By midday, Josephine had closed the distance to within ten feet of the gelding without a single sudden movement, moving only when Judas himself relaxed enough to permit it, retreating immediately whenever his ears flattened or his weight shifted toward flight. Thaddeus had been joined at the fence by his foreman, a weathered man named Otis Marsh, who had been present for all four previous failed attempts. Otis watched Josephine's slow, patient approach with an expression that shifted over the course of the second hour from polite skepticism to genuine attention. "I have never seen anybody get this close to him without a rope in hand," Otis said quietly to Thaddeus.
Thaddeus said nothing, watching his new wife extend one hand slowly, palm down, toward a horse that had broken bones and reputations across two full years. He felt his certainty of the afternoon's outcome begin for the first time to genuinely waver. The first touch came without ceremony. It was a brief, feather-light contact between Josephine's fingers and the horse's lowered nose, gone almost before Thaddeus could register that it had happened, followed by Josephine's immediate, unhurried retreat, giving Judas the space to process what had just occurred, without any pressure to accept more than he was ready for.
Judas did not bolt. He stood, ears forward now rather than pinned back, watching Josephine's retreating figure with an attention that looked to Thaddeus's increasingly uncertain eye considerably less like fear and considerably more like curiosity. Otis said, "Mr. Cain, I believe you may lose that wager." He said it with the faint private satisfaction of a foreman who had quietly hoped for two long years that someone would finally prove him wrong about that horse. "It is one touch, Otis," Thaddeus replied with less conviction than he intended.
"The horse has thrown four men after considerably more encouragement than one touch." He said it mostly to convince himself, and both men at the fence understood as much, though neither remarked on it further. But even as he said it, Thaddeus Cain understood that he was no longer watching the afternoon the way he had at dawn, with the settled certainty of a man observing a foregone conclusion. He was watching, now with the specific, uncomfortable attention of a man whose doubt was being dismantled in real time, one patient hour at a time, by a woman he had married on the strength of a letter he had not entirely believed. He found himself in that second hour thinking back to Silas Pruitt's mining claim and the particular sick certainty he had felt watching the actual worthless ground for the first time after having believed Pruitt's glowing description for the better part of a season.