Thaddeus Cain paid the wager in full that same evening. He paid the price of the dress Josephine had worn when she climbed the corral fence that morning, though both of them understood by then that the actual debt owed had very little to do with money. What Thaddeus paid in the months that followed was a different kind of currency entirely: a willingness to extend the same patient trust to his wife's judgment that she had extended to a frightened, distrustful horse in matters considerably beyond the corral. He began asking her opinion on stock purchases, on the training of younger horses coming up through the ranch, and on decisions he had previously made unilaterally out of the same habit of doubt that had cost him a season's profit to Silas Pruitt and had nearly cost him, on the very first day of his marriage, the trust of a wife whose competence he had entirely underestimated.
Josephine, for her part, found in Thaddeus something she had not found in her Kentucky fiancé: a man who, once his doubt was honestly and fully dismantled, did not simply tolerate her gift with difficult animals but came over time to rely on it. He sent for her whenever a new horse arrived unmanageable, understanding that his wife's patient, unhurried method succeeded where force and frustration had failed for two straight years. Within a few years, neighboring ranches began sending for her as well whenever their own hands failed with a particularly difficult animal. And Thaddeus, rather than resenting the demands on his wife's time the way her Kentucky fiancé once had, took a quiet, considerable pride in it, often riding along himself simply to watch her work, understanding by then that what he was witnessing was not a parlor trick, but a genuine and rare gift, one he had very nearly dismissed entirely on the strength of four other men's failures.
Judas himself became within a year one of the most reliable horses on the Cain ranch, ridden gently and often by Josephine herself, and occasionally, once enough trust had accumulated, by Thaddeus, who liked to say that he trusted no other horse on the property quite so completely, having watched with his own eyes exactly what it had taken to earn that particular animal's confidence. Kit Farrow, the young Dunmore hand who had doubted the outcome most loudly at the fence that first afternoon, became in the following years one of Josephine's most devoted informal students, riding over whenever a difficult horse arrived on any ranch in the valley to watch her methods and eventually to practice them himself under her occasional correction. He told people years later that the afternoon he watched Josephine Cain gentle Judas without a rope in three hours was the same afternoon he stopped believing that force was the only answer to a frightened animal.
It was a lesson that changed how he worked for the rest of his career. Otis Marsh stayed on as foreman for another fifteen years and told the story of that single long day so often to new hands arriving at the ranch that it became in its own small way a kind of local legend. It was the afternoon the new bride gentled the unbreakable horse and, in the same stretch of hours, broke her husband's doubt right along with it. The naturalist John Muir once wrote that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.