"Threw him and broke his neck on a rock the size of a washtub. Going on three weeks now." Bannock took off his hat. His hair was the same straw color as his mustache, and his forehead was white where the hat had been. "I am sorry, Mrs. Hale. Nobody knew you was coming. Haskell never sent word."
"Mr. Haskell gave me the impression nobody out here would much want word." She said it pleasantly. "Will someone go take that saddle off him? He's going to hurt himself."
"Ma'am, nobody's going to go in there right now."
So she went in.
She did not think about it. That was the only way she had ever done anything of this kind, from the time she was nine and her father had set her up on a two-year-old filly and said, Now, Josie, you just be the quietest thing in the world. She ducked between the rails. Somebody said, Lord God, and somebody else said, Lady, and Bannock said her name, Mrs. Hale, sharp, the way you'd call a dog off a porcupine.
She did not walk to the horse. She walked to the middle of the corral with her shoulder to him and her eyes on the ground, and stood there, and let him look at her.
He looked. His nostrils went wide and red inside and he blew at her, a long rattling snort. He swung his hindquarters toward her and she did not move, and he swung them away again. The saddle had slipped off to the near side. A cinch that tight should not have slipped, she thought, unless he'd been blowing himself up against it. One of the stirrups was caught up over the horn.
"Easy," she said, not to him exactly. "Easy, now. Nobody's doing anything."
It was a long time. Long enough that the men on the fence began to talk among themselves again, low. Long enough that Corley got up off the ground and went to sit on an upturned bucket by the barn. The sun went down behind the shoulder of the draw and the corral filled with shadow, and the roan's head came down an inch at a time until his nose was nearly on the dirt, and he licked his lips and chewed at nothing.
She knew that sign. She would have known it in her sleep.
She turned and walked to him, slow, and not to his head but to his shoulder, and laid the flat of her hand on the wet hair there. He shivered all over the way a horse does for a fly. She left her hand where it was. Then she reached under his belly for the latigo and worked the knot loose, and the cinch let go, and she let the saddle slide off the near side into the dirt. He jumped when it hit. He did not run.