"Horses," she told Wes. "He can smell them. Not ours. Shod horses, standing a long time in one place."
"Tasker," Wes said.
"Or someone like him." She looked at the draw for a long moment, and then at the ridges on either side, and he could see her thinking, the way he had seen her think over a lame foot or a balky colt. Then she spoke to the young men in quick low phrases, and they grinned, all three of them, as if she had told them a very good joke.
"What are you going to do?"
"Something old," she said. "Something my grandfather did to the Piegans and the Piegans did to my grandfather. Stay with me. Keep your head down. And remember what you promised me."
"I didn't promise anything."
"You did. You promised not to swing first."
The young men took the spare horses, all of them, and stripped off the lead ropes, and drove them in a loose bunch over the lip of the ridge and down into the draw at a dead run, whooping. In thick brush, a riderless horse sounds very much like one with a rider. From the chokecherries came three rifle shots in quick succession, flat and hard, and a fourth, and a voice—Tasker's voice—shouting hold it, hold it, they're loose, damn you, they're empty—
By then Plays With His Horse and his two cousins were already over the far ridge and coming down the back of the draw where the ambushers had tied their own mounts. Wes heard a yell, and the crack of brush breaking, and then the most beautiful sound he had heard in a long while: three shod horses thundering away up the draw at a gallop, with three young Crow men hanging off their sides, laughing like boys at a fair.
Rides Far touched her heels to the roan and rode straight down toward the chokecherries. Wes, cursing, went after her.
They found Tasker and two of Pike's riders standing in a small clearing in the brush, rifles in their hands, looking up the draw where their horses had gone. One of the riders was a boy called Nate Fowler whom Wes had bunked beside all last winter, and he looked, when he saw Wes, profoundly embarrassed.