* * *
She did not sleep. She had not expected to. She lay in a dead man's bed with the window open a crack and listened to the cottonwoods and the coyotes and, after midnight, to the slow heavy movement of a horse in the round corral, around and around.
At two she got up, put on her wrapper and Amos's sheepskin coat off the peg, which came down to her knees and smelled of him, and went out.
There was a moon, a few days off full. The yard was silver and black. Gideon was standing at the far side of the corral with his tail to the wind, and when she came to the fence he lifted his head and looked at her. She climbed up and sat on the top rail with her feet on the second, and did nothing.
Her father had been a horse trader, which in Cooper County was a word with a little dirt on it, and he had deserved the dirt about half the time. But in 1858 he had paid four dollars to sit in a tent in St. Louis and watch a man named John Rarey lay a killer stallion down on a bed of straw with nothing but a strap and patience, and he had come home a changed man in that one regard, if in no other. He had bought Rarey's little book and read it to Josephine at the kitchen table in place of the Bible. Every horse is a coward, he'd said. That's the first thing. Everything he does that you call meanness, he does because he's afraid. Find what he's afraid of, Josie, and you've found the whole horse.
What are you afraid of, she thought, looking at the roan.
At three she climbed down inside the corral and sat on the ground against the fence post with her knees drawn up under the coat. Gideon watched her. At half past three he took a step toward her, and then another, and then he stood and pretended to sleep. By four his nose was a foot from her face, and she could smell him, clean sweat and hay and something else under it, sweetish and wrong. She knew that smell too. Every farm child does. It is the smell of a wound that has not been let to heal.
She put up her hand and let him blow on it. He did. Then he put his whiskered lip on her palm, softly, as if he were asking a question.
"I know," she said. "I know it."
When the sky began to gray over the eastern ridge she stood up, slowly, and moved along his side with her hand on him. Neck. Shoulder. The hair was rough and sweat-dried in swirls where the saddle had been. She moved her hand back along the top of his ribs toward the withers, and at a place a hand's width behind the withers on the near side, low on the back where the bar of a saddle would bear down, he flinched so hard his whole body jumped sideways away from her, and he swung his head around with his ears flat back and his teeth showing.
She stood still. "All right," she said. "All right. I won't."