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Obviously Stallion's Gate is not meant to be taken too literally. There is a touch of the folk hero about Pena as he moves across the New Mexican landscape. A conscious stylist, Smith relies strongly on emotional echoes and calibrated suspense. He also seems keenly aware of his story's film potential. No producer will be confused by the tense hunting scene, the Indian dance that mocks the white man's efforts to saddle atomic energy, the Rocky-like prizefight that pits Pena against a younger opponent, an eerie trip with a radioactive cargo, and a climactic battle to the death next to the Bomb in the last minutes before the blast. Smith is also capable of subtler effects. His spare prose shapes images that contain haunting affinities: wild horses and Army jeeps; rattlesnakes and coils of electrical cable; the lustrous surfaces of ceremonial pottery and the polished plutonium core of the atom bomb.
Smith is less successful when he contemplates the meaning of it all. "We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history," says one character, benefiting from the hindsight of fiction. Records of the actual event contain revealing statements that defy the imagination. Said a general to the scientist who had called the century's most resonant countdown: "What a wonderful thing that you could count backward at a time like this!"