The wheeler threw a shoe in the first rocky mile of the morning, and Gid knew it by the sound before he saw it — a wrong note in the team's rhythm, iron gone quiet where iron should ring. He halted them in a flat of creosote and went back along the line. The off wheeler stood favoring the forefoot, the shoe gone entirely, the hoof wall split at two nail holes where the iron had torn away.
"Walked out of it clean, at least," he said to the mule, who had no opinion.
He got the tool roll from under the seat and the spare shoes from the box, and was working the rasp when a board creaked behind him in the wagon bed. The woman came over the tailgate in the gray light like she'd been born to it, one hand on the canvas bow, the other nowhere near her pistol. She had slept in her clothes. She looked at the raised hoof, the rasp, the mule.
"You want me to hold him or shoe him?" she said.
"You know which end of a rasp is which?"
"I know which end of a mule is which, which is more than most." She came down off the wheel without being asked and took the hoof between her knees the way farriers do, easy and certain, and worked the rasp in short strokes, cleaning the wall down to sound horn. Her hands were quick and they were not soft. A woman who had spent her life at a piano or a needle does not hold a clinch cutter like a tool she has paid for with her own money.
Gid set the shoe cold, the way trail work demands. She held, he nailed, she clinched. Neither of them spoke until the hoof was down and the mule had tested it and found it honest.
"Where'd you learn that?" he said.
"Where'd you?" she said, and wiped her hands on her skirt, and that was the whole of the answer he got.
The harness gave them the second lesson. The lead pair went in willing; the swing team fussed; and the near wheeler — a black, wall-eyed, and set in his opinions — balked at the collar the way he did one morning in three, planting himself and rolling his eye at the work ahead. Gid did his usual: patience, a hand on the neck, no whip. She watched one minute.
"His hame strap's twisted on the far side," she said. "It's been pinching him since yesterday, I'd guess. He's not stubborn. He's sore."
Gid went around and found it — the strap turned half over where it passed the ring, leather on a raw place the size of a coin. He straightened it and salved the spot from the jar he kept, and the black mule sighed like a man unburdened and stepped into the collar without another word. She had called it from ten feet, by the set of the animal's ear as much as by anything. She scratched the mule's forehead with her knuckles, familiar as family.
"Seems to me," Gid said, "a body learns mules by living with mules."
"Seems to me a body learns most things by living with them."
That night, at the dry camp he chose off the road, she asked after his rifle where it lay across his knees — asked it plainly, the way men ask, which no woman of his acquaintance had ever done. He handed it over. She worked the lever once, smooth, not fumbling for it; held it to the firelight and looked down the bore; ran a thumb over the muzzle crown.
"Been shot a sight," she said. "Still true, though. Somebody's kept it clean and kept it honest." She handed it back butt-first, muzzle down and away, the way a person does who has been taught young and never untaught. "Your pistol's a working gun too. Forty-four?"
"Forty-four forty."
"A rifle that eats what the pistol eats. That's a thinking man's outfit." She said it without flattery, as an observation, and looked back at the fire. "My father kept a ten-gauge by the door and a Colt in the flour bin. Said a house ought to be able to speak in two voices."
It was the first true-sounding thing she'd offered about her people, and Gid noticed he believed it before he decided to. He also noticed the rest — the rasp, the hame strap, the bore held to the light. Whatever Anna was running from, she had not been raised in a parlor. She had been raised the way he had: by people whose hands were their living.
He put another stick on the fire and did not ask her any of the questions standing in line in his mind. He had a rule about freight. It was getting harder to remember why the rule applied to a woman who could shoe a mule and call a twisted strap from the set of an ear — but a rule you only keep when it's easy isn't a rule. It's a preference.
"You'll want to be under the canvas before the moon's up," he said. "Road'll be watched from here in, I expect."
"Will it?" she said. "Yes," she said, answering herself. "I expect it will." And she went, quiet as smoke, into the dark of the wagon.
Chapter 7 — The Station Keeper's Questions
The middle station sat in a wide pan of white dirt with a well, a corral of mesquite poles, and an adobe house that had been added onto so many times it looked surprised at itself. A windmill turned and complained, turned and complained. Enoch Pyle came out of the door before the wagon had fully stopped, wiping his hands on his apron, smiling with his mouth a full second before his eyes agreed to it.
"Gid Mercer," he said. "Praise be. Road give you any trouble?"