The Saint lighted a cigarette.
“I just don’t know very much,” he remarked diffidently. “I’ve seen a few trick horses in my time, but Smoky’s must be something to tell Ripley about. Maybe you could sell him to a circus.”
Hank Reefe stared at him levelly, but it was Jim who growled, “What for?”
“There was blood on the saddle, wasn’t there?” said the Saint. “It must be a pretty acrobatic horse if it could have done this to him while he was still on top.”
“I’ve knowed a hawss to r’ar up an’ fall back on a man so’s he got the horn in his chest,” Nails said slowly. “I’ve seen hawss an’ man fall together an’ the hawss roll over on him.”
“The blood wasn’t on the horn,” answered the Saint, “and the saddle hadn’t been rolled on. It was quite a new saddle, and there wasn’t a scar on it.”
It was a strangely dramatic scene, all of them standing silently there around Smoky’s body with the silver moonlight carving out shadows as sharp and flat as a woodcut and drawing a kindly vagueness over the ugly details of death. So the moon would never mean soft music and romance to Smoky anymore, and its light on his broken body was only the same light that it had shed on hundreds and thousands of other broken bodies in European cities where soft music was also only the memory of a dream. But it seemed to Simon Templar that even in the timeless hush of those Arizona hills he could hear the grinding mutter of the mad machinery of destruction that had reached half-way around the world to lay a simple cowboy on the same altar with the peasants of Poland and the villagers of Greece.
Hank Reefe was nodding quietly.
“Sounds right enough,” he said. “So it could’ve been the same way with Frank Morland.”
“It’s been done before. Makes it look like a good accident. But they muffed Smoky a bit, or the saddle wouldn’t have given it away. He must have been shot or stabbed first, before they went to work with the big mallet with horseshoes nailed to it.”