Orrin Pratt resigned his commission before the trial and took the train to Ogden and was not seen in Carbon County again.
* * *
Winter came the week after the trial, and it came the way Bannock had promised it would.
It came in on a north wind that blew for three days without stopping and filled the draw to the tops of the corral poles with snow as fine and hard as sugar. It came at forty below, so that the nails in the walls of the house cracked like pistol shots in the night and the water bucket froze solid six feet from the stove. She learned to chop ice on the creek for the cattle twice a day, and to hay from a sled, and to tell by the sound of the wind under the door whether it was safe to go to the barn without a rope. She learned what Ab meant by a chinook, when one came in January, warm as April for a day and a half, and the snow sagged and ran and the whole country smelled of wet earth, and then the cold clamped down again on top of it and froze everything to glass.
Dutch stayed through the winter, and Corley, once his arm healed, and Toby, who had nowhere else to go and would not have gone if he had. She hired two more men in March off the Rawlins stage. They lost sixty head, which Ab said was a good winter, and which up and down the territory that year was a miracle; it was the winter of 'eighty-six and 'eighty-seven, and the big outfits on the Powder and the Belle Fourche lost half and more, and some of them never came back at all.
Eli Truesdale came out from Ferris Crossing every Sunday that the road could be traveled, and two Sundays when it could not. He came on the Percheron mare, wrapped to the eyes in a buffalo robe, with his beard frozen white, and he would sit in Amos's front room by the fire with his boots steaming and drink Ab's coffee and talk about nothing much. The price of bar iron. The Keoghs' new baby. A wolf somebody had seen down by the Platte bridge with one white foot. She found that she listened for the mare's step on the frozen yard from about noon on Sundays, and that she minded, more than she had expected to mind, on the days it did not come.
He did not hurry. That was what she noticed. In all those months he never once hurried her, and she understood after a while, with a feeling that was half laughter and half something nearer to tears, that he was doing what she had done, in the round corral with the lantern hissing. He was asking, and quitting the minute she answered. He was waiting for her to learn that there was an answer.
* * *
In May the asters came back on the hill above the house.
Gideon's back had healed in the winter. Where the wound had been, a patch of hair the size of a silver dollar had grown in pure white, the way hair does over an old saddle sore, so that in the spring sunlight he wore a little white mark behind the withers on the near side like a thumbprint, as if someone had touched him there to remember the place. She had stopped noticing it, mostly. She noticed it now, riding him up the hill on a bright morning with the meadowlarks going in the sage and the creek loud with snowmelt.
She rode him in Amos's saddle. Eli had taken it to his forge in February and cut out the bar where the nail had been and spliced in a new piece of seasoned ash, and covered it with fresh rawhide, and Keogh had sent for new sheepskin from Denver. It was the same saddle, with Amos's shape still in the seat. She had wondered whether the horse would let her put it on him. She had spent a week asking. He had answered on the fourth day.