Eli was walking beside her up the hill, leading his mare, with his hat pushed back. At the grave she got down and he tied the horses to the picket fence, and she knelt and took the old dead asters out of the jelly glass and put in new ones, purple and yellow at the heart, and sat back on her heels in the grass.
HE KEPT HIS WORD, said the board.
"So did you," Eli said. "Amos would say so."
"I didn't give anybody my word."
"You gave it to that horse," he said. "The first night. I don't know what you said to him. But he believed it."
She looked over at Gideon. He was pulling at the new grass along the fence, his tail switching the flies, the white mark bright on his back in the sun. Down below, in the yard, Ab had come out of the kitchen to throw a pan of dishwater into the dooryard, and stood shading his eyes up at them with his one hand. Toby was riding in from the upper springs, where there were two hundred and eleven cows and calves on the grass that spring, every one of them wearing a Seven P that nobody had touched.
"Josephine," Eli said.
She had known it was coming, of course. She had known it since about January. She had wondered how he would do it and had decided he would do it badly, and he did; he took his hat all the way off and turned it around twice in his big scarred hands and looked at the hat and not at her, and said a number of things about the forge in Ferris Crossing and how a man could as easily keep a forge on Sage Creek, and how the Seven P needed a good deal of iron work, and how he was thirty-nine years old and not much to look at and set in his ways. Then he stopped, because he had run out, and stood there.
"Eli," she said. "I've been answering since February. You only had to quit asking."
He looked up at her then. It was a long look, gray and quiet and rained-on, and slowly, at the middle of his beard, something happened that she had not seen it do before, and she realized he was smiling.
Gideon lifted his head from the grass and looked around at the two of them, the way a steady horse will when something has happened that he is not sure was necessary. Then he blew out through his nose and went back to grazing. It was spring on Sage Creek. Nobody in Carbon County called him the Devil anymore. Most of them had forgotten they ever had.