All the Pretty Horses

said.
    Breakin these horses.
    Why four days?
    You think we could do it?
    They intend puttin em in the rough-string? My feelin is that any horse broke in four days is liable to come unbroke in four more.
    They’re out of horses is how come em to be down here in the first place.
    Rawlins dabbed tobacco into the cupped paper. You’re tellin me that what we’re lookin at here is our own string?
    That’s my guess.
    We’re lookin at ridin some coldjawed son of a bitch broke with one of them damned mexican ringbits.
    Yeah.
    Rawlins nodded. What would you do, sideline em?
    Yep.
    You think there’s that much rope on the place?
    I dont know.
    You’d be a woreout sumbuck. I’ll tell you that.
    Think how good you’d sleep.
    Rawlins put the cigarette in his mouth and fished about for a match. What else do you know that you aint told me?
    Armando says the old man’s got horses all over that mountain.
    How many horses.
    Somethin like four hundred head.
    Rawlins looked at him. He popped the match and lit the cigarette and flipped the match away. What in the hell for?
    He’d started a breeding program before the war.
    What kind of horses?
    Media sangres.
    What the hell is that.
    Quarterhorses, what we’d call em.
    Yeah?
    That roan yonder, said John Grady, is a flat-out Billy horse if he does have bad feet.
    Where do you reckon he come from?
    Where they all come from. Out of a horse called José Chiquito.
    Little Joe?
    Yeah.
    The same horse?
    The same horse.
    Rawlins smoked thoughtfully.
    Both of them horses were sold in Mexico, said John Grady. One and Two. What he’s got up yonder is a big yeguada of mares out of the old Traveler-Ronda line of horses of Sheeran’s.
    What else? said Rawlins.
    That’s it.
    Let’s go talk to the man.
    T HEY STOOD in the kitchen with their hats in their hands and the gerente sat at the table and studied them.
    Amansadores, he said.
    Sí.
    Ambos, he said.
    Sí. Ambos.
    He leaned back. He drummed his fingers on the metal tabletop.
    Hay dieciseis caballos en el potrero, said John Grady. Podemos amansarlos en cuatro días.
    They walked back across the yard to the bunkhouse to wash up for supper.
    What did he say? said Rawlins.
    He said we were full of shit. But in a nice way.
    Is that a flat-out no do you reckon?
    I dont think so. I dont think he can leave it at that.
    They went to work on the green colts daybreak Sunday morning, dressing in the half dark in clothes still wet from their washing them the night before and walking out to the potrero before the stars were down, eating a cold tortilla wrapped around a scoop of cold beans and no coffee and carrying their forty foot maguey catchropes coiled over their shoulders. They carried saddleblankets and a bosalea or riding hackamore with a metal noseband and John Grady carried a pair of clean gunny-sacks he’d slept on and his Hamley saddle with the stirrups already shortened.
    They stood looking at the horses. The horses shifted and stood, gray shapes in the gray morning. Stacked on the ground outside the gate were coils of every kind of rope, cotton and manilla and plaited rawhide and maguey and ixtle down to lengths of old woven hair mecates and handplaited piecings of bindertwine. Stacked against the fence were the sixteen rope hackamores they’d spent the evening tying in the bunkhouse.
    This bunch has done been culled once up on the mesa, aint it?
    I’d say so.
    What do they want with the mares?
    They ride em down here.
    Well, said Rawlins. I can see why they’re hard on a horse. Puttin up with them bitches.
    He shook his head and stuffed the last of the tortilla in his jaw and wiped his hands on his trousers and undid the wire and opened the gate.
    John Grady followed him in and stood the saddle on the ground and went back out and brought in a handful of ropes and hackamores and squatted to sort them. Rawlins stood building his loop.
    I take it you dont give a particular damn what order they come in, he said.
    You take it correctly, cousin.
    You dead set on sackin these varmints out?
    Yep.
    My old daddy always said that the purpose of breakin a horse was to ride it and if you got one to break you just as well to saddle up and climb aboard and get on with it.
    John Grady grinned. Was your old daddy a certified peeler?
    I never heard him claim to be. But I damn sure seen him hang and rattle a time or two.
    Well you’re fixin to see some more of it.
    We goin to bust em twice?
    What for?
    I never saw one that completely believed it