Chapter Eight
Greene Farm, Four Miles North of Collins Ranch, Montana Territory
The mare went over the fence on the first try.
All four feet clean off the ground. Eight hundred pounds of wild young blood clearing the top rail of Ben Greene’s round pen by a good four inches.
She landed on the far side in the hard dirt of the paddock and stood there for one triumphant second before Ben’s hand shot out.
The lead rope went taut. The whole enterprise came to a sharp stop.
The mare shook herself, blew hard through both nostrils, and looked at the assembled men with the expression of a creature who intended to try that again at the first opportunity.
“Well,” George said pleasantly, from his position on the top rail. “She’s a bold one.”
“She’s been over that fence twice this week,” Ben replied, keeping the lead rope steady and his voice flat. “I thought you two might have a suggestion.”
Wade stepped off the rail.
He walked across the paddock toward the mare at an angle, not direct.
His hands stayed loose at his sides, his eyes on her shoulder instead of her face.
He kept his boots quiet on the packed dirt.
He breathed steady and even. The mare’s ear flicked toward him.
She shifted her weight. Her nostrils opened.
He stopped, six feet off. He waited.
Ben Greene, who had been a sheriff for twelve years and a horseman for forty, watched from the fence and said nothing.
The mare blew again. Her head dropped two inches, lifted, and dropped again.
Wade took one step closer.
The mare held still.
He stood with the cold mountain air coming off the foothills in long, slow waves.
The air smelled of pine, frost, and the dry, dusty warmth of a horse that had been working hard for an hour.
He waited. The mare’s ear came toward him, swiveled, and stayed.
Then he reached out his left hand, knuckles down.
She stretched her nose and touched it.
“There,” Wade said to the mare.
George, from the fence rail, exhaled.
It took another forty minutes before the mare would take the saddle blanket, and another twenty after that before she stood for the girth.
Wade and Ben took turns, patient and deliberate, reading each small shift and deciding which ones to push through and which ones to give ground on.
The process was familiar to both men and they worked without much talk.
The morning moved across the paddock in slow degrees.
George brought the water bucket at ten o’clock and handed Wade a ladle.
“She’s softer in the left eye,” George observed, watching the mare at the far end of the lead.
“Yes,” Wade replied, drinking.
“Bad start somewhere.”
“Yes.”
He handed the ladle back.
George was, underneath his easy good humor and his habit of leaving gates unlatched, an excellent horseman.
He had their father’s patience with animals and their mother’s instinct for the soft place in a creature, and with horses and cattle he was very nearly as good as Wade.
With people, he moved more freely, more willingly, in a fashion Wade was only beginning to understand he lacked.
Ben Greene joined them at the water bucket.
He was a big man, broad through the chest and grey at the temples, with pale hard eyes that had seen a great deal of what men did to each other when they thought no one was watching.
Twelve years of being sheriff had given him that.
He had held the Collins family at arm’s length for nine of those years, with the careful distance of someone who respected his neighbors and trusted very few of them.
When Nora and Archie had died on the Helena road, Ben had ridden to the scene with his deputy and stood at the edge of the road with his hat in his hands, in absolute silence.
Wade had understood him in that silence.
They had been cautious friends since.
“She’ll be a good saddle horse,” Ben said, watching the mare. “When someone has the patience for her.”
“Two weeks,” Wade replied.
“You think?”
“She’s smart. Smart ones break faster when you go at them right.”
Ben studied the mare for a moment. “I could sell her to the army. They pay better than sense for a horse they can point at something.”
“She’s too good for the army,” Wade said evenly.
Ben made a sound that was not quite a laugh but might have been. He drank from the ladle and handed it back to George.
The kitchen door of the farmhouse opened.
Alice Greene came down the porch steps with a tray of biscuits and coffee held level in both hands. The blue calico of her dress moved across the frosted paddock grass. The shawl at her shoulder was pinned tight against the morning chill.
She handed the tray to George without looking at him.
“Pa,” she said warmly, setting a cup in her father’s hands. “Mr. Collins.”
“Miss Greene,” Wade replied.
She gave him the second cup.
She kept her eyes on her father as she did it. There was something careful in her face. Her attention stayed on her father. Only there.
Wade’s eyebrow moved a quarter inch. He looked at George. George was very busy with the rim of his coffee mug. Wade looked back at the tray.
George’s eyes stayed on the tray. His jaw carried a slightly elevated stillness, and the faint pink at the rim of his ear gave the stillness away.
Ben ate a biscuit.
He watched his horses in the paddock, and he watched his brother, too.
George took the coffee Alice handed him without lifting his eyes off the wooden tray.
Alice took the empty mug back without lifting her eyes off her father.
Ben drank his coffee and looked at the mare with the easy interest of a man inspecting a horse he had a small commission in, and he did not see his daughter’s hand pause for a half second above the biscuit at the corner of the tray.
Wade kept his face still and his eyes on the mare and filed the half second under a heading he had been keeping in the back of his head for nine months.
He’d always been a perceptive man, Ben Greene. Twelve years as sheriff had made him more so.
He turned to Wade.
“How’s the north fence line holding?” he asked.
“Better,” Wade replied. “I put six new posts from the draw to the creek bend.”
“Good. The wind will come hard from the northwest this year. I can feel it already.” Ben set his empty cup on the tray. “Your girl settling in?”
Wade’s hand stopped halfway to his mouth with the coffee mug at the level of his collarbone. He set it back down on the rail without drinking.
“She is,” Wade answered after a count, the words coming out flatter than intended.
“Inga Andersen wrote to my sister in Helena,” Ben replied.
He kept his eyes on the paddock. “My sister wrote to me last Tuesday. I have not seen Inga’s letter, but my sister reported the gist of it, and Inga does not write to my sister unless she has an opinion she needs to put somewhere.
” A pause. “My sister says Inga approves, for what it’s worth. ”
“Inga’s approval is worth a good deal,” Wade answered, setting his coffee mug back on the rail.
“Yes,” Ben agreed. “It is.”
He watched the mare a moment longer. The lines at the corners of his eyes tightened.
His tongue moved once at the inside of his cheek.
His mouth opened by a quarter inch and shut again, and his eyes flicked once to George before they came back to the mare.
Then, he set his hat back on and returned to the paddock without it.
Wade watched him go, setting his coffee mug down on the rail.
The wood was cold against the bottom of the cup.
The mare in the paddock had begun to follow Ben back to the post with her ear forward and her shoulder loose, and Wade kept his eyes on her shoulder because the alternative was looking at George, and George had been watching him out of the corner of one eye for the last twenty minutes.
George appeared at his shoulder with the last two biscuits.
“Have a biscuit, brother,” he said pleasantly.
“I already had one.”
“Have another. It’s good for the constitution.”
Wade let out a slow breath at the top rail. He took the biscuit out of George’s hand, ate it in two bites, and brushed the crumbs off his thumb against the leg of his trousers.
“Satisfied?”
“Halfway.”
“Halfway will have to do you.”
“Halfway is more than I had at breakfast.” George took the second biscuit off the tray for himself and bit into it.
Wade picked up his coffee mug. George ate his own biscuit with great contentment, and the two of them watched Ben work the mare in slow, patient circles at the end of the rope, and George said nothing for a comfortable while.
“She is remarkable,” George said after a comfortable while.
“The mare,” Wade answered, his eyes still on the paddock.
The corner of George’s mouth pulled.
“Yes. Also the mare.”
Wade kept his eyes on the paddock. He took a careful swallow of his coffee. Then, he set the mug down on the rail.
“George.”
“Yes, brother?” George answered, his face going studiously innocent in the manner of a younger brother who had heard that tone of voice across thirty years of suppers and knew exactly what was coming.
Wade kept his eyes on the mare.
“How long has the rim of your right ear been pink, brother?”
A small choking sound escaped George’s coffee.
“It’s the cold,” George managed, recovering.
“It is not the cold,” Wade returned, his voice carrying the dry edge he had been keeping at the back of his tongue for the better part of three weeks.
“It is a possibility that it is the cold,” George tried again, the rim of his ear darkening.
“George,” Wade said, the corner of his mouth pulling at last.
“Brother,” George answered, looking very hard at the bottom of his coffee.
“Alice is on the porch step with the empty tray and is looking at you across the yard for the third time in eight minutes. I counted.”
George set his coffee mug down on the rail very carefully.
“Brother,” George said, low.
“Yes, George?” Wade asked, his voice mild in a manner that fooled neither of them.