Part 4
Grant remained beside the open gate for a moment. Then he put his hands in his pockets and returned to the truck.
Claire latched the gate after Flint. As Grant backed around, she saw his eyes lift to the rearview mirror, drop, and lift again.
She took the halter off and hung it on its nail. Twenty-five hundred was a generous offer for the horse people still asked her about with a grin. Grant hadn’t looked particularly generous while making it.
By October, the measurements showed nearly three hundred and ninety pounds gained. Flint stood at about eleven hundred and thirty now, with muscle beginning to cover his back and a clear gold coat beneath the last of the dead hair. Claire had worked through the mane a little each evening for six weeks. It fell black against his neck, and the dark line along his spine was visible again.
There was nothing supernatural about him. Fed and cared for, he was a well-made ranch gelding. Then he would move, and Claire would remember Owen standing motionless with a hay strap in his hand.
The Aldens called just before their October gather. Their hired man had broken his wrist, and they had two days to replace him before bringing four hundred cow-calf pairs off the summer country.
Claire offered to come. She took Flint because the work needed doing and he was fit enough now to do his share.
Nine riders met at the corrals. Three had been at the July auction. One recognized the buckskin and looked from him to Claire, but there was no time for questions before they spread out.
Flint took the outside wing. When the cattle slowed, he shortened his steps. When they stretched toward a gap, he adjusted his place without crowding them. Claire found herself asking for less as the morning went on.
In the afternoon, a dry cow slipped out and made for a sagging place in the fence. She had a good thirty yards on the nearest rider.
Claire began to move her rein.
Flint left the herd on an angle. Instead of following the cow’s tail, he went directly to the opening and reached it first. He stood there, facing her.
The cow braked, tossed her head, and turned back toward the others.
No rope came out. No one shouted. By the time Claire could have explained what she’d intended, Flint was walking back to his position.
Across the slope, a rider lowered the hand he’d raised to signal. Another sat with his mouth slightly open. The only sound close by was a calf calling for its mother.
Russell Keene arrived the next Sunday in a pickup clean enough to show the clouds in its doors. Claire was scraping mud from a water trough when he walked to the fence.
He admired Flint’s recovery. He asked after the hay supply. Then he offered eight thousand dollars.
“No, thank you,” Claire said, setting the scraper down.
“Twelve.”
She looked up. He hadn’t given her time to wipe her hands.
“I’m not selling him.”
Russell’s smile held for another second.
“Claire. You paid sixty dollars.”
“You could’ve bid.”
He drew breath, looked past her at the horse, and let it out through his nose. She waited until he returned to the truck before picking up the scraper.
Her pulse was still running too fast. She took a little more satisfaction in his departure than she cared to examine.
On Tuesday, a stranger from Elvar pulled a stock trailer into the drive and asked about the buckskin. Elvar was two and a half hours away.
On Wednesday, two trucks arrived. One belonged to an outfit across the mountains. By Friday, four vehicles stood along the ditch outside her fence, and a woman in a wool vest was photographing Flint through a long camera lens.
The figures rose with each visit. Fifteen thousand. Twenty-two. A man who’d driven from Kansas after a single telephone conversation said thirty thousand and asked how soon she could have him ready.
Claire gave him no date.
That evening, she carried a pencil and a scrap of paper onto the porch. She could understand twelve thousand for Flint as an exceptionally useful ranch horse. Fifteen, certainly. On a favorable day, to somebody who needed exactly what he could do, perhaps twenty.
Thirty thousand required something more than a story from the Aldens’ gather. These people weren’t all coming to appraise the horse in her paddock. Several had asked questions that sounded less like inquiries than checks against information they already possessed.
She called Owen.
He arrived the next morning, and she met him with her phone. First she showed him the saddle stamp. Then she haltered Flint and lifted the hair beneath his left jaw.
She’d found the scar while grooming him: a narrow pale line, nearly two inches long, easy to overlook until the dirt and rough coat were gone.
Owen bent close. He asked her to move the halter strap, then stood back.
“Tell me the stamp again.”
“T.R. Seventeen.”
He walked to the flatbed and lowered himself onto its tailgate. This time he didn’t pretend his hips were the reason he needed to sit.
“There was a place south of Ivara. Torven. Small operation, never much over thirty horses. Six foals one year, seven another. You didn’t see their ads because they didn’t need any.”
Claire kept her hand against Flint’s cheek.
“The woman who ran it,” Owen continued, “bred for a horse you could think with. Good bone mattered, but the mind came first. She kept them and put a foundation on them for four years. Through the last decade, working horsemen waited for whatever she’d let go.”
“The letters?”
“Torven ranch. She didn’t brand her horses. She marked the tack assigned to them, initials and foaling year.” He looked toward the shop. “Seventeen would fit.”
He left without finishing his hay-delivery coffee. After dark, his headlights swept the kitchen window again.
The box he carried contained old sale books, several held together with rubber bands. Claire cleared her table, and they worked through them beneath the hanging light.
In a thin 2019 prospect booklet, Owen stopped turning pages.
There were six Torven horses listed. The fourth was a buckskin gelding born in May 2017, out of a mare the breeder called the finest cow horse she’d raised. The photograph was poorly printed, but the colt stood square in good grass, his coat sleek, his back marked by a dark stripe.
Owen brought the lamp closer. Beneath the colt’s left jaw was a small pale mark.
Claire read the registered name beneath the photograph.
Torven Wayside…
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