Praying, a man at the front said and got a small laugh for it. And it was thinner than the last one because she had been standing still for 11 seconds. And a crowd cannot hold a laugh that long. The stallion left that rail. He came across half the pen in three strides with his head up and his ears flat and the whole fence sucked in air at the same time.
Ada shut her eyes. Catherine did not brace and did not lift her hands. She let her breath go out slow through her mouth and she dropped her eyes to the sand. He stopped 4 ft short of her. What the yard made then was not a laugh.
It was 200 people making the same small vowel at once. He stood in front of her blowing, one ear on her and one ear turned back. Dark with sweat, white foam where the rope had been at his throat. And then in front of every man on that fence, the widow maker walked the last four feet on his own and put his nose against her collarbone and left it there. Is she holding him?
She has not touched that horse yet. Then why is he standing there? Because nobody ever asked him to. She let him take her in. You let a stranger look at your face before you speak to him, and it is the same courtesy.
What the crowd could not see because her back was to them was that she was crying without a sound in the middle of a horse pen in front of 200 people. Then she was done. She wiped her face on her sleeve and went to work. She moved sideways, never straight at him, always on an angle. She crouched to the bed roll and shook out the flower sack and lifted out the hackamore and it uncoiled in her hands, dark and heavy and worn smooth.
Down at the front rail, an old man came out from under a booth awning and put both hands on the top board. His name was Virgil Chandler. He was 61. He made saddles and harness in Canyon City, and he had 40 outfits on a rack behind him. That's a bosal, he said out loud.
The way people announce things in church. Four strand. Look at the heel knot on it. Where does a woman like that get tacked like that? She didn't get it anywhere.
Somebody made it. Nobody is braided like that in this country in 20 years. Then he stopped talking and leaned out over that rail and looked at the thing in her hands for a good while. And something started coming up in the back of his mind that he could not get hold of yet. Catherine worked the rawhide in her fingers until it warmed.