They clattered down the stairs and a moment later Reacher heard the sound of a gasoline engine starting up directly below. The pick-up, he guessed. He heard it back out through the doors and drive away. He stepped into the bathroom and saw it come around the corner and wind around the horse barn and bounce across the yard past the house.
He walked back through the dormitory and piled the three used bowls on top of each other, with the silverware in the topmost. Threaded the three cup handles onto his forefinger and walked down the stairs and outside. The sun was nearly below the horizon but the heat hadn't backed off at all. The air was impossibly hot. Almost suffocating. And it was getting humid. A warm damp breeze was coming in from somewhere. He walked up past the corrals, past the barn, through the yard. He skirted around the porch and looked for the kitchen door. Found it and knocked. The maid opened up.
"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,