Free The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss Page B

house had a face Martha vaguely recalled. "Hello, are you Mrs. Romer?" she said.
    The woman visited upon her a stern look of disappointment. "I'm not Dorothy Romer, I'm Jeanne McWilliams."
    "I'm sorry, Mrs. McWilliams. I met so many people all at once, I've got everybody's names mixed up."
    "Well that's all right. But my husband told you we don't have any horses needing breaking." Mrs. McWilliams's husband blamed George Bliss, whose ranch ran along one side of their property, for letting one of his range bulls break down a fence and claim their milk cow, Jozie, for his harem. If they had had a horse needing breaking, they wouldn't have given it to anybody who worked for Bliss, whom they called Old Mister High and Mighty.
    Martha's face began to take up heat as Mrs. McWilliams's face went on being pale and wintry. Martha said, "I'm glad to meet you, anyhow—meet you
again.
I'm sorry I got your name wrong."
    Mrs. McWilliams was holding an empty burlap sack in one hand but she put the other hand to her forehead to shade her eyes against the gray winter light. Her fingers were long and reddened. "Well it's all right," she said, without softening the
tone of her voice. "I don't remember what your name is, to tell the truth, so I guess I don't have room to complain."
    "It's Martha Lessen."
    "I'll try to remember it. If you're looking to find the Romer place you can take that little road there, just be sure you shut every gate when you go through." She pointed to a faint trace wandering off across the grass and bitterbrush hills, not a road so much as a path, the kind made by neighbors when they visited each other.
    "Well, thanks. I'll just go on and see about that horse they wanted broke."
    "You shut every gate."
    "I will."
    She turned T.M. onto the path the woman had set her on. When she got down at the first gate and undid the wire and walked the horse through, she looked back down the half mile or so of slope to the house and saw Mrs. McWilliams standing on the narrow front porch watching after her, and from this height she could see a man and a pair of horses in a field behind the house, pulling stumps out of the ground. The McWilliams claim had had quite a few good big pine trees on it to start with, but they had cut them all down in the first months of living there.
    After Martha wired shut the gate, the woman on the porch turned and went inside.
    The sky was gray but didn't look to have any rain in it; it was the kind of high overcast that can make the world resemble a moving picture the way they were in those days, all shades of gray colorlessness. Martha thought it was beautiful country, even grayed out, close to the kind of open, rolling rangeland spoken of in
Lone Star Ranger
and
The Virginian
and other Western romances Martha had read, the country horsemen rode through in novels on their way to trouble with Cayuse In
dians or crooked sheriffs. In another twenty years people would wake up to realize that the timber was gone and the native grasses plowed up or eaten right down to the roots, that cheat-grass and rabbit brush and water-hogging scrub juniper had taken over all the disturbed ground. But it was still possible for Martha Lessen to look around and imagine the country as it must have been—the way Nez Perce and Shoshone Indians must have seen it, riding across with their big herds of ponies before white men overran the land, the kind of country where every gully and gorge in the foothills holds a clear, pebble-bottom creek, where the mountain slopes are clothed in timber and the valley floor is a golden grassland with stands of trees in patches, good big timber in the creek bottoms and along the river, the kind of country that leads people to name towns Eden or Paradise or Opportunity.
    Martha had read a little book about famous men and their horses: Alexander and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, General Lee and Traveller, the knight Reynard and his charger Bayard, the horse that had outraced Charlemagne's