certainties where his life could go was not going to become one more
certainty laid across hers. What he owed her was the road open, in both
directions.
They said it at the windmill the evening before, because that was where it
had started and Enola, who had a feeling for such symmetries that she would
have denied having, chose the place herself. The pump was turning slow in
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the evening air, creaking its old song, filling the trough by inches. Roach
stood hipshot in the corral with his head down, half asleep, the picture of a
horse who believes supper is a law of nature. Wade checked the trough level
out of the habit of his hands and found he had nothing to do with them after
that, so he let them hang.
"You will come back in the autumn," Enola said, "when the horses come
down." It was not a question, but it was not a command either. It was a thing
she was setting between them to see if it would stand.
"The horses will come down," Wade said. "That's the agreement."
"I did not ask about the agreement."
He looked at her then. She stood in the windmill's long shadow with her
braid over one shoulder, already half in the dress of her own people again,
and her face had the patience of somebody who can afford to wait out a
man's honesty because she has never once been in a hurry about her own.
"Enola," he said, "I ain't going to be the fence across your road. Not in either
direction. Your father got his valley back. You got a summer that's yours. I'm
not going to stand here and make a claim on it with gratitude — that's just
Barlow's way with better manners."
Something in her face eased that he hadn't known was braced. "My father
says a man is known by what he does when there is no one to pay him for it,"
she said. "You paid full price for a stranger, Wade Sutter. You paid it when
the price was everything, and there was no one in this territory keeping the
account but you." She stepped closer, and the trough went on filling, patient
as time. "My people do not forget such a debt. And I do not call it debt."
She would not tell him what she did call it, and he understood that asking
was another kind of fence, so he didn't. She rode out at first light with her
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father's two men, sitting her horse the way water finds a course, easy and
inevitable, and she did not look back — which Wade took, correctly, as
Apache honesty rather than coldness: what was behind her was settled, and
she rode facing what wasn't. He watched until the dust of them took the trail
out of sight, and then he went and got his tools, because the windmill gearing
had a tooth going and the summer was not going to wait for a man to finish
feeling things.
The autumn was full of work the way a good trough is full of water — to the
brim and without effort showing. The partnership remuda came down out of
the valley in strings of eight and ten, young horses with more opinion than
education, and Wade worked them in the round pen his neighbors' lumber
had built: the first touch, the first rope, the first saddle, the long education in
discovering that a man could be trusted. He had a gift that amounted to a
philosophy — he never asked a horse for the second thing until it understood
the first — and the Apache horses, bred keen and quick, came around under
his hands like they were remembering something. There was one blue roan
colt in the second string who nearly revised Wade's opinion of his own gift.
The horse had a solemn, long-jawed face that earned him the name Preacher
from the men who helped with the pen work, and he had evidently been
appointed by his whole tribe to test the new arrangement; he threw himself
backward on the first rope, struck at the sack, and stood afterward in the
middle of the pen trembling with his ears flat, a horse who had decided in
advance that whatever men were, they were the thing that had chased his
people across three territories, and he was not wrong enough about it to make
the work easy. Wade did not hurry him. He worked him four days in pieces
an ordinary man would have called too small to count — the smell of his
hand first, then the touch of it; the rope lying on the ground near his feet until
the rope was furniture; the saddle blanket as a rumor, then a fact, then a bore.
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"A horse ain't scared of the thing itself," he told the colt, somewhere in the
third day, in the low, even voice he used for all of them. "He's scared of
being hurried into it. Same as anybody. The whole art is not hurrying." On
the fifth morning Preacher took the saddle with no more protest than a sigh,
and stood under it looking faintly betrayed that the end of the world had been
postponed, and Wade gentled the girth one hole at a time and felt the
particular quiet that comes into a pen when an animal decides — not submits,
decides — to find out what you are. He rode him at a walk around the pen
before noon, both of them grave as judges, and he thought that if the territory
wanted to know what his partnership with Ojo Caliente amounted to, it
amounted to exactly this and could not be said any plainer in a courthouse.
His claim took shape around the work: buildings again, fences mended, the
water filing upheld and recorded in the county book in a clerk's fair hand, his
name in the registry of the draw spelled right and owing nothing to anybody.
Men who had crossed the street in October now stopped their wagons at his
gate to ask his eye on a green colt, and paid him in cash and in the territory's