"Here," he said, after a while. "Right here. This is the rock."
"I know it is," said Josephine.
Gideon came and stood behind her. She felt his breath on her neck, warm, blowing her loose hair. Bannock's eyes moved to the horse and stayed there.
"He was supposed to be dead by now," Bannock said. He sounded almost puzzled. "That's all. That's all it needed. Crane was going to give me two thousand dollars and run both places together and I'd have been foreman of the whole creek. The old man was going to give it all to some Missouri widow who'd never seen a cow. He wouldn't listen. He was going to hang me for seven cows." He shut his eyes. "Seven goddamned cows."
"It wasn't the cows," said Eli. "You know it wasn't."
Bannock didn't answer that. Up on the rim, the rest of them were arriving, Pratt and Tillery and Dutch and the Ferris men, their horses blowing, their faces looking down into the canyon at the thing on the rock and the woman with her hair down her back and the blue roan horse standing quiet as a church at her shoulder.
* * *
Sheriff Tom Dunmore rode in from Rawlins at sundown with two deputies and a lean, quiet man in a duster named Lusk, who was a detective of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and who said almost nothing all evening except "Thank you, ma'am," when Ab gave him pie. The next morning Lusk and Dunmore rode up to Whiskey Gap with Eli and Kansas Jack, and in the box canyon behind Crane's line camp they found forty-one head of cattle in a brush pen, every one of them branded on the left hip with a Seven B, and every one of them, when Lusk clipped the hair and wet it down, showing a P underneath with the lower loop burned in so fresh it had barely haired over. The earmarks were Amos Pruett's, overslope left and under-bit right, with Crane's crop cut on top. You could see it if you looked. Amos had said so.
Silas Crane was taken to Rawlins in irons on the Monday stage and tried in the November term for grand larceny of livestock. He hired a lawyer from Cheyenne who wore a diamond stickpin, and was sentenced to eight years in the Territorial Penitentiary at Laramie, and his range and his water and his silver-mounted bridle were all sold at a sheriff's sale the following spring to pay what the court said he owed.
Lyle Bannock was tried for murder in the same term. He was carried into court on a litter, because the leg would not knit right; the doctor in Rawlins said it would never knit right, that he would walk on it crooked all his life. The jury heard Toby Rusk, who did not cry this time, and Keogh with his day book, and Eli Truesdale, and Kansas Jack Tillery, who had come back from Ogallala at his own expense to testify, and who told the court that in thirty years of riding rough stock he had never seen a lower thing done to a horse or a man, and that he had seen a great many low things. They heard Josephine Hale read from a dime memorandum book. They saw the saddle; it sat on a table in front of the judge's bench for four days with the seat folded back, and men came from three counties to look at it.
The jury was out two hours. Bannock got life, at Laramie, in the same stone building as Crane, and Josephine thought, sitting in the courtroom while the judge said it, that she did not know which of the two of them would find that harder.