She watched him from the window as he rode off up the creek. When he was past the corrals Bannock came out of the barn and walked alongside the chestnut a ways, one hand on the stirrup leather, talking. Crane leaned down to answer. Then he touched spurs to the chestnut and went on, and Bannock stood in the road and watched him go, and after a while turned around and looked at the house. She did not step back from the window. She did not know whether he could see her.
On the corner of the rolltop desk, under Amos's spectacles, she had the tally book open at a page in the back where the old man had written, in his cramped and careful hand, a column of numbers with no heading and a single word beside the last of them.
Seven.
She did not know what it meant yet. But she had stopped believing that Amos Pruett had ridden north by mistake.
* * *
She doctored him that night.
It took four hours, and most of it was waiting. She brought a lantern and set it on a post where it would not shine in his eyes, and a bucket of warm water with a handful of salt in it, and a clean flour sack, and a tin of carbolic salve from Ab's shelf. Then she sat in the corral and let him get used to all of it, the bucket and the rags and the smell of the carbolic, which he hated, and the hiss of the lantern, which he hated worse.
Every so often she stood and walked to him and laid her hand on his neck, and when he allowed it she moved it a little way back toward the place, and when he flinched she took it away before he could decide to do anything about it. Advance and retreat. Her father's voice in her ear: You don't take a thing from a horse, Josie. You ask, and you quit asking the minute he answers. That's how he learns there's an answer.
At about eleven Toby came down from the bunkhouse in his stocking feet and climbed onto the fence.
"Lyle'd skin me," he said, in a whisper, "if he knew I was out here."
"Then you'd best be quiet."