The chain went through the ring behind her, and the sound of it carried all the way to the barn. Katherine Osborne was barefoot. The sand in that pen had been under the sun since 6:00 in the morning, and it was hot enough to raise a blister, and she stood in the middle of it in a gray dress gone ragged at the hem. And she did not move. 40 Ft away, a black stallion stood against the rail with foam on his neck, and his ears laid flat to his skull.
He had put four men in the dirt before noon. The last one had gone out on a board. 200 People were pressed three deep along that fence, and not one of them was quiet. Men were laying folded money on the top rail. A voice somewhere behind her offered 10 to one that she would not last a count of three, and somebody took it, and the whole rail laughed at the same time.
Up on the auction stand, Thomas Hammond held a sale bill with $5,000 written on the back of it in his own ink, in his own hand, signed. And down at the bottom rail, holding a pair of split boots against her chest with both arms stood a 9-year-old girl who had not made a sound in 4 minutes. Now, stop there because there is something you need to know before this goes any further. That woman was not brave. She was terrified.
Her hands had been shaking since the gate swung, and she had them pressed flat against her legs so that nobody on that fence could see it. She had $3 to her name. She had a broken wagon sitting 11 mi back with everything she owned in the box and a daughter watching her from a fence rail. And no more reason to be standing in that pen than a bird has to walk into a house. She had asked to be let in.
She had asked twice. That morning, Catherine Osborne had walked 11 miles to look at a horse over a fence. She left the wagon at Martha's place before it was light. The near back wheel had dropped two spokes on the road out of Drewzy, and there was no money to have it set. So, it sat in Martha's yard with a rock under the axle, and everything the two of them owned still in the box.
Catherine carried a bed roll under her arm tied with a leather strap and she carried it the way some people carry a child. Ada was nine. Twice on that road she asked her mother if they were going to be all right. And both times her mother said yes without slowing down. They came on to the diamond from the county road a little after 9 in the morning.
Now you have to understand what the diamond was because everything that happened that day came out of it. Thomas Hammond was 54 and he ran horses and cattle across more country than some states have counties. That is not the part that mattered. What mattered was water. In the Horny Basin, the man who holds the water holds the men.
And Thomas Hammond held every live spring from the Sylvies to the rim. He could dry a neighbor out in one August without raising his voice. And he had done it. And they still came and took their hats off in his yard. His house sat up on the rise behind the barns with glass in every window, and it was set where it was so that a man coming up the road would have to look at it for 2 miles.