The mud wagon that passed for a stage north of Rawlins put Josephine Hale down at the mouth of Sage Creek a little after four in the afternoon. The driver took her trunk off the boot and stood it in the sagebrush like a headstone.
"Seven P's up the draw about a mile," he said, and spat downwind. "You'll see the cottonwoods. You'll hear 'em before that, most likely."
"Hear who?"
He climbed back to the box and gathered his lines. "Whoever's trying that horse today."
Then the wagon was gone in its own dust. She was alone with the trunk, a carpetbag, and a wind that came off the Ferris Mountains smelling of sage and snow that hadn't fallen yet. It was the second week of September, 1886. She had been a widow for eleven months and a traveler for nine days, and her back ached in places she had no names for.
She left the trunk. Nobody was going to steal a trunk in country this empty, and if somebody did, they were welcome to her winter petticoats and her mother's Bible. She took the carpetbag and started walking.
The track followed the creek through a slot between two shoulders of red earth, and the cottonwoods came first, just as he'd said, gone yellow at the tips. Then a log barn, a long low house with a sod roof and a stovepipe, a bunkhouse, a set of pole corrals. Then the noise. Men were whooping. Somewhere in the middle of the whooping a horse was screaming, and it was not the sound of a horse in play.
She came around the end of the barn as a man left the saddle.
He did not fall so much as get thrown, the way a boy throws a stone. He went up and out over the top rail of the round corral, turned once in the air with his arms out like he meant to fly, and landed on the hardpan beyond with a noise she felt in her own teeth. His hat came down a moment after him.
The horse inside was a blue roan, big through the chest, dark on the legs and head the way the good ones were, and he was still pitching though the man was gone. He bawled and kicked at nothing and spun, and the stirrups of the empty saddle flapped against his ribs like somebody beating him, and that made him worse. Foam had come up white on his neck. His eyes were rimmed white too.
Five or six men were on the fence. Nobody went in.