Gideon came over the lip of the canyon and saw the rocks and checked, one stride, two, his head flung up, and she felt the fear go through him like a shock through a wire. This was the place. This was where the nail had gone in, and he had come apart, and the man he loved had gone over his head onto the stones and not got up.
"I know," she said into his mane. "I know. I'm here. Go on."
And he went on.
The bay was down. Bannock had come into the bottom too fast, doubled, and the bay had put a foot between two boulders and gone down hard on its knees in the creek, and was trying to get up now on three legs, screaming. Bannock was in the rocks on the far side, hauling Toby by the collar up behind a slab of red sandstone the height of a man. He turned when he heard her coming. He put the rifle up.
The shot went off flat and enormous between the canyon walls. She heard it go by. It made a sound like tearing canvas.
Gideon did not shy. She would think of that later, many times, lying awake: that the horse who had been named a devil, who had been tormented for three weeks into a creature that screamed at the sight of a saddle, did not so much as break stride for a rifle shot fired across his nose. You could set off a cannon under his belly, Eli had said. And he would just look around at you.
He went into the creek at a run and up the far bank in two great heaving lunges, and Bannock was levering the Winchester, and Toby, whom everyone had forgotten, including Bannock, turned in his grip and sank his teeth into the man's wrist to the bone.
Bannock yelled. The rifle went off into the sky. And Gideon, all on his own, with no word from her, laid his ears back flat against his skull and put his shoulder into Lyle Bannock as a horse puts its shoulder into a gate.
She saw Bannock go backward. She saw him fall into the rocks, onto the rocks, a big flat stone at the water's edge washed smooth by a thousand springs, and heard the sound his leg made under him. The Winchester went clattering down the stones into the creek.
Then she was off, and had Toby by the arm, and the boy was spitting blood that wasn't his and shaking and saying "Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am," and Eli's mare was coming down the canyon wall in a slide of red gravel, and Eli was off her before she stopped, with his own old Spencer carbine in his hands, standing over Bannock in the rocks.
Bannock did not reach for anything. He lay on his back on the stone with his leg bent wrong beneath him and his face gone white and slick, and looked up at the sky. He was breathing in short hard grunts.