“Up and at ’em, son. I want you to drop your twine on that big gray and ride some of the sass out of him this morning.”

Ben tugged on his britches and boots and sat at the table, trying to pry his eyes open while Ezra cracked eggs into the frying pan, two for himself and four for Ben. Ben washed down the eggs and a wedge of bacon with three big glasses of milk and a cup of coffee that was about two parts sugar and one part coffee, bolting his breakfast off an old tin plate of Ezra’s that bore a layered trail of old suppers taken next to campfires and blizzard meals eaten cold as a banker’s heart. Ezra liked to see Ben eat. The youngster was big enough to wrestle steers. A fellow that size had to eat.

Ezra didn’t have children of his own, so he was determined to teach Ben everything a young man ought to know. Teeter Spawn had begun Ben’s schooling before he died, taught him how to track a man in rough country, how to weave a rawhide lariat and deal a crooked poker hand. Now the rest was up to Ezra.

Once the breakfast dishes were scraped and stacked, they ambled down to the training corral. Walking behind Ben, Ezra could see Frank’s long legs and the Paint shoulders and maybe a little of his grandmother Livvy in the way he carried himself, but when the boy got near a horse, he was all Frank Hughes, the image of his father. It was a shame Frank had been killed fighting Germans at Belleau Wood, because any man would be proud to see the way Ben and horses just slid to each other, comfortable and easy. Ben’s way from the first day was Frank’s. Let the horse come to you and bring your string into tune with his, like a man getting ready to play the fiddle at a square dance. It was odd how a boy could inherit that, the same way Ben had inherited the straight black Lakota hair and the strange, pale gray eyes of the Paint clan. With horses, Ezra only had to tell him a thing once. Sometimes, he seemed to know without being told at all.