“She’s Too Heavy for My Horse,” the Cowboy Laughed—The Sheriff’s Response Silenced Him

PART 2:

He was a mountain of a man in a fringed buckskin jacket hanging open over a bare chest. Dark hair loose to his shoulders, a white scar cut down through one eyebrow. Every man in the square had heard he had wintered alone above timberline and come down changed. He said that horse packed 400 pounds of elk out of the high country every fall and had never yet complained about it.

He said the horse was not what was too small here. Then he told Nash to step down. Nash stepped down. Nobody in that square laughed again for a long while after. Corbin took Ruby’s hand and she was too stunned to refuse it and he put her up in the gray’s saddle himself and then went inside and posted the bond in his own name.

They were married in the clerk’s office in under 7 minutes with Verna Stoddard as the witness because there was nobody else. Ruby signed her name below his and could not feel her own fingers. Judge Thatcher signed the bond without a word of protest. And that was the part Ruby would think about later. He looked pleased.

Sturgis, standing behind him, looked pleased in a different and worse way. 40 miles of mountain and a winter [clears throat] at 9,000 ft. Both men had done the arithmetic and liked the answer. They rode out at noon with the whole town watching from the walks. Ruby knew what people said about Seth Corbin. That he had killed four men in the Sangre country. That he had no people.

That the county had elected him sheriff because no other man alive would have taken the badge in a district that size. He did not speak for the first 6 miles. She sat the gray and waited to find out what she had been traded into, and told herself she had survived worse rooms than this silence. At the creek crossing, he got down without a word, and shortened her stirrups two holes, and ran his hand along the gray’s spine and withers the way a man does when he is checking a load.

He straightened up and said the horse was carrying her fine. And that a horse was honest about weight in a way men had never learned to be. Then he swung back up and rode on. Ruby looked at the back of his head a long while and could not make the pieces fit. They camped that night in a stand of aspen going gold. And he built the fire.

Gave her the better ground, and dropped his heavy coat over her shoulders without asking. She braced for the look. She had been braced for it her whole life. That quick flick down the body and away. The small tightening at the mouth. It did not come. He looked at her face when he spoke to her and only at her face.

The second day they climbed through spruce all morning and came out on the shoulder of the world. Blue Rock Park opened below them, 5 mi of high grass ringed by black timber, a creek running silver down the middle, and 300 head of horses grazing loose. Ruby stopped her horse without meaning to. She had never in her life seen that many good animals in one place and her chest hurt with it.

Ollie Party met them at the corrals, a bandy old horse breaker with a face like a dried apple, and he looked Ruby over once and said the outfit had needed somebody who could carry a full water bucket in each hand. The cabin was not the hovel she had spent two days imagining. It was swept, chinked tight, the floor scrubbed pale, and one whole wall was books.

More books than the schoolhouse in Tamarack Wells had ever owned. Corbin showed her the back room, said it had a bolt on the inside, and told her he had posted a bond and nothing else. Then he went out to see to the horses. Ruby lay awake a long time in a clean room in a strange house and counted what she had left.

A dead mother, a stolen barn, a husband who had bought her out of the county’s hands for a bond, and had not once looked at her body. She got up before daylight out of pure habit and had the stove going before either man came in. By the end of the first week she had the feed sheet reorganized, the harness oiled, and a schedule chalked on the wall that nobody had asked her for.

By the end of the second week, the two hardest keepers in the remuda had begun to fill out because she had seen that their teeth were bad and had started soaking their grain. Ollie noticed. He said out loud in front of Corbin that the girl knew more about a horse’s mouth than any man he had rode with in 40 years.

Corbin said nothing, but that evening he moved the good lamp to her end of the table and left it. The days went quiet in a way Ruby did not trust. She kept waiting for the cruelty to arrive on its usual schedule, and it kept not arriving. She made herself small out of long practice, took the smallest portion, stepped out of doorways before anyone could ask.

He never demanded anything. He put meat on the table and wood by the stove and asked her twice a day if she was warm enough, and that was the whole of it. Ollie told her one night, while Corbin was out with a colicky mare, that the sheriff had come down from the mountains six years ago after a winter that killed everyone else in his party.

He had carried a man 9 miles on his back and lost him anyway. On the last warm day of September, Dan Sturgis rode into the park with a paper. Judge Thatcher disputed the bond of maintenance. Ruby was summoned back to Tamarack Wells for a hearing. Corbin read it twice and said they would go, because a man who runs from a paper gives the paper teeth.

Ruby folded her hands in her lap so nobody would see them shake. The hearing was postponed the moment they arrived, which she understood later was the point. They were made to wait days in a town that had watched her be given away. On the second afternoon, she walked to the drugstore for lamp oil and camphor, because waiting was worse.

The poison register lay open on the counter where the law required it to lie, ruled in columns. Every sale of arsenic in that county written out with the buyer’s name and the date and the purpose. Dan Sturgis had signed it three times in the spring. “Rough on rats,” the purpose column said, “for the courthouse cellar.

” Ruby stood very still in the smell of camphor and did arithmetic she did not want to do. Her mother had first taken sick nine days after the first entry. She had worsened after the second. She had died four days past the third. There was a fourth entry. It was dated the 21st of June, 11 days after her mother was in the ground, and there were no rats left in that cellar worth the buying.

The fourth one had not been bought for her mother. It had been bought for the daughter who stood up in a courtroom and called the appraisal a lie, and it had been bought before the judge ever signed the order sending her into the mountains to die. Corbin found her sitting on the drugstore steps with the lamp oil unbought and her hands open in her lap like she had dropped something.

She told him all of it in one breath. He listened without moving, and when she finished, the thing that came into his gray eyes was not surprise. It was the cold that comes into a man who has just decided something and will not be talked out of it. He took the summons out of his coat, walked into the hotel, and fed it into the stove in front of the desk clerk and four men who would repeat it.

He said his wife was not a chattel of that court and never had been. They rode out of Tamarack Wells that same hour with the whole town watching for the second time. And Ruby sat straight in the saddle for every foot of it. Something changed on the way up the mountain. He talked about the horses, about the winter, about her.

He taught her to shoot on the flat below the corrals, a heavy old rifle braced across a rail. And she put five in the black at 100 yards on the third afternoon. And Ollie whooped like a boy. She was good at it. She had steady hands from nine years of holding frightened animals still. And the recoil that bruised smaller shoulders did not move her at all.

Corbin told her that this country killed the slight ones first. That every man he had buried above timberline had been a thin man. He said, “Substance survives.” And he said it like a plain fact and not a kindness. Nobody had ever offered her that arithmetic before. She had been told her whole life that her body was an apology she was obliged to keep making.

And here was a man saying it was the reason she would still be alive in March. She stopped stepping out of doorways. She took a full plate at supper and did not watch to see who noticed. She read his books and argued with him about them. And he leaned back and let her win. And she saw that he was enjoying himself.

On the night the first ice skimmed the water trough, Ruby crossed the room, took his face in both hands, and kissed him. He had been waiting for her to be ready and would have waited until spring. He said things to her that she made him repeat because she did not believe them the first time. He used the word magnificent and did not laugh when he said it.

October came in and for 11 days Ruby was happy in a way that frightened her. She was going through her mother’s things one evening, the poor crate of them the court had let her keep, and she came again to the old stock saddle nobody had wanted. Her mother had never trusted a bank or a lawyer with anything. She had hidden the deed money in a feed sack and the barn keys in a boot and she had once said that a good saddle outlives every man who ever swore an oath on a Bible.

The first snow came the next morning and the peace ended with it. Sturgis rode into the park with four men behind him and Ruby counted them from the cabin window and set the rifle where she could reach it. He sat his horse in the yard and said the bond was void, that the judge had ruled and that she was county property again and would come down with them now.

He looked her up and down while he said it and told the men behind him that they had better bring the freight wagon for this one. And they laughed the way the square had laughed. Corbin came out of the barn with the shotgun broken over his arm and said that any man who put a hand on his wife would be carried off this park rather than ride off it.

Sturgis studied him a while then turned his horse. That night Ruby took her mother’s saddle down and cut the sheepskin lining loose with a boot knife. The will was folded inside it, four pages signed and witnessed, leaving the barn and the 80 acres of hay meadow to her daughter Ruby and nothing to the county.

Ollie read it twice by lamp light and said the quiet part out loud. If that will was good, then the judge had suppressed it. And if he had suppressed one, he had suppressed others. Corbin got out the county book and counted. In 6 years, Judge Thatcher had probated 11 estates as insolvent, and every one of those properties had gone to the same two buyers, and both buyers had the same Denver address.

The judge was not a rich man taking a little more. He was a drowning man. And every dead settler in that county had been a plank. Corbin wrote it all out for the district attorney at the county seat, sealed it, and sent Ollie down with the letter and a fast horse at first light. Ollie was stopped at the mail station at Deadman Creek by two men who took the letter off him and let him keep the horse, which told them everything about how far the judge’s arm reached.

Sturgis came back the following afternoon and did not bother with paper. He said the judge wanted the tin box and the four pages in it, and that he would have them tonight one way or the other. Then he leaned down over his saddle horn and told Ruby that her mother had gone easy at the end, and that she should be grateful for it, and that she would not be so lucky.

He said one more thing before he rode out. He said it would take four men just to drag her, and he was laughing when he said it. And that was the last mistake Dan Sturgis ever made on that mountain. The storm came down off the divide at dark and closed the pass, and nobody was coming up that trail to help them.

Ruby loaded both rifles and set them at three windows. She banked the stove and put her mother’s four pages inside her blouse against her skin. Corbin said across the lamp that he was sorry he had brought her into this. She told him he had not brought her into anything. She had been in it since June. And he was the only one who had ever stood between her and any part of it.

At 2:00 in the morning, the lanterns came up the meadow through the snow. They fired the haystack first to make light and to make the horses run. And the whole east end of the park went orange. The horses came through the yard in a wave and the shooting started under the noise of them and glass came out of the cabin windows in sheets.

Corbin went out the door to reach the barn corner and take the angle. And he made nine steps before a rifle knocked his leg out from under him. He went down in the open in the light of the burning hay with his blood black on the snow and 200 yards of nothing between him and the timber where the shooters lay.

Ruby heard herself make a sound she had never made before. Then she went out into the light after him. She did not run low and she did not zigzag because she did not know how. She walked straight out into the orange snow with bullets going past her like hornets and reached him and got her hands under his arms.

Seth Corbin weighed 230 lb. The big bay stood shaking with its ears flat and its eyes white. And Ruby braced her legs and lifted her husband clean off the ground and laid him across that saddle like a sack of grain. She walked the bay behind the corral wall with one hand on the horse and one hand on Seth. And there she packed the wound in his thigh with her apron and cinched it with a latigo strap and told him he was not allowed to die on her.

Then she took his rifle. From the corner of the wall she saw the thing they had not meant her to see. A buggy stood at the ford, a lamp on its dash, a man in a black coat sitting in it with a tin box on his knees. Judge Orrin Thatcher had never in his life let another man hold the paper that could hang him. Ruby went down the meadow with the rifle in her hands and the burning hay behind her.

And not one of the four men in the timber saw her go because they were watching the cabin for a woman they expected to be hiding under a bed. The loaded freight wagon stood on the flat above the ford where they had left it in October, 600 lb of wagon and a ton of baled hay. And it sat between Thatcher and the road out.

Ruby put her shoulder into the rear wheel and her hands in the spokes and walked it forward one hard step at a time until the whole wagon rolled off the bench and settled crossways in the mouth of the ford. Thatcher’s team hit the wagon and balked and swung. He stood up in the buggy and laid the whip across them and the wheels spun in the wet snow and found nothing.

 And he screamed at the horses in a voice gone high and thin. Ruby came up behind the buggy, set her feet, took hold of the rear axle in both hands and lifted. The back of that buggy came up off the ground with a man standing in it and the wheels turned freely in the air and Judge Thatcher went over the seat and into the snow with his tin box on top of him.

She dropped the axle and she took him by the collar of his black coat and lifted him up onto his feet like a barn cat. And she asked him whether he wanted to tell her about the 21st of June. Sturgis came out of the dark at the ford with his rifle already coming up and he was saying something about the fat woman and he never got to the end of it.

There was an iron singletree hanging on the wagon’s rear hook, 9 lb of oak and iron and Ruby took it off the hook in one motion and swung it the way she had swung a hay hook for 9 years. It broke the rifle across the receiver and went on and broke Dan Sturgis at the collarbone. And he sat down in the ford water and did not get up out of it.

The four men in the timber heard their employer screaming from the bottom of the meadow and they looked at each other and they rode south and kept riding. Ruby tied the judge to his own wheel with the buggy lines and left him there in the snow with his box. And then she went back up the meadow for her husband.

She got Seth Corbin inside and onto the table and worked on that leg until the sun came up. And she did it with steady hands because steady hands were the one thing she had always owned. He came out of the gray at midmorning and found her asleep sitting up beside him with the rifle still across her knees and the four pages still inside her blouse.

He said she was no man’s chattel and never had been. He said she was the queen of this park and every acre a horse could walk from it and that he had known it since the day she looked at a laughing man and said nothing at all. Ollie came up the thawed pass at noon with 11 riders and a deputy from the county seat and found a judge tied to a buggy wheel and a woman making breakfast for all of them.

The four pages went to the district court and the tin box went with them and the tin box held nine more. The druggist came down from Tamarack Wells with his poison register under his arm because a man who has watched a woman die of a slow fever will remember four entries for the rest of his life. The district court reopened the probate of Hannah Baxter and every other estate Judge Thatcher had ruled insolvent and 11 decrees were vacated in a single week.

11 families got their land back. Four of them were widows. Two of them had already been sent to the poor farm at Sand Wash and Ruby went down in the wagon and brought them home herself. Judge Thatcher was removed from the bench by the territorial legislature, indicted for the suppression of wills, for fraud upon the court, and for the murder by poison of Hannah Baxter.

Clyde Nash testified for the prosecution about the horses he had been ordered to bring that morning and about who had ordered them. He kept his hat in his hands the whole time and never once managed to look at the woman in the second row. Dan Sturgis was convicted on the register and on his own bragging and Verna Stoddard, who had signed as witness to a marriage she thought was a joke, found that nobody in that county wanted to hear her talk anymore.

Orin Thatcher died four years later in the state prison at Canon City and the barn on Spruce Street was sold to pay what remained of his debts. And Ruby Baxter Corbin bought it back for $1,100 in cash. They kept the livery in town and the horses in the park. And in 6 years, the outfit was selling saddle stock to the stage line, the freight companies, and the army remount board.

The money came in the way money does when a thing is done well and honestly. And they did not move to Denver, and they did not build a house with a tower on it. Ruby paid the probate costs for any widow in the county who could not. And she did it quietly. And she did it for 22 years. She became a legend in that part of Colorado, the way certain women do.

They told it in the saloons and at the fairgrounds and in the schoolyard. And the telling always ended the same way, with a buggy lifted off the ground. They said she was the strongest woman in the territory. They said it admiringly, and they said it in front of her. And after a while, she let herself believe it.

 The gray gelding lived to be 26 and carried her right to the end of it. And was buried on the flat above the ford where the freight wagon had stood. On summer evenings, they sat on the porch at Blue Rock Park and watched the horses come down to water. And Seth Corbin put his hand over his wife’s hand on the arm of her chair.

And neither of them ever needed to say what they were worth.