Thaddeus Cain had a horse in his corral that had thrown four grown men in four separate attempts, a black gelding with a scar over one eye, and a temper that had earned him the entirely unaffectionate name of Judas. And Thaddeus had just watched a woman half the size of any of those four men climb the corral fence wearing a traveling dress not yet a week old from the seamstress. Her name was Josephine Vane, and she had arrived that same morning as Thaddeus Cain's mail-order bride, with a letter describing her as capable and accustomed to hard work. A description Thaddeus had read with the particular skepticism of a man who had learned that letters described whatever a person needed them to say to escape wherever they were escaping from.
Josephine had noticed the horse the moment the wagon pulled into the yard, standing apart from the other stock, with the coiled, watchful stillness of an animal that had decided some time ago that people meant harm. She had asked what was wrong with him. Thaddeus had told her, with the flat, dismissive tone of a man closing a subject before it opened, that Judas was not wrong, he was simply unbreakable, and that four men better suited to the work than any woman had already proven it. Josephine looked at Thaddeus Cain for a long moment and then asked plainly whether he would consider it forward of her to try.
Thaddeus laughed, not unkindly. It was the laugh of a man who genuinely did not believe what was being proposed was possible. "Can you break a wild horse, Mrs. Cain? By all means, you have until sundown. I will even wager the price of that dress on it, though I expect I will win it back within the hour." He did not yet understand that Josephine Vane had spent the better part of her life around exactly the kind of wounded, distrustful creature standing in his corral, though the creatures she had gentled had mostly walked on two legs, and that the wager he had made so carelessly was about to cost him considerably more than the price of a dress.
Josephine set down her single traveling case beside the corral fence, unhurried, and studied the horse for a long moment before answering him. She said only that she would need until sundown and would prefer no audience for the first hour. A request Thaddeus found curious enough that he agreed to it without argument, more out of amusement at her presumption than any real belief the request would matter to the outcome. To understand why Thaddeus Cain doubted his new bride so completely within hours of meeting her, you have to understand what the failure of four grown men at the same task had already cost him.