It was a fine piece of paper. It had a seal on it. It said that for the orderly management of the range, the county would henceforth treat all unbranded cattle and horses, and all estray stock found running on the open range after the first of the month, as subject to gather by the Cattlemen's Association, to be held at the Association pens, and to be claimed by owners presenting proof and paying the costs of gather and feed within thirty days — failing which, the stock would be sold at auction and the proceeds applied to the range fund.
A man with forty head and two sons could not pay gather fees on a hundred calves the Association chose to call estrays, and everyone standing in that street knew it, and knew whose grass the auction money would fatten, and whose children would go without shoes while it did.
Old Man Teague read it twice, out loud, the second time slower, for the men who couldn't read. When he got to proof and paying the costs he stopped and looked around the street.
"Proof," he said. "Thirty days. And the costs of their gather priced by themselves. Boys, that's not a law. That's a net."
By evening, the valley had come to the Lazy J.
They came the way country people come to a meeting that matters — in wagons and on horseback, with children and coffee and the look of folks who have done the arithmetic of their own ruin. Ben Herrera brought Luisa and a tally book in a flour sack. A widow from the north fork brought her brand papers in her apron pocket. Two brothers from the dry side brought nothing but their tempers, which were considerable. Dan built up the fire in the yard and Jasper had his chair carried down off the porch to the cottonwoods, because, he said, a man does his standing sitting down at seventy or he doesn't do it long.
The talk went round the fire the way talk does — grievance first, then fear, then the naming of the thing underneath both.
"It's our calves they're after," Ben Herrera said. "A calf that misses the branding because the cow hid him in the brush — that's an unbranded calf. Thirty days and a fee I haven't got, and my calf is sold to pay for the privilege of being gathered by the men who gathered him."
"Estrays," the widow said. "My husband's horses stray onto open range every winter of his life. It isn't straying. It's grazing. They've just found a word for it that sounds like stealing isn't."
"They found the word years ago," somebody said. "Now they've found the paper for it."
Etta stood at the edge of the firelight with a coffee cup she wasn't drinking, and watched the valley gather itself. It was the thing she had crossed three territories to see — not a gunfight, not a posse, nothing with a rope in it. Just neighbors in a yard, saying the true names of things out loud where the others could hear them. A thing said by one frightened man alone was gossip. A thing said by forty people around one fire was a fact, and facts, she had learned in eight years of paper and patience, were the one crop Stanton could not burn.
Jasper Whitaker raised one hand. The yard quieted the way a church quiets, out of long habit of listening to him.
"I've run cattle in this valley forty years," he said, "and I have never once needed a law to tell me which calves were mine. I know my neighbors' stock better than I know my own, and so does every honest man standing here. This ordinance isn't about strays. It's about making the big outfit the law, and the rest of us tenants on our own grass. Well." His old voice did not rise, and it carried to the fence line anyway. "I am too old to become a tenant. The Lazy J's name goes on the petition to the territorial delegate, first line, and any man or woman whose stock is seized under this foolishness can bring their tally to my door and I'll stand their proof with them — and if the Association wants to argue the matter, they can argue it with all of us at once, which I notice is the one arrangement Colonel Stanton has never cared for."
The fire cracked. Somebody's child slept through it against a wagon wheel.
"Hear him," Teague said, into the quiet. "Write it down, somebody. The old man's still got his teeth."
Dan wrote it down — names first, then the words under them, in his plain segundo's hand, while Etta held the lantern. The petition went the length of the yard and came back full. Driving home under the late stars, wagon after wagon turned off into the dark with their lamps lit, and it seemed to Etta, riding at the back of them all with Petra warm under her, that the valley looked less like a scattered flock than it had that morning — and more like a herd that had finally turned, all together, to face the same direction.
Chapter 10 — Mateo and the Mare
Mateo Herrera was ten years old, solemn as a judge, and in love — hopelessly, entirely, and with his whole visible soul — with Petra.
He had first seen the mare at the Lazy J when his father came to sign the petition, and had conducted himself ever since like a young man with a serious matter on his hands. When Etta rode over to the Herrera place on the Thursday with a message from Jasper, she found the boy waiting at their gate with his hat in his hand and a scrubbed face, standing the way a person stands at the door of a church.