She stood with him a while. His breathing slowed under her hand.
When she ducked back out between the rails, they were all looking at her, and Bannock's face had nothing on it at all.
"You want to be careful, ma'am," he said. "He was gentle with Amos too. Right up till he wasn't."
"I expect that's true of most things," Josephine said, and picked up her carpetbag. "My trunk's down at the road. If somebody would be so kind."
* * *
The cook's name was Absalom Gentry, and he had left his left arm at a place in Virginia called Spotsylvania. He told her this the first night, standing at the stove with his empty sleeve pinned up and a spoon in his right hand, as if it were the main thing about him she would need to know.
"I don't need help in the kitchen," he said, "and I don't want it, so don't you go getting ideas just 'cause you're a woman and it's a kitchen."
"I wouldn't dream of it, Mr. Gentry."
"Ab."
"Ab."
The house had three rooms. There was the kitchen with a long plank table where the hands ate, and a front room with a stone fireplace, a horsehair sofa that had come a long way to be this tired, and a rolltop desk, and a bedroom behind. Amos Pruett's coats still hung on pegs by the door. His spectacles were folded on the desk on top of a stack of Breeder's Gazette. There was a smell in the house of pipe tobacco and harness oil and old man, and she did not mind it.