Teague said.
He said it plainly, to the trough and the dusk, not to the whole yard — but Dan heard every word go through him like a cold wire.
"Thomas Marlowe's string," Teague went on. "Best horses in Cedar Valley, and I'm including your uncle's. Man bred for sense first and speed second, which is the right order and most men get it backwards. That mare—" He nodded at Petra. "—she's got the head for it too. Look at her. She's been listening to us like a third party to the conversation."
Dan kept his voice where he kept everything, low and level. "Marlowe's been gone eight years."
"Gone," Teague agreed. "There's gone and there's gone, Dan. The county wrote those horses down as sold, and the family down as moved away, and this valley has mostly agreed to remember it that way because remembering it the other way itches. But Thomas Marlowe didn't last the winter after they run him off. Died up north in a rented room, so I heard it. Grief's a slow bullet, but it arrives."
"And the daughter?"
"Girl?" Teague shrugged inside his coat. "Twenty-three, the last I knew her. Rode out with what she could carry. Where she landed, God and the horse market know."
They stood a while. From the porch came the sound of Jasper coughing, and the creak of his chair.
Dan looked across the yard. Etta Marlow was working a Lazy J colt in the round pen by lantern light, though the hour for work was past — long reins, soft hands, her whole attention bent on the youngster the way a woman reads a letter. The colt settled under her voice like water finding level. She never hurried and she never missed, and Dan had watched hands for twenty years and knew the difference between a person who had learned horses and a person who had been raised inside a remuda the way other children are raised inside a house.
"How old would you say that mare is, Mr. Teague?" he asked.
"Nine, give or take. Teeth'd say it closer."
Nine. Dan did the arithmetic the way he'd been doing sums in the dark for a week, and the sum came out the same as it always did. Nine meant a yearling, eight years ago. Nine meant a horse young enough to be led out of a burning valley by hand, and old enough now to carry a woman home.
"Was I you," Teague said, climbing creakily onto the fence rail to rest before supper, "I wouldn't say any of this past this trough. Girl's got a right to her own weather, whatever it is. And if I was the praying kind—" He settled his hat against the last of the light. "—I'd pray she brought it with her on purpose."
Dan said nothing. But that night, checking the corral before bed, he found his steps had taken him past Petra's pen without his deciding it, and he stood looking at the mare a long time — at the splash, at the quiet eye, at the brand on her left hip that he had only ever seen whole and at a distance, in daylight, the way brands are meant to be seen.
He had been reading horses and men both since he was old enough to hold a rope. He intended, come the first fair chance, to take a closer look at that hip.