She solved it for them. She stood outside that tent with her husband's blood on her sleeve and told them to put it under Paul's name because they'd believe a man. And if they wrote hers down, they would say it never happened at all. He turned back around to the platform. You asked her whose rifle it is, Mr.
Foster. It's hers. It has been hers for 6 years, and there is not a man alive who is in that draw who does not know it. I've got no business standing here telling it, except that I have listened to you talk to that woman for three days. Then Leonard did a thing that Otis said afterward he would remember on his deathbed.
He turned to face Lane 2 and he came to attention badly on a bad hip, an old man in a coat with the wrong buttons on it and he saluted her. Out in the crowd of Fort Kio corporal stood up. Then the rest of the enlisted men. Then a man in a store suit near the front who had freighted on the powder in 82. And then the whole back of that crowd came off the wagon boxes at once, and it was not cheering.
For 4 seconds, it was 400 people standing up silent in the sagebrush. Then it broke. Ernest stood on his own platform under his own banner with the trumpet in his hand and nowhere on earth to put it down. He tried once. He said something about the rules and the money, and 400 people did not hear a word of it.
Otis went up the steps past him, took the sheet, and entered the scores in front of witnesses. Then he turned back two pages. He drew a line through the change from 400 yd to 600 and a line through the change to the west flat. And in the margin, in a hand anybody could read, he wrote, "Ordered by sponsor, entered under protest." He signed it and dated it and handed the book to the corporal from Fort Kio to hold. You do not have the authority, Ernest said.
No, Otis said, "But I have got the book." The purse was counted out at 20 11 that morning. $500 in front of more witnesses than any sum of money has ever needed. Anna Lambert signed for it and her hand was not steady, which was the first thing anybody had seen out of her in 3 days that was not made of iron. The rest took about a month. The Stockman's Association met in Mile City in November and voted 11 to2 to take the Kuster County match away from Ernest Foster and run it themselves. And one of the two was Earnest.
The Yellowstone Journal printed Otis Yates's marginal note on the front page. Word for word, Ernest kept his acres and his house with the slate roof. He kept everything he owned. He simply found over that winter and the one after it that when he came into a room in that town, the conversation in it changed, and that it went on doing that for the rest of his life. The painted banner with his name on it came down off the poles that same afternoon.