"Not yet," she said.
Ten minutes later Eli was gone toward Ferris Crossing on the big mare, by the back way through the breaks, to wake a Scotsman and a telegraph operator.
* * *
Bannock found the peg empty at half past eleven.
She was in the front room when he came. He did not knock. He stood in the kitchen doorway with the light behind him, and Ab, at the stove, turned around with the stove lifter in his hand and stood there holding it.
"The old man's rig's gone," said Bannock.
"I know it is," said Josephine. "You'll have it at noon."
He looked at her for a long moment. The hangover was on him; his eyes were red-rimmed and his skin had a gray shine under the sunburn. He looked at Ab, and at the stove lifter, and at the closed door to the bedroom behind her. He was working something out, and she watched him work it, and saw the moment he decided that whatever it was, there was nothing a widow woman could have done with a saddle in one night that would matter much.
"Noon," he said, and smiled, and went out.
They had come in a crowd. That was Crane's doing, she supposed; or Pratt's, who had a deputy's love of an audience. There were a dozen men from Ferris Crossing sitting their horses along the corral fence, loafers from the Elkhorn and a couple of small ranchers from down the creek and Keogh the storekeeper in a paper collar, who had ridden out in a buckboard with Eli and sat in it now with a ledger on his knee and his mouth pinched shut. There was Crane on his high-headed chestnut. There was Deputy Pratt in his buffalo coat, and Kansas Jack Tillery sitting on the top rail rolling a cigarette, and Dutch and Corley, and Toby by the barn door, white as milk.
Gideon was in the round corral with a halter on. He had gone to the far side when the riders came in, and he stood there now with his head high and his nostrils going, watching all of them, and when Bannock came out of the barn and walked toward the fence the horse wheeled and ran the length of the corral and stopped with his tail to the rails, trembling.