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Micah nodded.
“Yep. Ain’t never been rode—but not for lack of tryin’. Started him right after Christmas, with the rest of my string.”
As if to show how tough he was, the horse sat back on the rope and started pulling, hooves scrabbling.
“Here now! Here! Stop that, you big fool.”
Micah limped alongside the trailer and took hold to climb up on the fender, which made the horse lunge forward into the rattling bars. His rear feet slid up to his front ones and then, fast and impossible as a magician’s trick, he slipped his forefeet up between his body and the wall and managed to rear, going higher and higher, one leg on each side of the rope that tied his head up short.
“If he tries to come over the top he’ll break his neck,” Micah yelled. “Keep him in there ’til I can get another rope.”
But the colt had already started choking, eyes rolling. He twisted his head and his right forefoot slid off the top and lodged in between two of the beat-up bars of the trailer. He jerked sideways and wedged it in tighter.
“Forget the rope,” Blue called toward the truck, without taking his eyes off the colt. “Come here and hold his head.”
He broke out in a sweat. Suddenly he wanted this colt freed safely. It was the first time he’d let himself want anything for a long time.
Micah came back at a lurching run and Blue held out a cautioning hand without looking at him.
“Easy,” he said. “Easy, now.”
He was talking to all three of them, but mostly to himself.
The small, neat hoof had plunged through a wide space between the bent bars, but now the tender ankle was in a much narrower spot, held tight. Blue grunted comfort to the horse as he and Micah moved slowly toward him.
“It’ll take us both,” Blue said in a soothing tone. “Stand on the fender, hold his head, and get ready to grab the hoof. I’ll spread the bars.”
The colt trembled with fear so strong Blue could smell it. His eyes rolled white and his nostrils flared. They didn’t have long until he hurt himself bad. No, until he hanged himself.
“Got yourself in trouble, huh?” Blue murmured to him as he climbed up onto the fender. “Huh?”
He began a rhythmic “huh, huh, huh,” the old calming sound that mimicked a horse’s own talk, and set his feet as far apart as the space permitted. He glanced sideways as Micah stepped up there, too, and took hold of the halter.
The roan colt was on the sharp edge of panic. The air was filled with it.
Blue felt shaky inside. He hadn’t done anything—actually done anything remotely important in too long. But he had to do this now. He took hold of the two bars and put his back into separating them. It was a lot harder than he expected but when he pulled them apart and bent them out at the same time, he could make enough room. Micah grabbed the hoof and turned it, pushed it back into the trailer, gave it back into the roan’s control.
The colt dropped to the floor and stood, trembling.
Micah and Blue looked at him, then at each other. Micah grinned and Blue felt an answering grin lift the corners of his mouth. Micah let go of the halter and checked the tie knot. They stepped down to let the colt have a little space.
“Damned if he didn’t nearly hang his ornery self right here,” Micah said. “I allus say there ain’t no limit to what kind of a fix a hoss can git hisself into.”
Blue looked at the roan’s shiny hide glistening with the sweat of fear. He knew the feeling.
“Royally bred for a cutting horse,” Micah said, as they stood and watched the young horse get his wits back together again, “even if he’s too big for one and acts like a crazy no-name on top of that.”
“Maybe he never heard the old saying, ‘Blood will tell.’”
Micah Thompson didn’t answer. When Blue finally looked at him again, his eyes had taken on a glint of humor.
“It will tell sometimes, and then again it won’t,” Micah said, still studying him.
Then he added, “This sucker hates the sight of a cow.”
That made Blue’s smile widen and he laughed out loud. He hardly recognized the feeling or the sound.
The horse kicked then, and snorted at them as if they weren’t taking him seriously enough. Blue laughed again.
“God knows I’m too crippled up to fork the big bastard,” Micah Thompson said. “If’n I kin make a hundred or two on him, he’s down the road.”
He turned and started walking to the truck as if he expected Blue to go with him. With another look at the chastened colt, Blue followed.
“It’s not far to my place,” Micah said as he started around to the driver’s side. “Couple of hours as the crow flies. I’ve got a few more for sale, too, if you’re thinking you might want somethin’ different.”
Blue stopped.
“Or if you can ride, I could use some help with the whole bunch of twos,” Micah said. “That is, if you happen to need a job.”
He opened his door and got in behind the wheel. Blue hesitated only another second, then he walked to the passenger door and got into the old truck.
His hands were shaking just a little, so he spread them flat on his knees. In ten years he might’ve lost his balance and every trick he knew for staying on a rank one.
But he felt his lips curve again in the stupid grin. That roan devil behind him would make him remember how to ride or wish he never had tried. That horse would make him know he was alive again, at least for a little while.
He twisted in his seat and looked back. Horses had been living only in his dreams and his memory for so long and this one was real.
The roan was lifting his muzzle into the wind, real as the cracked glass of the window between them. Blue felt the blood rise in his veins.
The feel of a horse beneath him. That sweet challenge of swinging up onto a new one and finding out how to learn the secrets he had in his heart, what all he could do and would do with his four legs and thousand pounds of muscle and sinew. Bronc or ranch horse or cutter or anything else, Blue had never stepped on a new one without feeling that fierce, wild thrill.
“This here’s a pretty day,” Micah said, pushing down hard on the gas pedal. “Reckon it’s good to see summer comin’ on again.”
Getting hooked up with this old man and trying this colt was all right. He had a job and a place to stay now, at least.
This was okay. He’d known a hundred men like Micah Thompson when he was a kid.
“He’s still a stud, you said?” he asked.
“Yep. Reckon that might account for his meanness. A couple of swipes of the knife and he’ll likely turn into a pussycat.”
Blue slanted a look at him. “Not entirely, I’d say.”
Micah gave an evil chuckle.
“Told you you was a horseman, didn’t I?”
I used to be. I don’t yet know what all I’ve lost. Or will lose again.
Micah began ranting on about the characteristics of a real horseman, giving examples from a long list of the best horsemen he had known down through the years. He was talking as much to himself as to Blue, so Blue tuned him out as the miles rolled past his window.
The power of the mountains began taking him over, filling him up with their fierceness, an excitement nearly as strong as the one that had come with his first glimpse of the roan. Great Spirit of the Earth and Sky, how had he lived ten years without being out among the hills and mountains, the trees and the plains, ten years without laying his hand on a horse’s warm flesh?
Or a woman’s. Ten years without the touch of a woman.
No mountains and no horses and no tenderness for that long time. It was a miracle he hadn’t died.
But he hadn’t. That meant he could do anything he had to do. He had already gone through the worst.
He stared out of the truck as if his head couldn’t turn. It couldn’t. He couldn’t get enough of looking.
Or of smelling the wind and hearing it. Or of tasting fresh air on his tongue and feeling the worn paint of the truck door smooth beneath his hand. He wanted to hang his head out the window and soak it all up through his pores. They drove on and on and the farther they traveled, the freer he felt.
The land was huge. The sky was enormous. The day he’d arrived in Montana, following Dannie and her scumbag boyfriend, that was what had struck him. The sky could be big in Oklahoma. The hills there could feel like they were going on and on forever in layers out to the edge of the earth and then lifting into the sky, but when a person hit Montana it was like God had opened up his hand and laid out all the freedom in the world for whoever was brave enough to take it.
Something deep within him, something too unformed to be a memory, awakened from sleeping in his bones. Tanasi Rose had returned to Oklahoma when he was nearly two years old and Dannie not yet born, but his spirit knew this place.
“Always good to see spring, ain’t it?” Micah said.
Blue didn’t answer. The sun shone with such a yellow power that his eyes watered in its glare. The breeze blew in through the open window and dried the sudden wetness on his cheeks.
Maybe he would take this gift of spring and not think about what else he had to do until later in the summer.
He turned away from the thought and looked back at the roan. The horse was staring off across the wide spaces, thinking of freedom, too.
The old truck slowed at last.
“This here’s our turnoff,” Micah said. “Be about three more miles to my place.”
He turned west onto gravel.
The road led them north and west, winding down, then up and over, each rise a little less than its drop on the other side. It crossed a cattle guard, then a creek, running fast and wide over rocks.
“Looky yonder,” Micah said, flicking one gnarled finger toward the windshield as they started uphill again. “Whitetails.”
Three deer, surprisingly close, bolted. They crossed the road and vanished in among some cedar trees before Blue could realize he’d actually seen them in the flesh, but still his blood thrilled from the glimpse of their wildness.
Micah mashed the brakes as they lurched downward to a low-water bridge over a deeper creek with steeper banks than the first, then gunned the old truck as it labored up the next rising hill. They topped it and picked up speed on the way down as if the rattling trailer pushed the truck to go faster.
Blue looked down into a wide, grassy valley with mountains on the horizon, with trees gathered together in long sweeps of woods, with grain fields and pastures.
With buildings enough to make a town.
Black-topped roads running in every direction made him think for a minute that it was a town. But it was a ranch headquarters, with barns and bunkhouses, pens and shops and sheds flung all over the place. A big house at the heart of it with flags flying in front must be the main house.
What a dream, set in a sweet, protected valley.
They kept on rolling down the hill while Blue stared, trying to put it all together with the falling-down rig Micah drove. The closer they came to the valley, the more it was clear that this was headquarters to a big operation, one that had been there for many a year, one that was prospering.
Micah sure seemed to be a broken-down cowboy without much in the way of possessions but appearances could deceive. Or maybe, more likely, he just worked here. Lived in the bunkhouse, maybe. He was too stove up to work.
The road took another bend to run along a ridge above the ranch, then began curving in easy switchbacks leading down into the valley. Through the pines, Blue saw a truck with a hay spike on the back driving away from one of the farthest barns. It looked like a toy in the distance.
“That there’s where I live,” Micah said, as his rig left the gravel road for the asphalt.
He was pointing to a log house and barn nestled onto a low knoll at the base of this west-facing hill. Before Blue could open his mouth to ask who lived in the big house, the sound of a diesel motor came chugging up the last little rise to meet them.
Micah glanced at the driver and slowed to a stop. The other truck stopped, too. It was new and white under the mud that had splattered up onto the doors. Nice truck. One ton flatbed with a crew cab.
The front door bore a brand painted in black and gold, two parallel serpentine lines, elongated versions of the letter S, with the word Wagontracks arching above them. The driver leaned out the window to glance at the roan.
“Micah,” he said, “what are you asking for that hayburner you’re hauling?”
Micah grinned and shook his head.
“Save your breath, Pickle. I’m sellin’ this one to somebody who can ride ’im.”
They talked some more but Blue was only dimly aware of the sound and took in none of their meaning. He was caught up in reading the words that formed a crescent below the Wagontracks brand.
Splendid Sky Ranch.
When the other truck had downshifted and gone growling on its way, Blue spoke, even though he had to push his breath past the pounding of his heart.
“Where’s the Splendid Sky?”
“You’re sittin’ on it, son,” Micah said. “That’s the headquarters right down there.”
CHAPTER TWO
MICAH DROVE ON.
“Yes sir,” he said, “this here’s the Splendid Sky Ranch. Gordon Campbell’s place is famous all over the West.”
He cocked his head and shot a sharp glance at Blue from under the brim of his hat.
“You ever heard of it?”
Blue met his gaze. He had to do it to prove he could conceal his shock and he did.
“Sure, everybody’s heard of the Wagontracks horses,” Micah said, “and I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t a line of ranch horses anywhere, including them famous ones in Oklahoma and Texas that can measure up to ours.”
Blue couldn’t even listen to him. How, in the name of all that was holy, had he ended up here so soon? He didn’t have his balance yet—hell, he wasn’t even used to trying to see in the sunshine.
“I started every horse in the Wagontracks cavvy for fifty year,” Micah said. “For the main ranch. How many head you reckon that amounts to?”
Blue’s gut clenched as he looked out his window at the main ranch. Gordon could be down there in the big headquarters house right now. Or out there in that pickup zipping down the paved, black road that led away from it. Or he could be that tiny man on top of the tiny horse way off riding across the pasture.
Micah answered his own question. “More’n a thousand head, and that guess is a little on the low side,” he said, pride lacing his voice. “Yessir, Blue, back then, I could ride ’em.”
