He stood off from her, trembling. She did not touch him again. But the light was coming now, and she could see what her hand had found: a crust of dried blood and matted hair the size of a silver dollar, and in the center of it a little dark hole, puckered and weeping yellow, like the hole a nail would make if you drove it into a fence post and pulled it out again.
* * *
The farrier came out from Ferris Crossing the next morning with a wagon full of iron.
She was in the yard when he drove in, scrubbing the blood out of Gideon's saddle blanket in a washtub, and she heard him before she saw him: the wagon jangling like a peddler's, a mule that had opinions, and a man's voice telling the mule in a calm, tired, reasonable way that it was the most shiftless creature God ever set breath into, and that someday he'd sell it to a Frenchman to be made into sausage.
He was a big man, not tall so much as wide, with forearms like stovepipes and a burn scar across the back of one hand gone shiny and pink. He had a brown beard trimmed close and eyes that looked like they'd been rained on, gray and quiet. He climbed down and took his hat off when he saw her.
"Ma'am. Eli Truesdale. I heard in town there was a lady come to the Seven P. I didn't credit it."
"Josephine Hale. Why didn't you credit it?"
He thought about that seriously. "Seemed like something somebody'd make up," he said. "Like a two-headed calf."
She laughed, which surprised her. She had not laughed since before Leadville.
He had come to reset the shoes on the remuda, and he did, all morning, at the portable forge he set up by the barn. She watched him from the fence while she wrung out the blanket. He worked slow and did not hurry the horses. When a sorrel colt pulled back and stood on its hind legs, he let go of the foot and stood quiet and talked to it about the weather, and the colt came down, and he picked the foot up again as if nothing had happened.
At noon Ab fed him at the long table, and Bannock came in for dinner and shook his hand and asked after the price of bar iron in Rawlins, and went out again. When he had gone, Eli said, "That blue horse in the round pen."