“I brought these back,” he said.
He held up the bowls and the cups.
“Well, that’s kind of you,” she said. “But I’d have come for them.”
“Long walk,” he said. “Hot night.”
She nodded.
“I appreciate it,” she said. “You had enough?”
“Plenty,” he said. “It was very good.”
She shrugged, a little bashful. “Just cowboy food.”
She took the used dishes from him and carried them inside. Thanks again,” she called.
It sounded like a dismissal. So he turned away and walked out to the road, with the low sun full on his face. He stopped under the wooden arch. Ahead of him to the west was nothing at all, just the empty eroded mesa he had seen on the way in. On the right, to the north, was a road sixty miles long with a few buildings at the end of it. A neighbor fifteen miles away. On the left, to the south, he had no idea. A bar two hours away, Billy had said. Could be a hundred miles. He turned around. To the east, Greer land for a stretch, and then somebody else’s, and then somebody else’s again, he guessed. Dry holes and dusty caliche and nothing much more all the way back to Austin, four hundred miles away.
New guy comes to gate and stares right at us, the boy wrote. Then looks all around. Knows we’re here? Trouble?
He closed his book again and pressed himself tighter to the ground.
“Reacher, a voice called.
Reacher squinted right and saw Bobby Greer in the shadows on the porch. He was sitting in the swing set. Same denims, same dirty T-shirt. Same backward ball cap.
“Come here,” he called.
Reacher paused a beat. Then he walked back past the kitchen and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
“I want a horse,” Bobby said. “The big mare. Saddle her up and bring her out.”
Reacher paused again. “You want that now?”
“When do you think? I want an evening ride.”
Reacher said nothing.
“And we need a demonstration,” Bobby said.
“Of what?”
“You want to hire on, you need to show us you know what you’re doing.”
Reacher paused again, longer.
“O.K.,” he said.
“Five minutes,” Bobby said.
He stood up and headed back inside the house. Closed the door. Reacher stood for a moment with the heat on his back and then headed down to the barn. Headed for the big door. The one with the bad smell coming out of it. A demonstration? You’re in deep shit now, he thought. More ways than one.
There was a light switch inside the door, in a metal box screwed to the siding. He flicked it on and weak yellow bulbs lit the enormous space. The floor was beaten earth, and there was dirty straw everywhere. The center of the barn was divided into horse stalls, back to back, with a perimeter track lined with floor-to-ceiling hay bales inside the outer walls. He circled around the stalls. A total of five were occupied. Five horses. They were all tethered to the walls of their stalls with complicated rope constructions that fitted neatly over their heads.
He took a closer look at each of them. One of them was very small. A pony. Ellie’s, presumably. O.K., strike that. Four to go. Two were slightly bigger than the other two. He bent down low and peered upward at them, one at a time. In principle he knew what a mare should look like, underneath. It should be easy enough to spot one. But in practice, it wasn’t easy. The stalls were dark and the tails obscured the details. In the end he decided the first one he looked at wasn’t a mare. Wasn’t a stallion, either. Some parts were missing. A gelding. Try the next. He shuffled along and looked at the next. O.K., that’s a mare. Good. The next one was a mare, too. The last one, another gelding.
He stepped back to where he could see both of the mares at once. They were huge shiny brown animals, huffing through their noses, moving slightly, making dull clop sounds with their feet on the straw. No, their hoofs. Hooves? Their necks were turned so they could watch him with one eye each. Which one was bigger? The one on the left, he decided. A little taller, a little heavier, a little wider in the shoulders. O.K., that’s the big mare. So far, so good.