A woman by the gate put both hands over her eyes and turned her back on it. And Catherine did not fight him. That is the part nobody could account for afterward. And some of those men had been breaking horses for 30 years. She did not clamp down.
She did not haul on that rope. She let her hips go loose and stayed in the middle of them. And every time he threw a shape, she was not where the shape was aimed. She's going to be killed, Luther Weaver said out loud. Look at her hands, Virgil said.
Her hands were low and quiet. She had a fistful of black man and maybe 6 in of slack rope, and she was not using either one. On the fourth jump, he changed ends to the left hard, and the whole rail heard her grunt. She came off center by a foot. She got it back.
Somebody shouted, "Ride him." It was not an insult that time. The man who shouted it did not appear to notice. Then she did the thing that made Virgil Chandler put both hands on his knees. She did not ask that horse to stop. She asked him to turn.
She opened her outside hand a few inches and shifted her weight, and the stallion, in the middle of a buck, swung into an ark. She held him on it. The ark became a circle and she made the circle smaller. He bucked twice more inside it and found out that bucking cost him ground. Smaller, he broke into a run and she let him run and closed it down until running was work.
Smaller, three times around. That is what everybody counted afterward. And every one of them counted the same. On the third, the black horse came down off his hawks and quit. He stopped so short that his own dust went on past him and out through the rails.
There was one full second of silence under a white sky. Not one man at that fence had ever watched a horse stop like that. Bronx get ridden until they quit. That one had not quit. This one had been reasoned out of it in public by a barefoot woman with no bit in his mouth.
Then the yard came apart. 200 Buyers in clean hats roared like a grandstand. Men went up the fence. A hat went into the pen and nobody went in after it. And Catherine sat on that black horse in the middle of the pen with her chest heaving and did not celebrate anything.