She looked at him a long while. He looked back with his pale, clean, patient face, and there was nothing in it, nothing she could take hold of.
"Tomorrow at noon," she said.
* * *
Bannock rode back to Ferris with the deputy and Tillery at four o'clock. He said they'd stand Tillery to supper at the Elkhorn and he'd be back by morning. He said it to the yard in general, not to her. Dutch and Corley went with them, Corley riding one-handed, because it was Friday, and there was a woman at the Elkhorn who sang.
When the dust of them had gone down beyond the cottonwoods, Toby Rusk came across the yard with Amos Pruett's saddle in his arms.
He was carrying it the way you'd carry a dead dog, out from his body. He set it down on the saddle rack outside the barn door and stood back from it.
"Lyle keeps it in his room in the end of the tack shed," he said. "On a peg over his bunk. He don't let nobody touch it. Says it's for the coroner, if the coroner ever comes, which he won't. Only he gets it down every time somebody's going to try the blue. And he saddles him himself. Every time. Don't let nobody help." He swallowed. "I seen you looking at that blanket. I thought you'd want to see this, too."
It was a good saddle. It had been a beautiful one once. It was a Frazier, out of Pueblo, Colorado; the maker's stamp was on the fender, R.T. FRAZIER, and the swells were tooled with oak leaves worn almost smooth by a man's knees. The horn was wrapped in old rawhide gone black with use. Amos had sat in it for the better part of twenty years, and it had taken the shape of him, and she could see the shape still, a dip in the seat where he'd ridden a little heavy on the left. The stirrups were wood, bound in iron.
She turned it over on the rack, belly up.
The sheepskin lining under the bars was thick and old and matted, gray-brown with years of sweat and dust. She ran her hands over it, the near side and then the off, feeling the shape of the wooden tree beneath, the long curved bars that lay along either side of a horse's spine. On the near side, a hand's width behind the front of the bar, the wool was stiff and dark and crusted, and when she pressed down on it with the heel of her hand, something bit her.
She jerked her hand back. A bright bead of her own blood was coming up out of the meat at the base of her palm.