Imperial Light Unbridled

Story by Sumit Vohra.

Nobody knew where the horse came from.

It ran the range above Cutter's Tank, a pale gray stallion with a dark mane and a dark tail, and it ran for nothing. Not from wolves, not toward water. It ran the way a man laughs when nobody's told a joke.

A pale gray stallion with a dark mane gallops alone across a red range at dawn

A cattleman named Royce put a hundred dollars on its back. A hundred dollars to the man who could ride it into town.

They came from three states. Bronc riders with silver on their spurs. Mustangers with ropes they swore had never failed. A circus man with a whip and a bag of sugar.

Riders gather at a corral around the gray stallion

The horse threw the bronc riders. It dragged the mustangers through the creek and left them sitting in it. It ate the circus man's sugar and kicked the bag over the fence. Every night the saloon at Cutter's Tank filled with men holding their ribs and telling each other how close they'd come.

A cowboy flies off the gray stallion's back, hat spinning away

The last to try was Ezra Pike, who had broken horses for forty years and only said what was true. He spent a week with the stallion. He didn't rope it once. He just watched.

On the seventh night he sat on the top rail of the corral and told the room what none of them wanted to hear.

"That horse isn't wild," he said. "It's waiting."

Old Ezra Pike on the top rail of a corral at dusk, watching the gray stallion

They laughed at him. Ezra didn't mind. He had seen what they hadn't.

Every evening, the stallion climbed the ridge above the railroad. Every evening it stood there, facing east, and watched the trains go by. Not the westbound. Only the ones going east, the way somebody had gone once and never come back.

The gray stallion on a ridge above the tracks, watching a train's smoke trail east

Years before, a woman had ridden this horse to the edge of her land, swung down and slapped his rump to send him off. She had burned the house behind her and walked to Cutter's Tank to catch the eastbound train. The horse had watched her go. Then he had followed her trail as far as the tracks, and there the trail ran out.

A woman in a long green duster sends the gray horse off at the edge of her land

So he waited where it ended.

Royce took his hundred dollars back. The riders went home. The legend of the horse nobody could break went out along the rails, the way legends do.

Then, one evening in late summer, a westbound train came into Cutter's Tank to take on water.

A westbound train takes on water at Cutter's Tank at sunset

A woman stepped down to stretch her legs. She wore a wide hat, and a shotgun rode easy on her shoulder.

Shotgun Betty steps down from the train, shotgun on her shoulder

Up on the ridge, a gray shape lifted its head.

Nobody saw what happened next. Ezra Pike told it later, and he only said what was true. In the morning the ridge was empty, and there were two sets of tracks going west. One set was a horse's. The other belonged to a woman walking beside him, not riding. Nobody had broken him. She had just come back.