The Weight a Horse Carries

The drought had taken everything that could be taken without a man's hands, and what was left, the bank was coming for in the fall.

Della Hart leaned on the top rail of the round pen and watched her best chance for fifteen wild-eyed mustangs run themselves stupid in the dust. Caught off the high range two weeks back, half-broke at best, and worth nothing to anybody until somebody gentled them down enough to sell as saddle stock. Her husband could have done it. Tom had a way with a frightened animal — slow, patient, the same way he'd had with her in the early years. But Tom was eighteen months in the ground beside the creek, and Della had buried her own gift for patience right there with him.

She heard the stranger before she saw him. Hooves coming up the road at a walk, unhurried, a man who knew not to crowd a place he hadn't been asked into.

He stopped at her gate and didn't get down. Sun-dark, road-thin, a hat that had seen more weather than the man wore easily. His own horse stood loose-reined and calm, which told her more than anything he might have said.

"Heard in town you were looking for a breaker," he said.

"Heard wrong. I'm looking for a miracle. A breaker's just what I can afford to pay for one." She looked at the dust where the mustangs were still circling. "Fifteen head. I've got till the first sale in September. After that the bank doesn't much care whetherthey're gentled or not."

He looked past her at the herd a long moment, reading them the way she read a ledger. "Who ran them last."

"Nobody, since spring. My husband had a hand for it."

"Had."

"Had."

He took that in without making a thing of it, which she was grateful for; she'd had a year and a half of people making a thing of it. "Name's Sam," he said. "I don't break a horse. I haven't broken one in twelve years. If that's the word you need on the bill of sale, hire somebody else."

Della's pride, which was most of what the drought had left her, sat up. "Then what is it you do."

"I wait until the horse decides I'm not the worst thing that ever happened to it." He swung down, finally, and the ease of it — the way the ground seemed to come up to meet him — made something in her chest tighten in a way she did not welcome. "Costs you the same either way. Takes longer. Lasts longer too." He held out a hand, not to shake, just open. "Show me the worst one."

She didn't take the hand. But she opened the gate.

The worst one was a black gelding with a scar across the nose and a hatred for the whole human race that Della privately respected. Three men in town had already given up on him. Sam stepped into the pen and did nothing at all. He stood. He turned his shoulder to the animal, looked at the far hills, and waited, while the black thundered and feinted and finally — minutes that felt like an hour — slowed, and blew, and took one disbelieving step toward the man who was asking nothing of him.

Della watched a stranger offer a broken creature the one thing she had stopped being able to give anyone, and she understood she had just hired more trouble than the bank.

"You can sleep in the bunkhouse," she said, harder than she meant. "Supper's at six. Don't expect company