Chapter 7 — The Brand Under the Brand
The sore was a wire rub on Petra's left hip, a hand's breadth of broken skin where the mare had scratched herself against a fence end — or where a fence end had found her, in the dark, doing something she declined to explain. Etta found it at morning feed, ran her palm over the hot place, and swore softly in the manner of a woman who has strong opinions about wire.
"You," she told the mare, "are supposed to be the clever one."
Petra sighed and leaned her weight against the hand, which was the mare's whole philosophy of medicine.
Clipping was the only cure for it — the hair had to come away from the sore so it could be cleaned and salved, and hip hair on a roan in her winter coat stood thick as felt. Etta got the hand shears and a bucket of warm water and set to work in the corral, with the mare ground-tied and patient, and the sun just clearing the rimrock.
She had clipped a palm's width clear when Dan Whitaker came through the gate with the salve pot and a clean rag over his arm, the way a man brings tools to a job he means to help with and not supervise.
"Segundo does doctoring now?" she said.
"Segundo does whatever's in front of him. Hold still, mare." He set a broad hand on Petra's neck and the mare settled another notch, honest traitor. "How bad?"
"Shallow. Angry-looking and shallow, like most things she does." Etta worked the shears in short careful bites. "If you'd brace her rump a touch — she likes to lean, and I'd rather she didn't lean on the shears."
He braced. The clipping went on. And under Etta's hands, a little at a time, the brand came clear out of the hair.
The Flying S sat on top, bold and black-healed, the Association's mark, the one every rider in the territory knew. But underneath it — older, paler, grown into the hide the way a scar grows into a man — lay another brand entirely: a long shallow curve like the rocker of a chair, and under the curve, plain once you had seen it, an M.
Etta's shears did not stop. She had decided long ago — years ago, in a bunkhouse in Wyoming, with her whole plan spread out on a blanket like cards — that if this day ever came in a quiet corral with one man watching, she would not flinch from it. Flinching was a confession. She clipped one more careful bite and reached for the rag.
"Warm water," she said. "If you would."
Dan's hand had gone still on the mare's neck. He was looking at the hip. She could feel him looking at it the way you feel weather change.
"That's the Association's brand," he said at last.
"Flying S. You've seen it on half the horses between here and the Yellowstone."
"I have." A pause, weighted like a stone in a pocket. "I'm talking about the one under it."
The corral was very quiet. A magpie went over, complaining. Petra shifted and Dan braced her without thinking about it, and still his eyes stayed on the pale curve under the S.
Etta wrung out the rag and began to clean the sore, gentle and thorough, and chose her words the way she chose footing in bad country.
"Brands get altered, Mr. Whitaker," she said. "Generally by men who don't own what's under them. It's cheaper than breeding your own, and quicker, and it only costs somebody else everything they had."
She felt the sentence land. She had not lied. She had not told him anything, either, except the truth's bare shape, and she watched him take the weight of it and decide — she could see him decide, the way you watch a man at a swollen crossing decide the water — whether to press her for the rest of it.
"You come by this mare honest, Miss Marlow?" he asked.
"I did. She was foaled honest, too." Etta dabbed salve along the sore with two fingers. "What was done to her after wasn't. That's all the history I can give you today. I'd ask you not to sell it."
It was not a request she had planned to make. It came out of her anyway, and hung there in the corral air between them, and she hated the sound of it — a woman asking. Eight years she had asked nobody for anything.
Dan Whitaker lifted his hand off the mare's neck, slow, and took the rag from the bucket and handed it to her, and his face was the face of a man closing a gate softly instead of slamming it.
"Nobody's buying or selling at this trough," he said. "Sore'll want a week. I'd keep the hair long over that hip till she's healed — grows back thick on a roan. Less talk that way."
He walked out of the corral before she could answer, and Etta stood with the warm rag dripping in her hand, looking after him, understanding that the segundo of the Lazy J had just agreed — without a word of agreement being spoken — to hold her secret in his teeth for a while.
It was the first time in eight years that the load had rested, even a little, on somebody else's shoulders. She was not sure she liked it. She was not sure she didn't.
Chapter 8 — Eight Years Gone
The fence cutting had made the Lazy J careful, and careful ranches ride night watch over the remuda, so Dan took the first half of the dark and Etta took it with him — two riders being cheaper than forty horses, Jasper said, and twice as hard to steal.