Josephine Vane needed more than she had admitted even to herself: a man who would eventually watch her prove her gift rather than ask her to hide it. The wager Thaddeus made so carelessly on the corral fence was about to give them both exactly what they needed in the span of a single afternoon. Josephine did not enter the corral carrying a rope or a whip, the tools every one of the four previous men had brought with them. And Thaddeus, watching from the fence with his arms crossed, noted this with the particular satisfaction of a man already certain how the afternoon would end.
She stood just inside the gate, perfectly still, and did nothing at all for the better part of the first hour, simply existing in the corral at a respectful distance, while Judas paced the far fence line, snorting and tossing his scarred head, working through the same suspicious calculations he applied to every new person who entered his space. After perhaps twenty minutes, Thaddeus called across the fence, "Mrs. Cain, the horse is meant to be broken, not admired." Josephine did not turn. "He has already been rushed by four men, Mr. Cain, and he has thrown all four. I am not in a hurry to become the fifth failure. If you would like to make it a shorter wager, you are welcome to withdraw it now and keep your dress money." Thaddeus, stung slightly by the challenge in her tone, said nothing further, and settled onto the fence rail to watch, expecting the stillness to end in the same result as everything else that had been tried.
By the end of the first hour, something had shifted subtly in the quality of Judas's pacing. He had stopped snorting each time he passed near Josephine's still figure. His circles had tightened almost imperceptibly, bringing him closer to her position at the gate than he had come to any of the four men who had entered before her. Thaddeus, watching closely despite himself, could not have said exactly what had changed, only that something clearly had.
Josephine finally moved an hour after entering, taking three slow steps toward the center of the corral, and then stopping again, offering the horse nothing but her continued patient presence, and Judas, watching this new development from the fence line, took one hesitant step toward her before catching himself and retreating. It was not, by any measure Thaddeus recognized, a breaking-in, but it was, he began to suspect, with a discomfort he did not enjoy, something he had not seen from any of the four men who had tried before her. Otis Marsh, who had ridden out to check a fence line, and stayed instead to watch, leaned against the rail beside Thaddeus, and said nothing for a long while, simply observing the strange, patient standoff in the corral. When he finally spoke, it was only to note that the horse's ears had not pinned back once in the last twenty minutes, a small detail that Thaddeus had not consciously registered, but understood once Otis said it aloud to be entirely true, and entirely unlike anything either man had witnessed in two years of watching Judas react to human company.