They rode the edge of the horse pasture at a walk, far enough apart to cover ground, close enough for talk when talk came. The night was the deep blue kind Montana keeps for late summer, the stars thick as salt, the grass loud under the hooves. Somewhere out in the dark an owl was working the fence line for mice, unconcerned with the affairs of men.
"Coffee's in my saddlebag," Dan said, "if you're the kind that can drink it at a walk."
"I'm the kind that can drink it at a gallop. It's one of my accomplishments."
He passed the tin cup across the space between the horses like a man handing over a letter. "You've got a few of those. Where'd you learn horses, Miss Marlow? And don't say 'around.' Around's a big country."
Etta drank. The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in and she was grateful for it, and for the dark, which made what she was about to do possible. She had not decided to do it. That was the thing she would remember later — she had not decided at all.
"I knew a family once," she said. "A far piece from here. Man bred horses — bred them the way some men build churches, like it was the thing he was for. Best string in his country. He was not rich. He was rich in horses, which is a different currency, and it spends poorly when men come for it."
Dan rode quiet.
"There were men in that country who wanted what he'd built and didn't want to spend the years building it. That's the usual arrangement, I expect you've noticed. So they arranged it on paper first — paper is quiet, paper doesn't scream — and then one night in the fall they came with torches and ropes, and they took the whole string off in the dark, and they fired the house to tidy the story, and by the time the county got around to writing it down, it was a sale. Everything legal. Everything signed."
"And the family?" Dan said.
"The man got his girl out. That's what he did with the time he had — he got his girl and one yearling colt out the back way, down the creek, in the dark, with the fire going up behind them. And then that winter he died of it. Not burned. Not shot. He died of it, in a rented room with the stove gone cold, coughing, with nothing left in the world to get up for. A man can die of having his life stolen off him same as a bullet. It just takes till winter."
Her voice stayed level all the way through, which cost more than she would ever tell anyone. The tin cup was empty. She held it a moment longer than she needed to.
"And the girl?" Dan said, very quietly.
"The girl went to breaking horses." Etta smiled in the dark, and it was not a happy expression, but it was a true one. "It was the only trade she had. Turns out she was good at it. Turns out there wasn't much else the world was offering a woman with one yearling and another man's brand burned over—" She stopped. She heard the sentence finish itself in the silence anyway. "—over her family's mark," she said, more carefully. "On the yearling. You understand."
"I understand a fair amount, Miss Marlow."
They rode a quarter mile without a word, the horses blowing soft, the stars wheeling the slow way they do when a person is watching them and thinking.
"That's a hard story," Dan said at last.
"It's not a story. That's the worst of it. Somewhere up north there's a girl telling it the other way around, maybe — saying it's just a story somebody told her. Safer that way, some nights." She held out the cup. "Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Whitaker."
He took it. His hand found hers around the tin in the dark with an accuracy that had nothing to do with eyesight.
"If that girl ever wanted witnesses," he said, "she might find this valley has got a longer memory than it lets on at the trough. Some folks in it, anyway."
"Some folks in it," she agreed, "have already surprised me."
The relief rider came up out of the dark below the pasture gate, whistling to announce himself, and the watch changed, and whatever had been said between the segundo and the horse breaker went back into the keeping of the night where it belonged. Etta rode down toward the corral and the lantern light with her shoulders lower than they had been in eight years, carrying the strange, light, frightening knowledge that she had told the truth to a living soul — nearly all of it, in the wrong names — and that the world had not ended, and the horses had not scattered, and the stars had not fallen out of the sky.
She slept that night in the bunkhouse with her boots off, which she had not done on any job in eight years, and woke before the bell with the strange feeling that the valley had shifted an inch in the dark — toward her, or away from her, she could not yet tell.
Chapter 9 — The Maverick Law
The notice went up on the courthouse door in Cedar Bluff on a Tuesday, nailed over the top of last spring's tax list, and by noon half the town had read it standing in the street with their hats in their hands.