Hollis found him at his grandmother's trailer on the east side of town, out past the rail yard.
The boy's grandmother answered the door. She was about Hollis's age, in a quilted coat, and she looked at the old man on her steps with no expression at all.
"He came home at two in the morning," she said. "He hasn't said one word."
"May I talk to him, ma'am?"
She looked at him a while longer. Then she stepped aside.
Jesse was sitting on the edge of his bed with his hood up. He didn't look at Hollis when he came in.
"I'll pay for it," the boy said to the floor. "I don't know how. But I will."
"Pay for what?"
"The leather. The saddle. I know it's ruined. I know you'll have to start over and you won't make it by Saturday, and that rancher's going to hate you, and it's my fault." His voice cracked. "I just wanted to finish it for you. Your hands were shaking. I watched you all week. I thought, I can do this one part. I'll have it done before he even gets in."
Hollis sat down slowly on the wooden chair by the door. His knees didn't like the chair, and he didn't like his knees.
"Jesse," he said. "Look at me."
After a while, the boy did.
"What did I tell you," Hollis said, "about the first saddle I ever made?"
Jesse stared at him.
"You don't hide a mistake in leather," Hollis said. "You grow something over it. Come on. We've got two days."
They worked Thursday until midnight and all of Friday.
Hollis didn't touch the swivel knife. He sat on a stool beside the bench with a cup of coffee and his reading glasses and told Jesse what to do, and Jesse did it.
First, they studied the cut. It ran on a slant, a long shallow curve where the blade had skidded.
It was clean. That was something.
"Leather remembers everything," Hollis said. "So we're going to give it something better to remember."
He drew it first in pencil, on tracing paper laid over the fender. An oak leaf, a big one, lying across the roses, with its long center vein running exactly along the line of the cut. Then two acorns hanging below it on a short stem, to balance the pattern.
"The cut becomes the vein," Hollis said. "Oak leaf's got a strong center line. Your mistake is going to be the strongest line on the whole fender."
Jesse looked at the drawing for a long time.
"What if I mess it up again?"
"Then we'll grow a bigger leaf."
He didn't mess it up.
He went slowly, slower than Hollis had ever seen him go. He cased the leather again with the sponge, waiting until it went just the right shade. He cut the outline of the oak leaf with the swivel knife, his tongue between his teeth, stopping every inch to breathe.
He beveled the edges so the leaf lifted off the leather. He used the veiner along the old cut, pressing it down and smoothing it until the gash became a deep, clean center vein.
He stippled the background. He shaded the acorns so they looked round.
At ten o'clock on Friday night, Jesse set down the mallet and stepped back.
Hollis got up off the stool and came around the bench. He took off his glasses and put them back on.
The oak leaf lay across the bottom of the fender, among the wild roses, as if it had blown there in the wind and stayed. Its center vein was strong and dark and perfectly natural. You'd have had to know exactly where to look to find the cut.
Hollis knew exactly where to look. He looked for a long time.
"Well," he said finally. "Look at that."
Dutch Larrabee's retirement dinner was at the Basque restaurant next door, in the back room, on Saturday night. Sixty ranchers and their wives, in pressed shirts and good hats, and family style platters of lamb and beans and bread.
When Dutch's daughter pulled the blanket off the saddle on its stand, the room went quiet.
Dutch was a big man with a face like a saddle himself. He walked all the way around it twice. He ran his hand over the seat and down the skirts, over the wild roses, reading them with his fingers the way an old cowman reads a horse.
At the bottom of the right fender, his hand stopped.
"This one's different," he said. "This oak leaf."
Hollis was standing at the back of the room. Jesse was beside him in a borrowed white shirt, trying to disappear into the wall.
"The boy did that one," Hollis said.
Dutch looked up and found Jesse with his eyes. He looked at him a long time, the way he'd look at a colt he was thinking of buying.
"It's the best part of the whole saddle," Dutch said. "Son, you come out to the ranch sometime. I'll show you where it's going to ride."
Jesse turned red to the roots of his buzz cut and didn't say anything at all.
On Monday afternoon, Jesse came back to the shop after school. His sixty hours had been signed off on Friday. He didn't have to come.
He hung his apron on the nail by the door and swept the floor without being asked.
When he was done, Hollis handed him a small steel stamp. On the end of it, cut in reverse, were two letters. J.O.
"Every saddle I've made has the shop's mark," Hollis said. "Brandt Saddlery, Elko, Nevada. Starting with the next one, it's going to have yours under it."
The boy turned the stamp over in his fingers.
Hollis pressed the shop's mark into a scrap of damp leather on the bench. The boy set his stamp just below it and tapped it once with the mallet, very gently, and his initials came up clean under the old man's name.