Juanita wanted her to stay at the main house, but Emaline could not bear to be in a place where she wasn’t earning her keep. Eli’s daughter Jenny was eighteen, Mabel was seventeen, and Anna was fourteen, so Juanita had more than enough help to run the big house and Emaline would just be in the way. She also wanted to spend as much time with her brothers as she could, so the next morning Ben picked her up in the old truck and drove her to the cabin.

Ezra had a cot for Emaline in a room where he kept a gathering of old saddles, blankets, bridles, lariats, spurs, halters and harnesses, hackamores and martingales, short-handled quirts, a pair of the long black bullwhips they had used when he and Eli were freighting with ox teams in South Dakota with their father, Eb Paint. Most of it was worn and battered beyond use but rich with the memory of old trails, wild horses, fall roundups. Emaline slept among the rich odors of leather and lathered horses. From her bed, she could reach out and touch the bark on the logs of the cabin. The one small window in the room faced west, toward the Bighorns, and each morning when she rose, she could look out at the mountains.

There was plenty for her to do to earn her keep. She was a light sleeper, so she climbed out of bed when she heard Ezra get up, set the coffee to perk, started breakfast while he finished the chores, then woke Ben and Bobby. It took her until the Fourth of July to clean the layers of grime off the kitchen, to scrub pans that had never had a proper washing, to wash floors that looked like they belonged in a stable. Ben took her into Sheridan to buy a few kitchen things, including a big pot for soup, a ladle, extra cups and plates, forks and knives. She crocheted rugs for the floor, sewed curtains on Juanita’s sewing machine, began new quilts for winter.

Bobby was fifteen and still slender as a reed, but he was now as tall as she was. He had become a very good horseman under Ben’s tutelage, but his greatest pleasure was to ride over to the main house and spend time with Leo. Ezra called them “the twins” somewhat sardonically, given that Leo was big-shouldered and dark and over six feet tall. He meant that they were nearly as close as he and Eli had been when they were in their teens. He didn’t demand too much of Bobby because most mornings the boy rode off to see Leo right after breakfast and wasn’t seen again until evening. Bobby did his share of work on the 8T8, but he did most of it for Eli.