Testament by David Morrell

his chest, and he brushed aside her hair, kissing her on the back of the neck.
    “What about Sarah? She’ll hear.”
    “We’ll be quiet,” he said.
    Later as he sat in the dark in the living room, staring out the window toward the far-off glow from the town in the night, he thought how if someone wanted to catch them off guard the best thing was to wait outside in the dark until they needed to go out to the bathroom or how if someone had come bursting in while they were making love on the floor they wouldn’t have had a chance.

2
     
    “Have you got any horses for sale?”
    “I might have. It depends,” the old man said.
    “On what?”
    “Oh, on a lot of things I suppose. Like what you need them for and how much you know about horses in the first place and how much you want to spend.”
    He was standing on the hard sun-baked ground at the back of the ranch house, looking through the dirty screen door at the old man studying him. He’d been a long time deciding which ranch to go to, this one to the north near town or the other two to the south away from it. Just to be safe he had chosen the two to the south, and they had sent him to this place near town anyway. The house was warped and listing, windows dusty, dead weeds lying in the flower beds.
    The old man opened the screen door and stepped outside, and for the first time he saw that the old man was chewing something. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to catch you at your lunch.”
    “It’s all right. I was almost finished anyhow.”
    He had on cowboy boots and faded jeans and a sweat-stained denim work shirt hanging loose over his belt. His shoulders were stooped and his skin was hanging slack under his chin, but his sleeves were rolled up and the muscles of his arms were hard and stark. “About these horses,” the old man said.
    “I need them to pack gear into the mountains. I want to do some hunting.”
    “How many?”
    “Three. One to ride, the other two for packing.”
    “You’re going up by yourself?”
    “I’ve done it before.”
    “Suit yourself. These horses aren’t like pigeons, you know. You get in trouble up there, they don’t come back with messages.”
    He followed the old man toward the barn, its boards as parched and weathered as the house. The corral was in back of the barn, six horses, a water trough, a feed bin. He squinted at the horses as long as he could stand it, and then resting his eyes from the sun, glanced down at the scum on the water in the trough.
    “This is it,” the old man said, and he must still have had a bit of food at the side of his mouth because he started chewing again. “That’s all there is. I don’t work the cattle much now, just rent the land to the fellow down the road and hang on to these few horses to keep my hand in.”
    “That’s what he told me. He said you might not mind parting with some of them.”
    “Maybe. You know much about horses?” The old man was leaning against the fence now, looking out at them.
    “A bit.”
    “Which three are the best?”
    So that was it, he thought. The old man didn’t mind selling, but not to just anyone. You had to qualify. You had to have credentials.
    The horses had looked up from nosing the ground when the two of them approached, three bays, a sorrel, a buckskin, and a pinto. They were all mares, all short, compact, and trim, with the big solid haunches of quarter horses. Except for the pinto, which was even shorter and thin in the legs and small-headed, like the runt in a litter.
    He climbed up over the boards of the fence and dropped down into the corral, letting them size him up before he walked over, his hand out to the buckskin’s nose.
    The buckskin didn’t respond for a moment, then dipped its nose down sniffing, nuzzling the hand, looking for sugar likely or maybe an apple.
    He glanced at the others. Two of them, one bay and the sorrel, were circling slowly to his left. The rest were standing nearby, curious.
    He brushed his hand across the