That was the worst part of it. The child was not looking at Hammond. She was looking at her mother to see what a person does. Catherine took her hand off the top board. Is the north rail public, Mr.
Hammond? What? The board at the cattle guard. Is it public or is it not? It was public.
It had said so in red paint for 11 years because open rails bring crowds and crowds bring bidters. His own greed had painted that board. He came down off the stand. 200 People got out of his way without being asked. He came down that fence line in a straight line and he stopped close enough that she could smell bay rum over the dust.
And he looked at the bed roll under her arm. Give me that. It's mine. He took it anyway. He hooked two fingers under the leather strap and pulled.
And the strap burned a line across the inside of her forearm. And then Thomas Hammond turned around and threw it over the rail into the pen. It landed 4 ft from the stallion and rolled, and the canvas came open, and the flower sack came half out of it into the sand. The horse threw his head around and screamed at it and went back into the rail with his hind quartarters and the whole fence laughed. Ada screamed too.
That was the only sound the child made in the next quarter of an hour. One short high sound and Catherine put her arm across her daughter and turned her face into her skirt. Here is what was in that roll. A tin plate and a cup. A razor, a hide knife, and an all worn down to fit one hand, a tint type of a young man at the head of a Bay Mare, holding his hat, squinting, and in a flower sack, coiled in on itself like something asleep.
A hackamore of hand braided rawhide. Four strands, dark and smooth, where a thumb had sat on it for eight years. She had braided that one the winter after Ross died. Out of a hide nobody would buy in a shed with no stove, working by field because her fingers were too cold to see with. She had sold 200 since.
She had never sold that one. There had been a week in Baker City when she stood outside a sadlery for an hour with it in her hand and walked away with it still in her hand and no supper for either of them. It was lying in the sand now, 4 feet from an animal that meant to kill it in front of 200 people. And Hammond lifted his arm and showed the crowd where it had gone. "There it is," he said.