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city boy home?”
    I idled the Austin Healey slowly along beside her as she turned the horse into the neighborhood from which I had just emerged. Sally Dean was wearing jeans and a red-and-white checked shirt tied at the waist. A country girl out for a ride.
    “I suppose little towns can be confusing to urbanites,” she said. “No freeway exit signs to help you find your street.” Her voice had a sardonic edge to it, a kind of challenge, but what kind, I couldn’t tell. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy the leisurely pace.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Day one has been anything but leisurely.”
    “You sat in on the Hardesty trial,” she said. “I heard. Gill must have put on a real show.”
    “He sure did.”
    “Damn,” Sally Dean said. “I lose again.”
    “You and Stroud make bets on his trials?” I asked.
    “We have ever since I worked for the firm.”
    This was something Molly Tunstall hadn’t told me. “You were an associate of the firm?”
    She smiled down at me. “I was a gofer. I got things for them. But I learned a lot from them, too.”
    Ed’s back end had come even with my seat, and I took a flick from the big horse’s tail in my face. It made my left eye sting.
    “What breed of horse is Ed?” I asked, rubbing horse dust out of my eye.
    “Ed’s an Appaloosa,” she replied. “Do you know anything about horses, Mr. Parker?”
    “Not much,” I said, looking up at Ed’s glistening gray bulk. “Aren’t Appaloosas supposed to be spotted?”
    “Ed didn’t spot,” she explained. “If he had spotted, he’d have been a show horse, and he wouldn’t be out here with us today. Also his name would have been something else: Mama’s Little Goldmine or The Sheik of the Seven Veils.”
    “I take it spots make an Appaloosa more valuable.”
    “To some people,” she said. “But Ed does okay without his spots, don’t you think?”
    “So long as he finds my house,” I replied.
    We made an odd little parade, a girl on horseback leading a broken-down sports car, but the house, it turned out, was only two blocks away. I had passed it on my search.
    “Voilà,”
said Sally Dean when we got there.
    On the phone two days earlier Hardwick Chandler had spoken proudly about the housing part of the job package, reminding me how unusual it was for a law firm to provide its new lawyers with free lodgings. It was a two-story frame house, recently painted an agreeable shade of green, with yards in both the front and back, a couple of huge, shady pecans, and a screened-in porch running along the side of the house next to the driveway. Not bad.
    I climbed out of the car, thanked Sally Dean for helping me find the place, and invited her inside for a drink of water.
    “No, thanks,” she said, “but Ed could use something.” She threw a leg over her horse and slid off. She was riding bareback. “He likes the heat, but it’s been a little hotter this afternoon than he expected.”
    There was a garden hose coiled under a faucet at the side of the house. “Do you mind?” Sally asked, handing me the reins. I took them and she went to the faucet and uncoiled the hose. When she turned on the water, the horse came over to her—leading me—and lapped at the nozzle. When the horse finished drinking, Sally spritzed water over his back. Ed put his head down as the water ran over him. We were enveloped in the acrid odor of wet horse.
    “Gill told me a little about you,” she said. “You’re a tax lawyer?”
    “I
was
a tax lawyer,” I corrected her.
    “In a big Houston firm. Then you burned out, and your wife bailed.”
    “Stroud’s got the facts out of order,” I said, “but that’s about right.” I was not pleased that my new boss was entertaining folks with my life story.
    “So now you’re going to be a jack-of-all-trades country lawyer?”
    “I’ll be whatever the firm needs me to be, Ms. Dean,” I said.
    She laughed. “You may be surprised to find out just what all that is. Sorry about