"That's Corley done," somebody said. "That's Corley done for a week."
"That's the last one," said another man, and the whooping stopped, because he had said it the way a man says grace. He was standing apart from the others, a tall man in a cowhide vest with a Winchester held loose in the crook of his arm. He had a long, clean-shaven face and a yellow mustache that he kept trimmed close as a barber would. "I said Corley was the last one and I meant it. Saturday I'm going to put a bullet in that horse's head, and the next man that wants to argue about it can argue with Amos up on the hill."
The thrown man, Corley, sat up and felt of his collarbone and said a word that would have got him whipped in Boonville, Missouri.
Josephine set her carpetbag down.
"Whose horse is that?" she said.
They all turned. She was aware of what they saw, because she had seen it herself in the wavy mirror at the Rawlins House that morning: a woman a little past thirty in a gray traveling dress gone brown at the hem, a black straw hat tied under the chin, a face that the sun of the last nine days had not been kind to. She had her mother's long jaw and her father's habit of standing too square.
The tall man touched his hat brim with two fingers. "Was Amos Pruett's," he said. "Who's asking, ma'am?"
"Mrs. William Hale." She found she had to say it twice in her head before she could say it out loud, though she had been saying it for years. "Amos Pruett was my husband's uncle. He wrote and asked me to come. I believe that makes the horse mine. And the rest of it."
Nobody said anything. In the round corral the roan had stopped pitching and stood spraddle-legged with his head low, blowing, the empty saddle crooked on his back. The wind moved the cottonwoods.
"Well," said the tall man finally. He uncradled the rifle and stood it against the fence. "Well, ma'am. I'm Lyle Bannock. I ramrod this outfit, or I did for Amos. I'm sorry to be the one tells you. Amos is dead."
"I know he is. The lawyer in Rawlins told me. Mr. Haskell." She looked past him at the horse. "He told me the horse threw him."