Because it is a very funny thing. A woman with no shoes asking Thomas Hammond for a contract. He should have heard it. 200 People spent the rest of their lives wondering how he did not hear it. But arrogance has a deafness all its own.
And a crowd was laughing at somebody who was not him. So he took a sail bill off the stand and turned it over and wrote it out against the top rail with a pencil in a big showy hand. He said every word out loud as he wrote it so the men in the back would not miss any of it. $5,000 and the black horse called Emperor to Mrs. Catherine Osborne if she rides him this day and he signed it. Thomas Hammond with a flourish on the H that took him two strokes.
Then he held it up over his head and turned all the way around with it so every man on that fence could get a clean look. He handed it down to Clark Snider and told him to enter it in the book. Snider entered it in ink with the date. A thing announced from the stand goes in the book. The rail cheered.
Ammon took a bow. He actually took a bow. And then Catherine knelt down in the dust in front of her daughter. She did not make a speech. She said, "I need you to stand right here by this post and not move, and if anybody speaks to you, you say nothing." Is it Toby?
She had never seen him. She had been a year old, but she had grown up on a wagon seat listening to her mother tell it. The shed and the lantern and the two in the morning, and there is not a child alive who cannot do arithmetic on her mother's face. Catherine said, "Yes. Are you going to get killed?" "No." Then Catherine sat down in the dirt at the bottom rail and pulled off her boots and set them side by side against the boards.
Neat. The way a person sets shoes at a door. One of them had a split across the heel wrapped twice with bailing wire. She put them in her daughter's arms. She rolled her sleeves back and her forearms came out riged with thin, pale scars, old and parallel.
The marks rope leaves over 20 years. Nobody along that fence read them right. Wesley Boyd stood at the gate with his hand on the pin and did not pull it. Hammond had to say his name twice. The first thing she did inside that pen was nothing.
That is not what 200 people had crowded up on a fence to watch. They had come to see a woman run at a horse or a horse run at a woman. Instead, she stopped 6 ft in from the gate and stood with her arms hanging and her shoulders down and her body turned a quarter away. So, her chest was not facing him at all. What in the world is she doing?