The first roof leaked smoke instead of rain. Ruth woke coughing on the floor of Carmela's aunt's house, her boots against a sack of onions and somebody's small foot pressed into her ribs.
She moved the foot. Eva muttered without waking.
Across the room Teresa was sitting with her back to the wall. Inés slept against her shoulder. Carmela and Mateo lay behind a blanket hung from a line. Ruth could hear him breathing, then Carmela saying something softly, then both of them quiet again.
There were too many people and not enough blankets. The onions smelled. A rooster outside had been crowing since moonrise. Ruth lay still, waiting for the familiar sound of Lark shifting in a stable near her bed.
At last she got up.
Teresa opened her eyes.
“Where?”
“Out.”
“Take the door quietly.”
Ruth stepped into the cold. The river lay east, hidden by low ground and fields. Around her were fences, yards, houses with smoke finding its way into the morning. Not empty country, not a new world. People had been getting up to work here without knowing she existed.
Esteban found her at the yard fence after sunrise. He had a heel of bread in his hand and offered half.
“You ride?” he asked.
Ruth looked at him.
He grinned. “Carmela said you're funny when you're tired.”
“Carmela's lying.”
“That's possible too. There's work if you want it. Sorting, mostly. Mending tack. You take orders from Berryman, not me.”
“Does he know who I am?”
“He knows you came with us.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
Esteban tore the bread with his teeth. He thought before answering.
“Tell him yourself.”
Berryman was a small man with a stiff beard and one watery eye. He listened to Ruth, looked at the bandage on her hand and asked whether she could work without bleeding on his rope.
“I'll try.”
He rubbed his beard, looking past her. “There's a bay needs moving. Come on.”
He put her on foot with a young bay that had learned people would step out of its way. Ruth went sideways when it threatened to crowd her, then forward when it stopped. She didn't hurry. After a while it followed her along the fence, offended but willing. Berryman watched from a rail, chewing something.
“You've done that before.”
“Once or twice.”
“I'll pay you for today. This evening. Be here again tomorrow.”
“In money?”
He stared at her, then at Esteban.
“In money,” he said.
At dinner Ruth laid out the hundred and eighty-two dollars remaining from her reserve. She had carried it all night, feeling its shape under her coat when she couldn't feel anything else.
Esteban had the wagon accounts. Forty-two dollars for the two teams, the drivers and the hired wagons. Ruth counted it to Rafael, who signed his name and Esteban's beneath the sum. There was no flourish, no discussion of how much danger they had accepted. Rafael folded the notes and asked Mateo whether the knee needed a doctor.
“Rest,” Carmela said. “For a start.”
Carmela and Esteban's aunt would take seventy dollars toward the crowded rooms and winter food for the families while they found their own places. She made the arrangement with Carmela and Teresa. Ruth paid the woman after they agreed, not before.
That left seventy.
Teresa looked at it, then at Ruth.
“Mateo needs files. Leather. A few things he couldn't bring. I need cloth and thread before I can earn anything.”
“Then buy them.”
“I'll bring back an account.”
“For you.”
Teresa studied her, deciding whether she meant it. Then she took the notes.
Ruth turned her empty purse inside out. A bit of thread and a small gray pebble fell onto the table. Eva claimed the pebble at once. Teresa laughed before she could stop herself.
“There,” she said. “You've made one good bargain.”
That evening Berryman counted Ruth's wages into her hand. The coins lay in the uninjured palm, warm from his pocket. She had bought and sold animals worth more money than he might ever pay her. She had never needed a day's pay so immediately.
She bought soap. A little food she could call her own. Nothing else.
When she went back to the aunt's house, Carmela moved a bowl so there was room for her at the table.
“You're late.”
“I was paid.”
“Then eat before you spend it standing up.”
Ruth sat.
Six weeks later, Teresa fought with a door that wouldn't shut.
No summons had come for Ruth. Harlan had kept his threat to himself, along with his accounts and his horses. She still listened when a rider stopped outside the yard.
Ruth stood on the little step outside, holding a bundle of bedding. Inés was inside the room, pushing a borrowed table away from the wall.
“Lift it,” Teresa said.
“I'm not touching it.”
“The door, Ruth.”
Ruth lifted the lower edge. Teresa pulled. The latch met with a sharp wooden click.
For a moment the three of them stared at the closed door.
Then Inés opened it again, slowly, as if testing whether it had really become theirs to use.
The room was small. A place for sleeping behind a curtain, a stove, a window that faced a wall instead of a view. Teresa had chosen it because it had good light in the morning and a table could fit beside the window. She had paid the first rent from her own earnings, leaving most of her share of Ruth's money untouched.
“You could stay at the house longer,” Ruth said.
“And hear the aunt argue with the rooster? No.”
“The rooster usually wins.”
“Not for another month. I couldn't.”
Benito came around the corner carrying the second chair. He had found work with a teamster and acquired a new hat that did not improve his appearance. Inés told him so. He told her that was why she wasn't allowed to choose the family headwear.
There was room for four chairs only if someone didn't mind sitting against the bed. Mateo arrived with Carmela and Eva before they had decided where to put them. He walked with a stick, slowly, complaining that people kept asking about his knee when there was nothing wrong with his mouth. Eva carried a folded cloth and refused to say what it was until everyone had sat.
It was a curtain. Carmela had made it for the window.
Teresa touched the hem, then took it away from Eva before the child could drag it through the stove ashes.
They stayed an hour. Mateo and Benito put up the curtain rod while Teresa told them it was crooked. Luis came late, red-faced from work at the yard. He had chosen to help there in the mornings and learn his father's trade in the afternoons. Inés worked with Teresa when she wanted the wages and spent two afternoons each week with a woman who had books and expected them returned clean.
When Ruth asked what she was reading, Inés looked at her and said, “Something with no horses.”
Ruth laughed. The girl smiled, surprised to have pleased her, then bent over Eva's sleeve to fasten a missing button.
On the walk back Carmela asked whether Ruth had found a room.
“Above the store. Barely enough space to lie flat.”
“How much?”
Ruth named the rent. Carmela made a disapproving sound.
“That's a room for the owner, not the person sleeping in it.”
“He'll come down.”
“You certain?”
“No. I told him I'd look elsewhere.”
Carmela nodded, satisfied with the effort if not the result. At the aunt's door she stopped.
“Sunday,” she said. “If you're not working. There's dinner.”
Ruth looked at her.
“Bring something,” Carmela added. “We've enough people eating.”
“I will.”
The next morning Ruth went to the yard before the frost had lifted from the rails. She wore her old coat with a new patch where the foot gate had torn it. Her saddle hung in Berryman's shed. She had cleaned it twice and oiled the leather, though she had no horse to put beneath it.
Some mornings she planned how she could fetch Lark. She would get as far as the road, the number of miles, the place she could stop for water. Then she would see Harlan waiting beside the stall, smiling because he had known she would come.
She hadn't found a way past that yet.
There was work. A woman had come to buy two geldings for a freight outfit. Ruth brought them out, watched the woman examine their legs and liked her better when she asked to see them walked before discussing price. She told her what she knew: one disliked a flapping coat, the other needed time to settle on a strange road. Berryman grumbled that Ruth was trying to unsell his stock.
“Better she hears it here,” Ruth said.
The woman bought both. At the office she put down her money, counted twice, and asked for the terms in writing. Berryman brought out a book. Then Esteban appeared at the door with a slip showing the week's work he had done on the sale horses.
“You want this now?” he asked.
Berryman looked at the buyer's money, then into his own cash drawer. He counted Esteban's wages from the drawer and passed them across before taking payment for the horses.
Esteban counted them too. One coin had rolled under the book. He reached for it, and Berryman lifted the book without being asked.
Ruth waited by the open door, holding the two leads. The gelding that disliked coats tugged toward a patch of grass. She let him take one mouthful, then drew his head up and put the ropes into the buyer's hand.