At 20 9 the sail started. Clark Snyder had a voice that carried to the road and the lots came through the ring in strings of four and six. There was a man from Texas there named Sydney who was taking 300 head south and he had the best chair and Hammond's own coffee because 300 head is 300 head. Twice that morning somebody mentioned the inspector. Alfred Newell had been working the basin for 3 weeks and no horse was going to cross out of that county without his certificate on the string and he was due at the diamond before the week was out.
Nobody said it like it mattered. It was the kind of thing men say about the weather and the mail. Remember it anyway. At 11 they brought lot 40 into the round pen and the whole sale stopped being a sale. Hammond had been advertising that horse for 3 months, and the catalog said it in heavy letters.
An animal no man has yet sat. Danger is worth money at a horse sale. It fills the rails, and full rails raise the bidding on everything else. He put four of his own men up on that stallion in front of 200 buyers with a $20 bonus posted for anyone who stayed 10 seconds. Clyde went first.
He was 22 and had been telling people all week what he was going to do, and he was in the sand before he was properly down in it, and he got up laughing with his hat in his hand. The second man lasted one jump. The third came off crooked into the rail and walked out holding his elbow against his ribs and did not laugh. The fourth man never got a leg over him at all. The horse took him off the fence as he came over it.
And that was the one that went out on a board. And after that, a quiet came up along the rail that nobody had asked for. And here is what Catherine saw. Standing at that fence with her daughter's hand in hers, that not one of the 200 people around her saw. All four of those men had gone at him from the left.
Every man in that basin mounts from the left. It is how it is done and how it has always been done. And when a horse tries to kill you for it, you say the horse is bad. She watched him set himself when a man moved on his near side. It was not temper.
He went into the rail hind quartarters first and dropped his head and a band of muscle above that left shoulder jumped like a wire coming tight. It jumped every time. It jumped whether the man had a rope in his hand or nothing at all. Nobody was looking at the shoulder. They were watching his teeth.
That is what a man watches once he has already made up his mind about an animal. Sydney from Texas got up out of his good chair, went over to Hammond, said something short, and sat back down. What he had said was that he did not want that horse at any figure because he was not walking 300 heads south with a killer in the string. That was the moment Thomas Hammond stopped enjoying his morning. 200 Buyers had watched an animal with his brand on it, put four of his own men down, and then get refused in front of everybody by the biggest check on the place.
So he settled it from the stand. The horse would not go through the ring. No animal was going to leave the diamond and go around this basin with his brand on it, making a fool of him in other men's corrals. Any man there had until the end of the day to prove him wrong. If nobody could sit that horse by sundown, he would have him shot at the fence and the hide could go to Virgil Chandler's booth for $6.