He had promised himself after that never again to trust a description he had not personally verified. Watching Josephine work, he understood, with a discomfort that sat oddly alongside his growing admiration, that he had broken that very promise, the moment he decided, without a single hour's evidence, that his new wife's letter was almost certainly exaggerated. He had doubted the wrong claim entirely. The afternoon brought a small crowd.
Word had traveled the way word always traveled in a valley with few enough ranches that everyone knew everyone's business. And three neighboring hands had ridden over on invented errands, drawn by the news that Thaddeus Cain's new bride was attempting what four grown men had failed to do. Among them was a young hand from the Dunmore spread named Kit Farrow, who had been present two years earlier for the very first attempt to break Judas, and who remembered vividly the sound of his own friend's arm breaking against the corral fence when the horse threw him. Kit stood at the rail with an expression of open disbelief, watching a woman in a traveling dress accomplish in three hours what had put his own friend in a splint for six weeks, and said to no one in particular that he would need to see the rest of it before he believed any part of what he was currently watching.
Josephine worked through the crowd's arrival with the same unhurried patience she had shown all day, unbothered by the growing audience at the fence, focused entirely on the horse in front of her. By the third hour she could run a hand along the full length of Judas's neck, and the gelding had begun, in small increments, to lean very slightly into her touch, rather than simply tolerating it. The halter came out at the height of the third hour, produced from a small bag Josephine had carried into the corral at the very start, and left untouched by the gate for the first two hours, a soft rope halter rather than the heavier, harsher tack the four previous men had all attempted to force onto the horse at the very start of their own failed efforts. Josephine did not attempt to place it immediately.
She held it first, letting Judas investigate it with his nose, smelling it, nudging it, satisfying whatever calculation a distrustful horse makes before accepting something new near its head. And only after several minutes of this did she begin with excruciating slowness to work the halter into position. Thaddeus watched this entire process with his arms no longer crossed, his earlier posture of amused certainty, replaced by something closer to fixed, silent attention. And when the halter finally settled into place around Judas's head, without a single moment of panic or resistance from the horse, a small, surprised sound went through the gathered crowd at the fence.