Page 95 of The Drifter

The dog was gone before the word finished. Out the door, off the porch, one gold streak flattening low over the yard and through the fence rail and out into all that country, running the way a thing runs when running is the whole of what it was made for.

I watched him shrink toward the dust plume where Clint had gone.

Then, Cash was up, and moving, and he looked at me once—just once, a hard, fast read, the same read his whole family did, the one that took your measure in the time it takes to turn a page.

"Stay by that phone," he said. "Don't leave this house."

And then, he was gone, too.

31

CLINT

The horse saw me coming and declared war.

He was a big gray, seventeen hands of him if there was an inch, standing in the middle of that corral with his tail up and his blood already hot. When I came through the gate at a dead run, he reared and boxed the air with both front hooves and came down hard enough to shake dust off the rails. He screamed at me. Not a whinny. A scream, a challenge, the sound a horse makes when he's beaten every man who's walked in and means to add one more to the count.

Any other day, I'd have given him an hour. Horses earn their attitudes same as men do. A horse this mad had been handled wrong by somebody, and the right way through that is patience.

I did not have patience. I had my mother at the end of a trail with a clock running.

There was a lariat hanging on the gate post, stiff with dust. My hands knew it before I did—built the loop on the move, my body running a program written into it before I could read. The gray watched me come and reared again, hooves cutting. I threw the loop under all that theater and took him around the neck and hauled.

He fought it. He fought it hard, backing, whipping his head, near lifting me off my boots. I planted, and worked down that rope hand over hand the way my father taught all seven of us, and I brought his head down. All the way down. Down to mine, his eye level with my eye, my fist in the rope right under his jaw.

"Listen to me," I told him, low, from about six inches. "I've got no time for you. Right now, in this fight, I am the big dog. That's over. Decide."

He tried to rear. I yanked him back down, hard, no give in it anywhere.

His ears went flat back. His nostrils flared wide, blowing hot air in my face. He stamped, and the muscles under that gray hide were jumping like a storm coming.

"Don't try me."

We locked eyes.

There's a moment with a horse. Anybody raised with them knows it. It doesn't come from breaking and it doesn't come from sugar—it comes when the animal looks all the way into you and takes a reading of exactly what you are. You'd better be what you're claiming, because a horse cannot be lied to. That gray looked into me and found whatever was in there—the clock, my mother, the whole burning day—and something shifted behind that big, dark eye.

He snorted. Once. Disgusted. A king signing a treaty he'd be revisiting.

But when I swung up onto his bare back and got a fistful of mane, he didn't rear.

He bolted.

The gate stood open. He went through it like a bullet leaving a gun. I nearly went off the back of him in the first three strides—no saddle, no rein, nothing under me but a half-ton of furious muscle and nothing in my hands but mane and the loose end of a lariat. I clamped my legs down and got low over his neck and held on for my life.

He hit the southfork trail like he'd read it out of my head.

Maybe he had. A horse feels everything—the seat, the legs, the intent coming down through a man's hands—and every ounce of me was pointed down that trail. He took the pointing and ran it. The ranch fell away behind us. The country opened up.

And in the middle of the worst ten minutes of my life, some ancient piece of me came awake and sang.

This trail. This exact trail. The caliche going pale ahead through the scrub, the ocotillo standing up like burning wire, the arroyo cutting in from the east, the mountains laid blue and low along the far edge of everything. I'd run away down this trail on foot as a boy—every time, this one, the southfork, because it went the direction he'd gone—and now, I was running it on a devil of a horse with the wind ripping my eyes to water, hunting my mother where I used to hunt my father.

The land came at me and came at me and I knew every rise before it rose. The gray's hooves hit the hardpan like a drumline. Jackrabbits blew out of the brush ahead of us and scattered. Somewhere overhead, a hawk was surely watching two fools run flat-out through the heat of the day. The whole gold world poured past, and I rode it the way I was raised to ride it.

I risked the watch.

Five minutes gone.