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Silence crackles around him, his heart is afire
Galloping over open spaces, the gold of dawn.
He’d ride through a storm, the ice and snow
By iron-shod feet, toward the keeper of his flame.
Born of the land, tamed by her
The glow of her smile, the key to his joy.
She is his air, his hope, his love,
He is her cowboy, hers alone.
I turned the paper over a couple of times. No author, no address. Just a folded poem stuck in my pocket. Had I picked it up somewhere? Surely, I’d have remembered. I only wore my nice coat for going to town, but I’d worn it to church on Sunday. I couldn’t have forgotten something like this in that little time.
I reread the poem more slowly. Whoever wrote it had a gentle way with words and an expressive turn of mind. The way they described the hardships and glories of the life they loved was like a tender challenge to live, fully live, the moment one was given. It made me choke up a bit. I couldn’t know who had written it, of course, but it seemed to speak into my soul with the voice of a man. A man who knew honor and love and beauty and sacrifice.
And, apparently, a man who had to be from around here. I carried the page to my room to spread it on my dresser, where I could read it over and over again. But who wrote it?
Chapter 3
Dusty
“Snows’sreallycomin’downnow,” Luke announced as the door of my barn office slammed behind him. It created a gust that picked up and swirled my stack of feed invoices to the floor, and I jumped up to catch them.
“Darn it, Luke, I just got those sorted! Can you close the outside door next time before you come in?”
“Sorry.” He bent to help me collect the papers, but he wasn’t much help because the pile he handed me was rumpled and entirely out of order. It would have been easier for me to pick them up neatly, one at a time.
I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to Luke. I’d had nightmares for a week about him and… and I couldn’t even think of her name in the same sentence as his. Obviously, though, Luke didn’t notice my sour mood, and he wasn’t going to give me much choice in talking to him. I just sighed. “Thanks. Where are you coming back from?”
“Hardware store.”
“Oh, yeah?” I slid my laptop aside and wetted my finger to flip through the pages. “I hope you kept the receipt for me. What broke this time?”
“Nothin’. Just hangin’ out with the Langton boys. Gage has a new truck.”
“Don’t get any ideas. Yours is only two years old.”
“Yeah, but it’s got sixty thousand miles on it.”
I set the re-sorted stack of invoices down on my desk and deliberately placed a rock in the middle of them that I kept in my office for just that purpose—in case of Luke. “It’s your money, I guess. So, is Dad looking for me or something?”
Luke’s face crunched. “No. Why?”
“Why’d you come up here?”
“Oh! That. Wanted you to look at a horse I’d like to buy.” He pulled his phone out, touched the screen a few times, turned it sideways, and passed it to me.
I shouldn’t encourage him. I was still annoyed with him, and Luke had too many horses. But I never could stay mad at Luke, and when I saw the picture on his phone, I whistled in surprise. “Wow.”
“I know, right? She’s a beaut.”
“Gorgeous.” I tapped through the pictures, zooming and turning the phone with the angles of the photos to get a better view. It was a silvery gray mare, nearly white but for a chiseled black muzzle and large, liquid brown eyes. “Seven years old, fifteen-three hands. Where is she?”
“California. Been some guy’s wife’s trail horse, but he says she was originally trained as a header.”
