"Gideon."
"Gideon." He nodded slowly. "I shod that horse four times a year for six years. Steadiest animal on this creek. You could set off a cannon under his belly and he'd just look around at you, like, was that necessary." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the plank. "I come out the week after Amos was buried to do the others. Lyle had a man on the blue, trying him. I watched it. I never seen a horse change like that in my life. Not from just a fall. Not from anything."
"There's a hole in his back," Josephine said.
He looked up.
"Behind the withers, near side. It's festering. He won't let me near it. Mr. Bannock says Amos spurred him going off." She took the wet blanket off the chair back where she'd hung it to show him. "I've been washing this all morning. The blood's on top. It came through from the horse side up. And it's been bled on more than once. There's old and there's new."
Eli took the blanket in his scarred hands and turned it over. He put his blunt finger on the stain, then lower, on a small round tear in the weave right at the center of it, a hole no bigger than a lead pencil.
"A spur," he said, "doesn't go through a blanket from underneath."
They looked at each other across Ab's table. Ab, at the stove, had stopped moving.
"No," said Josephine. "It doesn't."
* * *
Silas Crane rode down from the Seven B on Thursday afternoon, on a high-headed chestnut with a silver-mounted bridle, and brought her a box of Huyler's chocolates from Cheyenne.