"Ma'am?"
"Fetch me the lantern, Toby," she said. "And Ab's pliers. And a knife."
When he had gone she sat on her heels in the barn door, with her hand in her lap, and looked at the saddle and did not touch it. The sun was going down orange behind the draw. Somewhere a meadowlark was singing the last of the evening. She was aware of being very calm, the way she had been calm in Leadville when the shift boss came to the door of the cabin with his hat in his hands, a calm that was not peace but its opposite, a thing held so tight it could not shake.
Toby came back with the lantern and Ab came with him.
She parted the wool with her fingers.
It was a horseshoe nail. She knew it at once, and so did Ab, who said "God damn," very softly, and then, "Beg pardon." It was the square, tapered shank of a common horseshoe nail, a number six or seven, and it stood up out of the underside of the bar exactly half an inch, no more. The point had been filed. She could see the file marks bright on the iron under the crust. The wool had been combed up around it so that it could not be seen and could barely be felt, unless you pressed, unless something heavy pressed: a man's weight settling into the seat, coming down on the bar, driving the point into the back of the horse beneath.
Old blood was dried black on it. And newer blood over that. And a few hairs, gray and black, caught in the crust. Blue roan hairs.
"Turn it over," she said.
Ab held the lantern. Toby helped her right the saddle on the rack. She ran her fingers over the seat on the near side, over the place directly above the nail, and felt it before she saw it: a seam in the leather where no seam should be. Someone had slit the seat jockey along the line of the bar, three inches, and sewn it shut again with waxed linen thread, small neat stitches, eight to the inch, and rubbed them over with dirt and neat's-foot oil so they would not shine new.
"Lyle done that," said Toby. His voice cracked in the middle. "I seen him. A week before Mr. Pruett died. He was sitting on his bunk with the saddle on his knees and an awl, and I asked what he was doing, and he said the old man's seat had split and he was mending it for him as a favor. He said—he said don't mention it to Mr. Pruett, because the old man was proud and wouldn't want to know he needed help with a thing like that."
Nobody said anything.