The summer horse sale ran in the open. There was no roof and no shade on that side of the place, just a round pen of white sand with rails around it and 200 buyers standing in the sun in clean hats. Their wagons and their saddle stocks sat in rows behind them. It was going to be 96 by noon, and the sand threw the light back up into everybody's eyes. Catherine and Ada came up the outside of the crowd and stopped at the public rail, which is the low fence on the north side that anybody may stand at.
There is a board at the cattle guard that says so. Ada wanted to know why they could not go in the front like everybody else. Her mother said they could see fine from here. Ada asked again. Catherine crouched in the dust and fixed the collar of her daughter's dress, which did not need fixing.
She said it quiet. There were men on this place who knew her face. They were going to stand at this rail and look at one horse and then walk back to Martha's. And Ada was not to talk to anybody. Ada said, "All right." She had heard some version of that sentence in four counties.
Here is what the notice said, and it had been nailed up in three counties for 8 years. It said that Catherine Osborne, widow, had taken a black colt off the diamond range in the summer her husband died and that the diamond would pay for information. Nobody ever came to arrest her. That was not the point of it. A woman with her name on a horse theft notice does not get hired, does not get credit at a store, does not get a school for her daughter, and does not get to stand in a county office and be believed about anything at all.
She had been moving for 8 years. She had been feeding Ada on braidwork. Rawhide res and hackamores and quirts sold through a saddler's middleman in Canyon City who paid her 40 cents on the dollar because he knew she could not go anywhere else. Her hands were cracked across every knuckle from soaking hide. She was 32 years old and she looked older.
And there was not one person on that ranch who would have believed what those hands could do. They had him in a plank pen behind the barn by himself. And Catherine saw him before she had been on the place 4 minutes. She saw him the way you see one face in a crowded room. He was black all over with no white on him anywhere.
16 Hands and change. She had been there when he was born. On her knees in wet straw in a shed with a lantern hung on a nail. 24 Years old and 6 months a mother. Ross asleep in the house because the mayor was not due for another week.
The cult came at 2:00 in the morning and she sat with him until the sun came up and she named him Toby after nobody because it was a plain name and it sounded right in the dark. He was nine now. Ada was nine, too. They had been fold the same spring. And for the first year of her daughter's life, Catherine had carried the baby out to that shed in a blanket while she did the feeding.
That is all you need to know about why a woman with $3 walked 11 miles to stand at a fence. The catalog called him emperor. It said bread on the diamond. Everybody in that basin called him the widow maker and had for two years and not one person at that rail thought about the sound of that word for a single second all morning. Catherine stood at the public rail with her hand flat on the top board and she did not say his name because she had learned in 8 years what happens to a woman who says a thing like that out loud.