Two winters in Colorado on a company cattle operation that paid in script redeemable only at the company store. He was not bitter about any of it. Bitterness was something you had to maintain and maintenance required a fixed position and he had not stayed anywhere long enough to maintain much of anything. What he had maintained without particularly choosing to was a quality of attention. He noticed things.
He noticed when labor was honest and when it was not. He noticed the distance between the stated purpose of authority and what that authority was actually being used for. Three years in New Mexico Territory had given him ample opportunity to practice that measurement, and the reading in Cimarron, where he had spent most of the autumn, had not been comfortable. The road north of Cimarron ran between two ridges of ponderosa pine, and in December it was the kind of place that made a man feel surveiled by the landscape itself. Levi had ridden this stretch twice before, both times without incident.
This time the silence felt different. Not empty, but withheld as if the trees were holding something back. He heard the horse before he saw it. Not hoof beats, something stranger. A high broken sound, half whinny and half something closer to a dog barking.
Irregular and insistent coming from around a bend with the pines crowded in tight. Pocket slowed without a touch of the reins. Levi felt the gelding's muscles tighten beneath him. That particular coiling that tells a rider the animal has already made up its mind about what's ahead. The paint came around the bend at a trot.
Sweat dark at the neck and flanks even in that cold. Its bridle gone, its saddle listing badly to the left where a cinch strap had broken clean. a fine animal, compact through the chest, broad through the hip, the kind of horse that represented years of careful selection. Its coat was the blue and white pattern the Jicarilla called spiderweb paint, and there were three thin lines of red pigment worked into the bridle knot, still hanging from its neck, the kind of family specific marking Levi had seen Apache riders use. He pulled Pocket up and let the paint approach. It slowed at 10 ft, blew hard through its nose, and stood there watching him with an expression he later struggled to describe.
Not wild, not frightened, something more deliberate than either. It put its head down, it stamped once. Levi looked at the horse, then at the tree line, then back at the horse. The paint turned and walked back the way it had come. He followed.