“There might be a way over there—”
She urged her horse on to squeeze past him, and forced it out on to a narrow shelf that looked as if it might sneak around the barrier. It was foolhardy riding, for if the shelf had proved to be a blind alley there would have been no chance to turn round and come back, and he wondered whether she did it in ignorance or recklessness. But he followed her because it was too late to argue, and was relieved to find that in a few yards the sheer drop that fell away from the ledge eased into a less perpendicular slope of rubble — still dangerous enough to navigate, but not offering the same prospects of instant and irrevocable disaster. He kept close behind her, skirting a pile of smaller boulders; she seemed quite unperturbed, and she kept looking off the trail towards the point where the blast had been, as if there was much more on her mind than any casual risk of the route.
Perhaps that was why she never saw the rattlesnake curled sleepily on a rock that rose waist-high from the slope as she rode past it. The Saint saw it, and his hand went like lightning to his gun, but from the start of that movement everything seemed to happen at once. He saw the rattler’s tail dissolve into a quivering blur of warning, but before the sound even reached his ears the pinto had heard it and lurched sideways, losing its foothold on the treacherous scree. Simon thought that he fired at the same moment as the snake struck, but he had no chance to meditate about it just then. He had had no time to wonder whether the horses were gun-broke, and it would probably have made very little difference if he had. It turned out that they weren’t. His palomino reared up on its hind legs like a tidal wave, twisted wildly as its rear hoofs skidded and took a half-sideways leap into space that landed it twenty feet down the slope. Through some incredible agility it remained upright, but there were seconds of frantic scrambling and sliding after that before the Saint had a chance to realise that he was still definitely in the saddle. It was a feat of horsemanship that an audience of bronc riders and mountain cavalry could have stood together and cheered, but he was less concerned with that than with the slim figure clinging to the slope above him.
“Jean — are you all right?”
It sounded to him like particularly stupid dialogue, but it was the only thing to shout as he drove the trembling palomino back up a ladder of precarious zigzags. Then as he reached her he saw that she was shaking half with laughter.
“I can’t help it, Simon! You floated gracefully through the air on a flying horse, while I was landing on my behind... Oh God, the romance of the great open spaces!”
He lowered himself from the saddle beside her, and helped her to sit up.
“You’re sure you aren’t hurt?”
“Only some undignified bruises.”
But she looked at the rattlesnake writhing and lashing a few feet away, its back almost cut through by the Saint’s bullet. He edged over and crushed its head with a stone, and looked at her more closely when he came back.