"There," said Pratt, to the crowd. "You see how he is."
"I see how he is about Mr. Bannock," Josephine said.
She came down the steps of the house with the saddle in her arms. It was heavy, forty pounds of old Frazier leather and wood and iron, and she had not asked anyone to carry it. She walked across the yard with it while they watched her, and she laid it on the top rail of the fence belly up, so the sheepskin lining faced the sky.
"Mrs. Hale," Pratt said, "we're not here for a show."
"Then I'll be brief, Deputy." She turned to the man on the rail. "Mr. Tillery. You're a horseman. I'm told you've ridden the worst there is from here to Montana. Before you get on my horse in this saddle, would you do me the kindness of putting your hand right there"—she pointed—"and pressing down. The way a man's seat would."
Kansas Jack looked at her, and at the saddle, and at Bannock. Then he licked his cigarette closed and put it behind his ear and swung down off the rail. He put his brown hand flat on the sheepskin where she'd shown him and leaned on it.
He took his hand away fast and looked at it.
Then he did a thing she would remember a long time. He did not say anything. He took his own clasp knife out of his pocket, opened it, and with the point of the blade he parted the matted wool, very carefully, as a doctor would part hair to look at a cut. He bent down. He looked for perhaps five seconds. Then he straightened up and turned around to the men on the fence, and his walnut face had gone a dull dark red from the collar up.
"There's a horseshoe nail in this saddle," he said. "Drove up through the bar from the top. Point filed. Wool combed over it." His voice was perfectly flat. "There's blood on it. A lot of blood. Old and new."
Nobody moved. And then everybody did, all at once; the men on the fence swung down and crowded in, and Pratt was saying "Now, now, now," and Crane's chestnut was dancing sideways at the back of the press, and in the middle of it Josephine turned the saddle right side up on the rail and folded back the cut seat leather and showed them the head of the nail set into the tree.
"Somebody slit this seat," she said, loudly, so they would all hear it, "and bored a pilot hole, and drove that nail, and sewed it shut again with waxed linen. Eight stitches to the inch. It was done a week before Amos Pruett died. On the twentieth of August he saddled up in the dark and got on, and when his weight came down on the bar that nail went into his horse's back. Any horse alive would have done what Gideon did. Any horse. And since then every man who's tried him has tried him in this saddle, saddled with Mr. Bannock's own hands. Mr. Corley. Mr. Keller. Who else? Every time, that nail went into the same hole."