They got back.
His own horse, a long-legged bay, was standing ground-tied by the barn. He walked Toby to it backward, step by step. Nobody breathed. He made the boy get up first and then swung up behind him, the rifle still at Toby's neck, and reined the bay around, and for one instant he looked at Josephine across the yard.
"You ought to have took the money," he said.
Then he put the spurs to the bay and went out of the yard north, up the creek, toward the breaks, with the boy's hat blowing off behind him into the sage.
Men were running for horses. Pratt was shouting. Crane's chestnut reared in Dutch's hands. And Josephine Hale ducked through the rails into the round corral, where Gideon stood with his head high and every muscle of him shaking, and took hold of his halter.
"Josephine," Eli said. "Not him. He's not—he's not ready. Take my mare—"
"Your mare's carrying two hundred pounds of blacksmith across that creek. That bay of Lyle's is carrying two men." She was already throwing Toby's old saddle onto the blue's back, over a folded blanket she had cut out in a ring around the wound with Ab's shears that morning, just in case, just in case. Her fingers flew on the latigo. Gideon stood for it. He stood like a stone. "He's the only horse on this creek can catch them, and you know it. Amos knew it. That's why he rode him."
She did not wait for an answer. She got up. There was a moment, one moment, when she felt him gather under her and thought: this is where he goes up, this is where it ends. And then she felt him understand that nothing was biting him, nothing at all, only her weight, which he knew now; and Kansas Jack swung open the corral gate, and Gideon went through it like water through a sluice.
He was faster than anything she had ever sat. She had ridden good horses in Cooper County, blood horses, Kentucky horses her father had bought and sold. This was something else. He ran low and flat and long, with his ears pinned, and the sage went by under her in a gray smear and the wind tore her hat off and the pins out of her hair, and she lay up along his neck and let him go. Behind her she could hear the others coming, Eli's mare thundering, somebody yelling. She did not look back. Ahead, a mile off, the dust of Bannock's bay was climbing the first rise of the breaks.
The country broke up north of the ranch into red clay hills and cutbanks and dry washes full of greasewood, and Sage Creek wound through it in a canyon, crossing and recrossing itself. The track went down to the first crossing and up again. At the second crossing it went down between two shoulders of broken red rock, into a stony bottom where the creek ran shallow and fast over boulders the size of washtubs.
She knew where she was before she got there. She could feel it in the horse.