Part 3

THE FIRST TIME THE BOY SAW THE CREATURE, HE KNEW where the tales of monsters sprang from. He was awakened from a long, meandering dream by the sow’s anxious squeals and Raleigh’s deep-throated neigh. He had his trousers on in a few seconds, boots just after. He ran for the door without lacing them, shoved it open, strode out into the night, and circled the house toward the barn. He wasn’t ready for what he saw there and knew so immediately.

A beast stood poised on the sod fence of the pigpen. It was outlined in the starlight, rendered unreal and ghostly and more fearsome than it might have appeared in the reasoning light of day. The boy tried to name the beast, but he couldn’t create the word in his mind. Its legs were spread wide, its neck was low, and its ears lay flat against its head. The hair along the crest of its shoulders and down its back stood at attention. It had been gazing down at the frantic sow, but when the boy appeared it snapped its head around. It stared at him, head slinking from side to side, paws kneading the turf beneath it. It seemed to consider the boy first to discover if he was to be feared, and then, having decided that he wasn’t, to decide whether it might dine doubly tonight.

The boy read all this in the creature’s eyes, for the beast concealed nothing of its thoughts, or the hunger within it and the need, above all else, to quench it. But only when its lips drew back from its jaws and exposed the white glint of its fangs did the boy remember its name: wolf. He tried to step back, but his feet were stuck to the ground. He tried to call out, but he’d lost his voice. The boy grasped at his thigh as if somehow the action might produce a weapon, or suffice as a call of alarm that he couldn’t otherwise muster. It did neither.

The wolf let out a growl, sank low, and prepared to dive for the boy. It might have, except that the boy’s uncle came bounding around the side of the house, rifle in hand. The man aimed and fired before the wolf had fully taken in his presence.

What happened next neither the man nor the boy could fully say later. It was as if the rifle’s blast took the wolf away with the speed of the bullet. The animal simply vanished, leaving nothing but empty space before them and ringing silence and the question as to whether it had been an illusion. They might have thought so, except that the wolf let up a howl of protest from the safety of the black fields, a cry ringing with indignation and resentment and with the pent-up lusts of a lifetime. When it began to fade, lesser creatures picked up the call and added to it. The night came alive with cries of canine camaraderie, from all directions and distances, leaving the boy with the feeling that they were hopelessly outnumbered, surrounded by and deep within a legion of carnivorous life.

The next morning, the boy searched the ground with his stepfather and uncle. They found the wolf’s tracks in the soil beside the sod fence and on the fence itself and around the back of the house and at the door to the stables. They kept the pig in the barn from then on, but two days later they awoke to find four of their five hens dead and feathers strewn about. Again they found the beast’s tracks.

Looks like we got a little problem, the stepfather said.

The uncle and the boy agreed.

GABRIEL AND THE OTHERS RODE HARD through the next week, hitting the Pecos River late on the second day, turning and following its course northwest. Most of each day was spent in riding. Although they stopped regularly to water the horses and rest them, they never broke for long. The constant motion atop a living being of hard contours, sinew, and muscle wreaked havoc on Gabriel’s body. Each stride sent jolts of pain through his backside and into his lower back and straight up the chain of his spine. His hands clenched the reins with a white-knuckled passion that left his fingers twisted like claws. When he dismounted each evening, he walked on bowed, clumsy versions of his former legs.

They passed from Texas into New Mexico at some unmarked boundary, and as the week wore on, they kept the Pecos to their left. Across it Gabriel spied the foothills of the southern Rockies, sharp, sand-colored ridges out of which grew buttresses of reddish stone and beyond which the ground rose to greater heights. To their right lay the great expanse of the Llano Estacado, a land so barren that Gabriel could imagine no creature living there by choice. The plains stretched to the horizon, spotted by occasional prickly pear and tree cholla, all sharing muted colors that varied little except with the rising and setting of the sun, when that orb played tricks of light across the land and set colors moving in ribbons.

At night they huddled around a tiny fire. Sometimes they laid up in dry areas of the riverbed, finding shelter within the water-carved features. Although days were passing, pushing in between themselves and the horror of Three Bars, neither Gabriel, James, nor Dunlop had found his voice again. None ate more than his first plateful of food, and none joined in the nightly discourse held between Marshall and Rollins and Dallas, all of whom seemed like actors finally realized, finally given their moment in the light and loving every second of it. As the two boys sat staring at the fire and Dunlop sat staring into the night, the other three threw out plans for their future in California. Rollins talked only of whores and a life of leisure; Dallas considered trading in his spurs and sailing to Hawaii; Marshall cast webs of schemes, business ventures and building projects and even plans for a career in politics. Gabriel would have said they looked and sounded more like children at play than fugitives and murderers, except he knew that wasn’t true. They looked like all of these.

Caleb rarely joined them in these sessions. He developed a habit of nightly reconnaissance. He’d backtrack their trail during the early evening and return in the black hours, emerging suddenly as a shape beside the fire. He walked with such stealth that nobody saw him arrive. Rather, they just realized at some moment that he was among them once more. Each evening, by his silence, he assured the men that they were not yet being followed. Gabriel thought many a time that if Caleb were tracking them instead of with them, they’d all be dead before the next sunrise. He wondered when Caleb found time to sleep, and whether he went on his nightly searches as the hunted or the hunter.

Marshall spoke to the boys as if he hadn’t noticed their silence. In his orations they had been partners from the beginning and shared any guilt equally with the rest. It seemed that all knew and none needed to hear again of the boys’ obligations to the group. But Gabriel felt the other men’s watchful eyes on them day-long, saw in their glances a constant scrutiny, especially from Dallas and Rollins. These two watched them as if they longed to be provoked and were just waiting for the digression that would give them the excuse.

On the fourth night out, they camped in a protected arroyo with a view toward the setting sun. They supped on frying-pan bread and thick strips of bacon. For the first time since Three Bars, Marshall retrieved the gold from his saddlebag and set the brick on a blanket. The men studied it from several angles. None touched the bullion, as this seemed a luxury meant only for Marshall, but they commented on the glint of the stuff in the setting sun and whistled at the prospects the soft metal conjured in their minds. Gabriel, from the edge of the group, couldn’t help but find the display somehow wrong. He couldn’t get the images of Ugly Mary and Rickles from his mind. The bar of gold seemed a strange, dead thing, like a coffin set out in state or the mound of an unmarked grave.

“What do ya think it’s worth?” Dallas asked.

The men debated this question for some time. Rollins was convinced it would fetch a thousand dollars. He called it a “thousand-dollar bar” and said the logic of it was clear to anyone with a lick of sense. Dallas thought it might go for more. As gold-hungry as people were out in California, they’d probably fall over themselves offering hard currency for the stuff, until each of the men would be as rich as the king of Siam. This comparison drew some interest from Marshall, who couldn’t imagine what a skinny-necked Alabama boy like Dallas knew of the riches of the Far East.

“I tell you boys the God-honest truth,” Marshall said at last. “This here gold ain’t worth what it used to be, not anymore. There was a time you could’ve wiped out a whole nation of redskins for what we got laying here. There was a time you could’ve hung a thousand Jews from crosses and beat the living shit out of your slaves and nobody’ve batted an eyelash.” He looked around at the group, pausing on Gabriel and James and then shaking his head sharply to bring back his wandering mind. “But them days are long gone. Sad truth is, the world is changing and ain’t one of us knows what it’s gonna end up looking like. That’s why I don’t mind us staking ourselves to a little insurance.” He picked up the brick with reverent hands and held it up for the others to see. “I can’t say exactly, cause I wasn’t there when they picked this fella up, but you’re looking at more than a couple thousand here. Old Mary never cared for banks. There were too many Easterners involved for her liking, too many Yankees. I remember her saying she’d look after her own cash, thank you very much. Nobody’d get hers except over her dead body. And those were her words, not mine.” He paused and weighed the brick in his hand. “Yessir, this here’s the weight of justice done. No fat bitch’s gonna outfox the man who taught her all she knew.”

“Hell no she ain’t,” Dallas agreed, “not when she’s full of lead and twenty pounds heavier for it.” He couldn’t help breaking into a little dance, a sort of a heel-to-toe jig to the music of his own whistling. Rollins knelt close to the gold and repeated its worth several times, until interrupted by Dunlop’s forlorn voice.

“It’s not worth the lives you took to get it,” he mumbled, just loudly enough to be heard. He looked off into the distance, toward the East, as he had done since they arrived at camp. His expression was so vague and distant that one might have doubted he’d even spoken, except that he spoke again. “And it’s sure not worth the time we’ll all spend burning.”

All eyes turned to him, then cautiously moved back to Marshall, who found no insult in the statement but in fact seemed glad to hear it, saying, “That’s an interesting point, Dunlop, the whole question of God and Satan and punishment and that. Problem for me is that if I’m damned as a sinner, then I’m damned as a sinner and that’s that. If I’m damned, I was damned a long time ago. I’ve been living a damned life now for thirty-some years, and I can’t do a thing about it. If I was to drop down on my knees and pray, I’d be making God out a fool. I’d be trying to pull the wool over his eyes, so to speak. I’d be kowtowing to the Almighty just to get a bit of the good stuff in the hereafter. Now, wouldn’t that make me bout the biggest hypocrite you ever seen? If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a hypocrite. I’d rather share a mescal with an honest man in hell than drink wine with some brown-nose saint in heaven.” He seemed annoyed for a moment, bitter, as if he knew exactly whom he spoke of when he mentioned this saint. “Anyway, the world’s too damn complicated for any one son of a bitch to have made it up.” He stood up and heaved the brick onto Dunlop’s lap. “Here, feel the weight of a man’s soul.”

Dunlop convulsed away from it, scrambling to his feet and looking back at it as if the metal were a living creature capable of great harm. He looked ready to lash out, but he didn’t find his voice again, and any words he might have uttered would’ve been drowned out by the men’s laughter. Dunlop sat again, turned his back, and continued his contemplation of the east.

Marshall bounded over and snatched up the brick. He held it close to the back of Dunlop’s head, and for a moment Gabriel thought he was going to hit him with it. But instead he knelt behind the man and spoke close to his ear, with the soft voice of a friend.

“Careful there, Dunlop, you gotta keep control of that temper of yours. Don’t go all soft on me and get yourself in trouble, you hear? I like you. We’ve blood of Scots, you and I. But don’t think I’d hesitate. I’d take you out of the world faster than your daddy shot you into it, and I’d enjoy it just as much.”

Dunlop didn’t move. He showed no sign of even having heard, but Marshall backed off, satisfied. Gabriel felt James’s gaze hard on him, but he avoided the other boy’s eyes.

Dallas spat in Dunlop’s general direction, accurately enough that a few flecks of the spit touched the man’s boots. “Never knew you were such a damn twat anyway,” he said. “Should’ve known, though, seeing’s how the so-called Scotchmen don’t even wear trousers.” He turned back to the group, having suddenly found humor in his loathing. “Did y’all know that? Dunlop told me so himself. Said they used to go to battle the whole lot of them half naked, nothing but a piece a cloth wrapped around their jewels.”

Dallas amused the others for some time by dancing about in imitation of warriors in ball gowns, doing his best to mimic a Scottish accent. Something in it sent Rollins into hysterics. But when things died down again and Marshall began to hide the brick away, Rollins asked him seriously, “So you knew all along they had the gold there? I figured you were just being a vengeful son of a bitch. But you had a plan, didn’t you?”

Marshall finished cinching up his saddlebags before answering. He looked up at Rollins and said, “You don’t think I’d kill them just for the pleasure of it, do you?”

Something in the question seemed like a threat. At least, Rollins took it so. He backed away a step and shook his head. “Hell, no. I know you’re always up to something or other. I went along with it, didn’t I?” He looked down at the fire, dismissing the conversation with a wave. “I was just saying . . . just pulling your chain a little.”

Marshall didn’t seem truly satisfied with this answer, but he let it sit. He found a bottle of whiskey and proposed a little drink, just a ration to ease the evening’s tensions. The others agreed readily enough. Gabriel watched them, Marshall’s question still loud and unanswered in his mind.

NEAR THE END OF THE WEEK THEY TURNED toward the mountains of the Sangre de Cristo range. Throughout days of riding, they rarely spotted other people. Twice they saw Indians in the distance, Navajos according to Marshall, quiet travelers who appeared and disappeared with the stealth of coyotes. They only once passed within shouting distance of another group of white men. But neither group hailed the other, and they rode on without comment, into a land more and more remote.

They wove their way through changing surroundings, finding cooler mornings and chilly evenings in the shadows of the mountains. The air thinned, becoming crisper and more variously scented. They were now in a country where each wood had its own distinct smell, where creosote and sage, mesquite and juniper and piñon, wafted on the breeze along with the drifting sands. The dry soil took on a reddish hue, somehow more earthen and richer than that of the plains, deep umber tones that clothed the mountains in shades as varied as that of human skin.

Gabriel rode into the landscape only vaguely aware of its beauty. He looked at the rocks and cliffs and shrubs as if he feared that they had some malignant life hidden within them. In its various shapes and forms, the land seemed to be composed of living beings trapped in stone buttresses, frozen faces that would have whispered to him had not the land held them prisoner. With each look he found movement dancing just out of his vision’s reach. And although the movement was always explained by something—the play of the wind, the trickle of sand, the spiny back of a horned toad, or the grotesque progress of a scorpion— Gabriel couldn’t shake the suspicion that the world was no longer as he believed. The land was alive in a way he’d not known before, in a way made all the greater for the images of the dead, which still served as a screen upon which the world was cast.

These feelings were made more concrete on the evening of their seventh day of flight. Having gone a little distance from camp to relieve himself, Gabriel came upon the half-decayed corpse of a mule deer entangled in the twisted branches of an old juniper tree. The smell of it hit him at once, entering his nose and pouring down into his guts like a foul liquid. At first it looked as though the deer had been captured where it stood, as if the tree had grown up around it and lifted it from the ground. It seemed somehow Biblical, some amalgamation of a burning bush and a living crucifix. What kind of land was this, he wondered, where trees set traps?

As he stood staring, it became clear from the bloody and scuffed ground that something had dragged the deer into the tree by brute force, a creature with the strength, with the guile, and perhaps even with the artistry to build a statue of rotting flesh. The corpse had been gutted and cleaned of internals. Its two hind legs were broken at their midpoint and shredded, whether by teeth or claws was unclear. But most horrible to Gabriel’s mind were the deer’s eye sockets, empty depressions that crawled with insect life. Once more this journey had given him an image he’d carry ever after.

He didn’t sleep that night, nor the next. And it was with weary, thankful eyes that he first beheld Santa Fe, nine days after leaving Three Bars.

THE YOUNGER BROTHER BUILT AN ENCLOSURE in the barn to house the remaining chicken and protect it from the wolf. Three days later the beast returned. It was propelled by a hunger born deep within and of strange origins. It clawed at the door and sniffed around it and tested each chink and crack to see if it could pass through. It couldn’t, but it kept at it until the man appeared and shot at it once more. The wolf felt the bullet scorch past its left flank, so close it could smell the hot metal against its fur later that evening. Its hunger was unabated, but it quit the scene and retreated to the darkness and howled and planned its return.

The boy asked his uncle if he had ever heard of a wolf behaving so. The man answered that he had not, although he figured this meant little, as beasts will always surprise you when you least expect it. He thought maybe the wolf was an old one, maybe it was injured or sick and couldn’t hunt properly and so was seeking out a stationary food source. The boy responded that the animal he’d seen looked neither elderly nor sickly. The man nodded his head and said that was rightly so. Truth is, I ain’t got the faintest what to make of it.

The boy asked his uncle if he might sleep with his rifle beside his bed. The man considered this and conferred with the boy’s mother and then agreed. Guess I done missed it twice. Maybe your luck’ll be better.

The boy didn’t tell the others what he planned, but that evening he waited anxiously till his stepfather’s breathing fell into the familiar pattern of sleep. Then he waited longer, knowing his mother was slow to sleep and he must be patient. Eventually he rose and walked barefoot to the door, gun in one hand, boots in the other. He opened the door carefully, although he found that the slightest movement caused sound louder than reason would have thought possible.

Once outside, he high-stepped around to the side of the house, pulled on his boots, and made his way to the barn. He had to speak to the animals as he fumbled with the door, as any motion in the dark now made them nervous. He soothed them and, once inside, stroked Raleigh and patted the mule and explained his plans to them all, asked for their blessing and strength to aid him. The pig alone seemed skeptical, grunting and watching him askance and making low, throaty sounds, a discourse the boy was fated never to understand.

He sat opposite the door on a three-legged stool and laid the gun across his lap. He waited. Several times he checked the chamber. Several times he checked his pockets for more bullets, and each time he doubted he had done so and repeated the action. So passed the night, in silence save for the noises of the animals and the scurrying of mice and the friction of the sky rubbing past the world.

As the sky lightened with the first signs of the approaching dawn, the boy crept back into the house and to bed.

THE SCENT OF PIÑON HUNG IN THE OVERCAST AIR like a transparent blanket. Gabriel breathed it in through his nose, rolling the scent around on his palate and tasting it. There was something sweet in it, something clean and earthy. He had never seen a town like Santa Fe. The muted shapes and colors of the adobe buildings blended with the landscape as if they were a natural part of the earth’s architecture. The place bustled with people, mestizos mostly, brown people, some with modest faces and others with proud ones, many showing the features of empire, the clash of cultures betrayed in the shapes of eyes and noses, in speech and clothing.

Once the horses were tied to a hitching post, Marshall proposed a quick drink. This was met with enthusiasm. “But we’re not here to get swizzled,” he added. “A drink or two is all I’m suggesting. No whoring. No fighting. Let’s just keep our wits about us.” With little more than a gesture, he assigned the boys to watch the horses. With his saddlebag in one hand, he threw the other arm around Dunlop and led him away, although the man seemed to sink under the pressure of the limb. Dallas cast a glance back at Gabriel and James before he entered the bar, some seventy yards away. He caught their attention, nodded, and pretended to shoot them with his finger.

The second he was through the door, James grabbed Gabriel’s arm and said urgently, “C’mon, let’s make a run for it. Let’s do it now. This could be our only chance.”

Gabriel looked at him sadly. There was little spite left in his countenance, but he could offer no confidence in such a plan. He leaned against the post and looked at the horses. The creatures’ eyes touched on the boys with the same indifference with which they looked upon the ground or the board to which they were bound.

“There ain’t no use. They’d track us down just for the pleasure of it.”

James seemed to know this was the truth, but he argued anyway, pointing out all the foot and horse and wagon traffic of the roads. He doubted anybody could track them through all that. “Study on it. They wouldn’t even know where to start. We could ride off in the wrong direction or something. Or ride straight back the way we came. Think of all the places to hide out there.”

“I don’t know. You heard what he said. They won’t be long.”

“Yeah, they will. You seen the way they drink.” James stared hard at the cantina. He squinted his eyes and looked as though he were trying to peer through the adobe at the men inside. “They’re probably drinking already.” He turned the same intense vision on his friend. “I see that dead woman all over the place, Gabe. Don’t matter if I’m sleeping or awake—all I can do is see her. Last night she came after me and got on me and started touching me all over. It wasn’t even no dream. I could’ve sworn she was on me for real, though. She was all bloody . . . Jesus Christ. This ain’t what I was thinking when I ran off from Pinkerd’s, and they’ll probably kill us anyway. Gabe, what else can we do? We gotta go.”

Gabriel tried not to look at James, but the passion of his friend’s plea tugged at him. He met his gaze, saw the quivering hope and fear there, saw the horizon reflected in his eyes and his own distorted reflection. For the first time, a tingling sense of possibility crept into him. It was a big world, full of hiding places, full of vast spaces, and he was small, so small in comparison. He could be lost and never found. He could find his way home.

Gabriel looked at his horse, her sleek muzzle and oily brown coat. His gaze moved down the reins to the hitching post. They weren’t even tied to it. They were only thrown over the board and wrapped around it twice. He could have them undone in less than a second. He slid his fingers around the reins and felt the dry texture of the leather.

As if in answer to this touch, a man emerged from the cantina. The boy’s gaze shot to him faster than a bullet would have. Caleb. He stood in the doorway with his head tilted back ever so slightly, as if he were scenting the air. His face was nothing but a dark shadow beneath his hat, his eyes only the faintest points of substance against that black void. His head turned, and small and distant as his eyes were, Gabriel felt their touch as if they had a physical force, as if the man had reached out and grasped his chin between his fingers.

Gabriel pulled his hand away from the reins. He held it out beside him for a moment, flexing his fingers, and then he passed the palm across his lips, exhaling a breath onto it as he did so. It was a strange gesture, and the boy wasn’t exactly sure why he did it. But only then did Caleb lean back against the adobe wall. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. The flare of the match illuminated the contours of his face for a second and proved that he was a man of flesh and bone, not a phantom in disguise. But if this was any comfort, it didn’t show on either boy’s face. They both stood tense and stiff, and try as he might, Gabriel could not get rid of the pressure that seemed to grip his jaw.

THEIR STAY IN SANTA FE WAS SHORT, two nights and only one full day, which they spent supplying themselves for the journey west. They camped behind a livery that boarded the horses, shod, fed, and rested them. They set to the work of stocking up on things they’d found themselves in want of on their ride from Three Bars. They bought several boxes of matches, extra water bottles, and, at Rollins’s request, a new coffeepot. Gabriel was sent out with Rollins and Dallas to buy food. They returned with their horses laden with blocks of bacon, canned tomatoes, sacks of beans, flour, baking powder, bricks of lard, and, again at the Texan’s urging, more coffee than Gabriel could have imagined consuming. Marshall came back with a map, some sort of geological survey commissioned by the government. The men looked it over carefully, studied it from different angles, and even held it up to the light. All agreed they could make little sense of it.

By the time they rode out of Santa Fe, something had changed in the group’s demeanor. The accumulation of days and miles in travel and their undisturbed passage through the city had lifted the men’s spirits. It seemed that some unstated boundary had been crossed and put behind them. The tension eased. Indeed, even Gabriel found it impossible to conceive of somebody tracking them through the wilderness. He took little joy in this fact, however, for it had never seemed to him that the true danger would come from without. It was right here in the company of the men that he felt most ill at ease, and watching Marshall relax and joke with the others, listening to him spin schemes for a future lived in wealthy debauchery, he felt the rules and norms of society slipping further away. But still he rode in silence, still he and James shared long glances, searched each other without words, still the days passed and they moved ever deeper into the West, into a land that swallowed them without end.

IT CAME ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF THE BOY’S VIGIL. He had fallen asleep, although he knew so only because when he opened his eyes the world was different from what he remembered. It was still just as dark. The animals were still near at hand. The gun still sat cradled in his lap. But something was different. He swallowed and was surprised at how loud the sound was. He’d never heard the world more clearly. It was as if he had woken as some new sort of being, one with ears that could float away from him and speed out into the night.

He would have shaken his head to rid himself of the sensation, except it was thus that he heard the beast’s footfalls when they were still far away. Raleigh heard them too and lifted his head and neighed and watched the boy. But the boy just listened to the swish of paws through the grass, to the breathing of the life out there. He could even hear the saliva as it fell from the creature’s lips and splashed against the earth. He knew just when the wolf loped in from the cultivated fields, crossed the space between house and barn, and set its eyes on the barn door. There it paused. The boy’s fingers gripped the rifle so tightly they were white against it, but he didn’t notice. He noticed nothing save the presence on the other side of the door.

When the wolf moved, it did so suddenly, as if all reserve had been cast away. It shoved its head into the crack of the door and tried to squirm through. The boy forgot the rifle and fell back against the wall and stared at it. The wood bucked and shimmied against the rope latch, then gave with a crack. The wolf stepped forward. The boy couldn’t believe the size of its head. It was a monster of a head, a disembodied thing with enormous eyes. Its snout was longer than his forearm, with flaps of skin that pulled back from its teeth in exertion and hunger and anger. Behind this came a body somehow small by comparison, bony and barely capable of bearing the weight of its skull and all the more grotesque for it. The creature paused in the door and surveyed the barn with quick jerks of its head, taking in the frantic horse and mule and the crazed pig, which was trying to burrow through the wall of the barn. Then it looked at the boy.

The boy saw the hairs on the creature’s back rise up. He saw its teeth standing like so many ivory phantoms in the dim light. And he saw into its skull through the sockets of its eyes. That’s when he remembered the gun. As the beast leapt toward him, he brought the rifle up to his chin and pulled, aiming into the blur of motion before him. He fell back with the kick of the gun and bounced off the wall and landed on his knees. He came up lashing out with the butt of the rifle, pulling the trigger again and again, although there was nothing left to fire. Only slowly did he realize that he was still alive and that the wolf was not upon him. He spun around, searching out the corners of the barn. But there was nothing, only Raleigh and the mule and the pig and the nervous clucking of the one remaining hen.

He could never truly believe that the kick of the gun had been so great. In his dreams for many nights to follow, the kick was actually the force of the wolf’s chest butting against the rifle and ac cepting his bullet. But in real life there was no sign that the wolf had been shot. No body, no blood, nothing except the tracks that proved it had actually been there. How he could have missed it he would never understand. The wolf didn’t come back again, but the victory left the boy with a deep sense of something unfulfilled.

ON A MORNING TWO DAYS OUT OF SANTA FE, the group came to the top of a sandstone ridge and looked down upon a farm. It was a complex of three structures, a main house and two barns, which sat next to a shallow river. Behind the house and lining the river ran well-tended rows of corn, among which a man and a woman worked, heads down and moving slowly up the lanes, oblivious of the watchers above. At the back of the house, two teenage girls washed clothes, occasionally laughing and flicking soapy water at each other. The whole valley was lightly dotted with firs, which shimmered in the morning breeze and sent their green smell wafting up the ridge. A goat munched on the sparse grass at the far edge of the field, and a single mule grazed from a long tether on the spit of land within the river’s fork. The place conveyed a sense of idyllic tranquillity. Gabriel couldn’t help but think of his own family, the green grass, the sod house, the people and the quiet warmth therein.

Marshall led them forward. He hailed the family from a hundred yards. The two heads in the field snapped up. They exchanged some words. The woman circled quickly around the house, gathered the two girls, and disappeared inside. The man walked forward to welcome them. He looked to be a mestizo, mostly of Spanish descent but with features that also betrayed Indian ancestry. His legs were slightly bowed, his arms somehow short for his body, but his face had a strength to it, a quiet, polite calm, which instantly seemed both a greeting and a warning. His nose was prominent and sharply hooked, and his beard was carefully kept. He stood before the horsemen, wiping his hands with a handkerchief, and greeted them in Spanish.

Marshall looked at Rollins as if something in the greeting would amuse him, then back at the man. “Howdy,” he said. “This here’s a beautiful spread you got. I never would’ve thought it, all this desert around the place. Little Eden. Hope you don’t mind us passing through.”

The man watched Marshall, looked over the other men, and answered, switching into English without comment, “Thank you. You’re welcome to pass.”

Marshall nodded. An awkward moment followed, a tense silence as the man waited for a response or movement from the travelers. Marshall seemed too enraptured by the tranquillity of the place to notice. He inhaled deeply and tilted his head to the side. “Listen to that creek. Ain’t that nice? Just gurgling like that.” Dallas affirmed that it was nice—right pretty-sounding, he thought. Marshall wondered out loud how far it was to the next creek, wondered if they’d find as nice a place as this to take some lunch and water the horses. He let the question hang in the air until the man made his offer, the offer he must make in that land of few homes and unwritten hospitality. Marshall accepted.

The man called to his wife. Almost instantly she appeared. She cracked the door open, paused, then slipped through and pulled the door closed behind her. The man asked her to prepare a lunch for the visitors. She went back into the house and returned with a cutting board at her waist, holding a large knife in the other hand. She set them down on a wooden table. A moment later the two girls emerged from the house, one carrying a plate of corn tortillas and the other a slab of bacon. They looked to be in their early teens, one slightly older than the other, both slim and tall, taller already than their father. Despite their demure manner, their down-turned faces, the short steps with which they walked, and the plain dresses they wore, or perhaps because of these, the girls betrayed a budding, youthful sensuality. Rollins let out a low whistle. The mother’s eyes cut him, but she made no comment.

Marshall instructed the others to water the horses and stake them out. Once this was done, the men gathered under the firs and listened as Marshall and the man spoke.

“This is a hell of a lonely country, ain’t it?” Marshall began.

The man agreed that it was, but he said it suited them well. They were prospering here and enjoying the quiet toil of the earth and the solitude.

“What about Indians, bandits and that? You feel safe, what with the womenfolk and all?”

The man said that he enjoyed good relations with the nearby Indians. They traded often, and he’d found them to be nothing save peace-loving, curious folk, simple in the way of God’s first children and thus beautiful. He said also that he had a son, a strong young man who was away just now but who was a comfort to them all in their solitude. He was a soldier, a vaquero, a son and brother, all at once.

“He’s talented, your son. Jack of all trades.”

The man agreed. He stroked the dark hair of his mustache with his fingers. “He is good at many things.”

Marshall smiled and turned to his companions. “These here are good folk, living a good life. You hear that, Dallas? You should learn something from this.”

Dallas nodded, although his attention was on the girls.

“Hey, Dallas, you hearing me?” The boy nodded. Marshall turned to the man. “Think Dallas there’s much impressed with your daughters. Fine family you’ve got. Makes me a little envious, tell you the truth.”

Once the women had set out the food, the wife led the girls off a little distance to eat by themselves. Rollins stood and asked them back to the table. They would not come, and the man said that was the way it should be. Marshall told Rollins to sit down and act like he had some sense.

As they ate, Marshall probed the man further with questions about his life. The man answered him politely, thoroughly, as if it were his duty, one that he didn’t take lightly. Yes, it was a joy to father a family and see the children grow. No, he wouldn’t give it up for anything. Yes, his family had come north from Mexico several generations ago, from the Guadalajara region. And yes, it was difficult to say where his heart and loyalties lay, being part of a conquered territory, beaten, but not truly accepted into this so-called union. While there were few in Nuevo Mexico who bore his familial name, there were many who did in Viejo Mexico. This he would never forget.

Despite his cordial responses, the man watched the group with slight disdain, which he did not give voice to but which he couldn’t help showing all the same. His eyes said that it was rude to ask such questions and that only his good manners prevented him from pointing this out. If Marshall noticed this, he gave not the slightest sign. He chatted on between mouthfuls of food, so completely engrossed by the man’s words and so unaware of what his body was saying that Gabriel felt a tingling low in his back. He didn’t know what was going to happen here, but he feared that the peace of the afternoon was too much like a blank page and these men were too anxious to write their history on all things pure.

After lunch the men lounged around, showing no signs of haste. Their postures were relaxed enough, but their eyes moved with quick, nervous shifts, landing often on the man, the girls, the wife, and then sliding to Marshall. The woman went inside. Shortly after, Dallas sidled off to where the girls were back at the washing. He moved casually, as if taking in the air over there and enjoying the view of the river without a clear thought in his head. When he finally turned to face the two, he seemed almost surprised to discover that the girls were so near at hand. Gabriel heard the beginning of his conversation: “Hey, y’all girls speak American?” He moved a little closer and looked to be helping them with the laundering.

Marshall told the Mexican that their destination was California. He asked him about the country to the west of here, and the man told him what he knew of it. He said it was high desert country, that they were at the edge of a plateau that stretched for two hundred miles, that beyond that there were more mountains. A bad country, he called it, many scorpions and few people. They should conserve their water, for there would be little this time of the year. Beyond that, he said, the land leveled again and was desert until you reached more mountains. Somewhere beyond that was the Colorado River, and beyond that California, but he could not speak with detail, for he had never been that far. He said it would be a long trip, but he wished them a good voyage.

“Oh, it’ll be a good one,” Marshall said.

“Why do you make this trip?” the man asked.

“Well . . .” Marshall waved the question away. “Hey, here we’ve shared your table and all that and had this nice talk, but I don’t even know your name.”

The man smiled. “I find travelers are often slow to speak of names. I am Diego Maria Fuentes.”

Rollins guffawed. “Maria?”

The man looked at him without apology. “Yes. It’s not as it sounds, though. My—”

There was a shout. They all turned in time to see one of the girls shove Dallas with such force that he stumbled backward down the shallow slope and fell into the river. He stood up cursing, and the things that happened next followed each other so fast that Gabriel could hardly keep the string of events in order. The door to the house flew open and the woman emerged, brandishing a long slaughter knife. She flew toward her girls and beyond, toward Dallas. The boy drew his pistol in a flourish that sent a spray of water into the air and sighted on her. The father stood to move, but Rollins stopped his progress with one of his long, stiff arms.

“What, you think I won’t shoot a woman?” Dallas yelled. “Goddamn, what the hell you thinking, pulling a knife on me? I’ll shoot you dead just as soon as look at ya.” His gun hand jerked with his words, impassioned and yet unsteady. The boy cast a quick look at Marshall. “I wasn’t even doing nothing. Just told the girl she smelled like strawberries.”

The Mexican, still trapped behind Rollins’s arm, whispered God’s name quietly and spoke Marshall’s aloud. He pushed the arm away and began to move forward. His body seemed divided between two disparate inclinations. His hands gestured for appeasement, drew calming circles in the air, and tried to wave the tension away. But his eyes and lips betrayed him, respectively cutting the boy with all the venom they had and muttering a quick string of Spanish expletives.

Whether Dallas would have understood the man’s words was doubtful, but Marshall seemed to grasp them clearly enough. He swung on the man, drew his pistol, and stopped him with the butt of it. The impact across his mouth knocked out four of his front teeth. He stumbled backward and fell flat on his back. He struggled to his feet, but Marshall hit him again with the pistol, across the forehead this time. As the man stood, dazed, Marshall swung the full force of his kick to the man’s groin. He went down.

Marshall stared at him a moment. “I can’t stand to hear my men talked about that way, leastways not by yourself. Dallas may be the son of a whore and a mongrel dog, but it ain’t your place to say it.” He turned to the others. “Damn! Just when I was enjoying the afternoon, too. Dallas, you damn horny toad, what are you playing at? Now look what you’ve gotten us into. Look at this fella. Just a minute ago we were doing a little polite conversating. But you had to act a fool, and he had to go and get uppity.”

Rollins, so excited that he sprayed moisture with his words, stood before the man with his fist swinging low before his face, waiting for the slightest provocation to lash out. “Damn right, he got uppity! Mexicans are the uppitiest sons of bitches next to niggers! But now look at him.”

The man’s eyes rolled. He tried to stand, even reached out toward Marshall, for support or to do him injury. Marshall slipped away from his fingers and pushed Rollins back in the same motion. All his attention was focused on the man’s movements, on the gurgling sound his throat was making and the blood that poured freely from his forehead and the corners of his mouth. Dunlop walked toward the man with outstretched arms, but before he reached him, Marshall tossed his gun to his left hand and punched the man with his right. The blow snapped the man’s head around and sent flying a froth of blood and spit. The man fell on his face and groveled in the dirt.

Dunlop stooped over him as if he would help but feared to touch him. Marshall looked at the Scot with revelation in his face.

“Look at him, Dunlop. The worm does turn, doesn’t it?”

Shouts from Dallas redirected their attention. He had the woman on her knees, with his pistol aimed dead at her forehead. He was yelling at her, and she was trying to respond but could scarcely utter a word for his cursing. Caleb slipped behind the woman, took the knife from her, threw her down, and bound her hands and legs as he would bind a calf for branding. Dallas turned his gun on the two girls, who stood in such complete shock that they seemed to understand nothing, not even the function of the weapon aimed at them.

A moment passed in stillness, each person frozen in a posture of crime or torture, each stunned at the prospect of what the next moment might bring. The tinkling of the river played in the silence; a crow called in the distance; the horses watched the human antics with apprehension. Gabriel felt he could scarcely breathe. He stood trapped by the stretched moment in time.

It was Dallas who broke the stillness. He smiled. Whether the smile was enough to change the direction of the men’s actions or whether they had shared a plan from the outset, Gabriel couldn’t say. But he watched it unfold, an almost silent chain of actions that couldn’t have been smoother if choreographed. Caleb dragged the woman across the ground and set her beside her husband. Marshall waved his hand toward the girls, and Rollins and Dallas took them inside. The girls walked like numb creatures to be directed, with no fight, just eyes hungering for their parents, seeing their state and then following the men’s directions. Dallas broke the silence by asking if the other men figured the girls were virgins. Marshall said he figured they were. Yes, he figured they were. Then they were gone into the house.

Gabriel looked at James, and he back. They both looked at Dunlop, who pulled his eyes slowly from the man at his feet. His gaze passed over the boys and fell on the house. He stared at it with an emotion that grew as the silent seconds passed. His cheeks trembled; his jaw worked up and down as if he would speak. He mumbled something, shook his head, and stumbled forward. He moved in a trancelike state, carried forward by something beneath his conscious mind. His steps were wild and clumsy and barely kept him upright. And they were short-lived.

Caleb was up and over the picnic table and to Dunlop in a few strides. He kicked the man’s feet from under him, drew his gun as he fell, and landed on top of him, his knee digging into Dunlop’s back, the muzzle of his pistol pressed into his neck. Dunlop cried out, sounds that were not words, that were not even protests of pain but howls of a torment that language couldn’t explain. His feet thrashed in the dirt and his fingertips gripped the earth, but Caleb held him down.

Gabriel took a step toward them, but he was stopped before he could even form a clear thought. Caleb didn’t change his grip on Dunlop, but his eyes flashed a threat at the boy. Gabriel froze, and the man went to work binding Dunlop’s hands. He didn’t feel the need to check the power of his threat. And indeed, there was no need.

Gabriel stood immobile, James at his side, watching. Caleb tied the parents together, back to back, with efficient, silent motions. He then sat biting his fingernails, listening to the stony silence that came from the house, watching the couple and the boys with his coal-black, narrow eyes. When the men emerged from the house, they did so triumphantly, throwing about jokes and laughter, pushing one of the girls before them, the one who had shoved Dallas. She was bound at the wrists and blindfolded. There followed an argument that Gabriel caught very little of, as he was staring at the girl. She stood as still as he, head straight, chin raised, and jaw set tight. Her blouse was ripped open down the front and her skirt was crumpled and soiled. She stood until Rollins grabbed her by the wrist and led her toward the horses. She walked with a limping, pained progress, but she did not fight.

The argument, which Gabriel had missed, had been won for the moment by the baser demons of the men’s nature. The whole group mounted and rode, the girl on one of her father’s horses, a long-legged gelding that was strung by the halter behind Rollins. Dallas led a paint mare away in a similar fashion, loading her up with various objects that he took a fancy to. Only Caleb stayed behind. As Gabriel reached the rise on the far side of the house, he cast one last glance back. Caleb sat a few feet away from the couple, seeming from the distance like a friend sharing the afternoon. A form stepped from the house: the other girl. With that last glimpse, the land pushed its elbow in between them and the homestead was no more.

THEY CARRIED ON THROUGH THE TANGERINE HIGHLIGHTS of dusk and for several hours into the night. The group’s mood sombered as the darkness deepened. Dunlop rode with his hands tied behind his back, silent, eyes distant, letting the horse tag along behind the others of its own accord. The girl was similarly bound, although blindfolded as well. Gabriel watched her from his position several horses behind, trying to read her body and gain some understanding of her thoughts. But she gave few signs to decipher. She sat on her horse with an erect back, with a balance she maintained with her legs alone, with a calm that was somehow defiant and defeated at once. The bright red handkerchief that was fastened around her eyes remained until they stopped and made camp, until they’d built up a fire and broken out the mescal stolen from the girl’s home. Only when the tone of revelry had been reestablished did Rollins yank the scarf from her eyes, with the air of a magician.

The rapists toasted their deeds and talked of penetration and blood and the joy of total power as if there were no such thing as remorse, as if the louder their voices were, the less shame they felt, as if they would shout it up to God and see him blush. Rollins proposed that the girls had enjoyed it, that all women have something in them that likes it that way, that there is a little she-cat in them who may scream and fight but needs it like all the rest. He tried to get the girl to answer this claim, but she stared stonily into the air above the fire. Marshall said he figured that theory was based on some faulty logic, but Rollins stuck to it, saying he could tell she’d liked it and would soon be liking it again.

But despite their words, none of the men touched the girl that night. They grew quieter. They sat, one and all, beneath a canopy of low-hung stars. The night was so clear and the air so delicate that Gabriel found himself wishing he could breathe in the stars and so take on their light, wishing he could touch them and be pulled up toward them, away from this place and these men. Before long, Rollins slept, snoring, his head thrown back. Dallas sat out on a ridge nearby and seemed for once to wrestle with his thoughts. Marshall lay on his back and talked to himself in a low murmur. James lay on his side next to Gabriel, head clasped firmly in his hands, silent.

Gabriel watched them all, especially the girl, who sat cross-legged, bound, and still. She neither moved nor stretched nor slept, but just stared. She didn’t return his gaze. He looked back at the small fire of mesquite before him. The flames were like spirits captured within the wood, beings stretching up their arms into the night and tasting the air of freedom. They made him think back to the girl’s parents. What had happened to them? He tried to convince himself that Caleb had stayed behind only to make sure they were properly bound and could not give chase or run for help. That must have been it. That had to have been it, for they must not die. At least, if they lived, nothing was irrevocable yet. There was still hope. He went to sleep arguing with himself, painfully aware of how hollow his words sounded.

Late that night Gabriel awoke. His eyes first took in the stars, which looked strange to him. They had rotated their positions, the familiar ones slipping from the sky while new ones came to take their place. He thought he had woken for no reason, until he realized that somebody was standing at the edge of the firepit, not more than ten feet away from him. The fire had died down to embers, but its faint red glow and the bone-white highlights cast by the stars illuminated the shape enough to give it form. He felt his pulse quicken. A tingling surged through his body, as if his blood had just come alive with tiny bubbles.

The man was hatless, his shoulders stooped. He teetered a little, cleared his throat, and lifted a bottle. The moonlight sparkled on the glass. There followed a sound that at first Gabriel couldn’t place. It was a dry rasp, a gurgle, an expulsion of air just ordered enough to resemble speech. He listened, but it wasn’t until the silence after the sound that he knew what it was. Caleb had spoken. Gabriel held so still that even his breathing ceased. He waited, and the voice came again. This time, with effort, he made sense of the sound.

“I could have you all.” The man tilted the bottle again. After he’d drunk, he stood teetering once more. “All of you, right now.”

Gabriel could just make out his eyes, thin crescents in highlight, but he couldn’t tell where his gaze was directed. He tried to guess but was stunned by a realization that chilled him to the core. If he could see Caleb’s eyes, then . . . He slammed his eyes shut. A moment later he heard an expulsion of air, a guttural noise, and two soft grunts. It took him a second to realize that the sounds put together made laughter. The bottle fell to the ground. There was a rustling of boots on earth, and then he knew that the man had moved away a few feet and collapsed.

Gabriel listened for any sounds to follow, but there was nothing except the whisper of a high wind and the men’s snores. It was only after several minutes of tense awareness that he realized he was not the only one awake. He could just make out the outline of the girl, still upright, still staring before her, eyes and ears as alert as Gabriel’s.

THE MORNING BEGAN WITH ARGUMENTS. Marshall protested the kidnapping of the girl. He said he cared not a lick for her well-being and liked the taste of her himself, but he figured they’d had her already and ought to just get moving. No use slowing themselves and giving some greasers an excuse to track them. Dallas and Rollins put up a united front, calling forth all possible strands of logic, from the improbability that anybody would even come upon the farm within the next month to lessons on the biological necessity of the relief the girl could offer. They’d already seen she could ride. Hell, in a day or two they’d probably have her cooking and doing the washing for them. Dallas even suggested that they could sell her once they got to California, thus earning hard cash to boot.

But in the end, Rollins responded with action rather than words. He strode over to the girl, reached around her shoulders, and yanked open the torn front of her dress, exposing her chest. His rough hands cupped the small orbs that were her breasts, and this brought a smile to his face. He squeezed them, measured the weight of them, looked up at Marshall, and said, “Tell me you don’t want these along with us.” He slid one hand down and cupped the spot between her legs. The girl twisted her head to the side and spat. She set her jaw, and that was all. “And this down here, sweet as a Georgia peach and you know it. Come on, Marshall, my yanker’s been one swollen-up lonely son of a bitch for too long now. If we’re going to hell, let’s do it right, let’s take a little pussy with us.”

Marshall looked at the man with disgust. “I guess thinking with your head don’t have anything to do with your outlook, does it?” Rollins didn’t feel he needed to answer. Marshall’s eyes drifted over to Caleb. He exchanged a long look with the man, then sighed. “I guess she ain’t got much to live for anyway . . . But if some son-of-a-bitch Mexican comes hunting her, I’ll serve you both up on a platter for him. Can’t stand a man who takes a little twat that seriously. Makes me wonder if your mother loved you proper.”

So decided, they broke camp and moved on, inconvenienced only briefly by Dunlop, who launched into a vitriolic tirade against the men and their actions. Marshall stripped off one of his own socks, stuffed it in the man’s mouth, and bound it tight, saying, “There. Now don’t eat it, Dunlop.”

THE NIGHTS WERE COOL ON THE COLORADO PLATEAU. They rode across a rutted, butted, and sand-washed landscape five thousand feet above the sea. They were in a country open to sky, moving vulnerably beneath it, closer to God and more insignificant for it. The land they traveled through was thick with chaparral and creosote bushes. They stirred up pigeons and quail, which lifted into the air with raucous cries and, more often than not, flew in line with the riders. Dallas shot five of them before Marshall told him that he should think about saving his ammunition. He did for a few hours, until some jackrabbits proved too large a temptation for him. He shot three in the space of an hour.

For the first few days the girl did manage to slow their progress. She sat unresponsive in camp, had to be pulled to her feet and set in the saddle bodily. She was no longer blindfolded, and her hands were tied in front of her instead of behind her back, but she still refused to give her horse any direction. It would dawdle along at the end of its tether, following reluctantly. Every so often it would sink on its haunches and fight forward progress, once jerking Dallas, who was leading it, completely from the saddle. This happened so often on the second day, and so often at precarious moments for the lead rider—just mounting a ridge of slippery rock, just about to descend a slope—that Rollins finally deduced that the horse was acting on signals from the girl. From then on she rode James’s horse and he hers. Thus they picked up the pace.

Gabriel kept his eye on James, who seemed less and less of this world. He no longer responded to comments thrown his way, no longer even met Gabriel’s gaze. Instead, he stared blankly at the passing land and the creatures in it. It seemed he’d forgotten the most basic actions of life. Marshall had to shout at him to get him to move; more than twice Rollins slapped him across the back of his head in an attempt to get a response from him. Gabriel did what he could to help him along, hitching and unhitching his saddle, fetching him food at supper, and rolling out his blanket in the evening. But he could tell that the boy’s being was somewhere else entirely, and he knew that he must bring him back, that James must come back and face the here-and-now if he was ever to escape it. He whispered this to his friend in their rare moments of solitude, but if the boy heard, he gave no sign. His eyes stayed wide and quivering and nervous, like those of a mouse beneath the canopy of the night sky.

Gabriel never actually saw what the men did with the girl. They’d lead her away one by one during the evening. At first they’d return cheerful and boastful, teasing Gabriel and James about not being invited to the party. Dallas couldn’t help but demonstrate for the boys the way he’d “given it to her,” thrusting into the air as if to damage it. Even Caleb led the girl away occasionally. Rollins bubbled in protest at this but couldn’t muster the courage to voice it and shrugged it off instead, saying she was just a brownskin anyway.

But as the days passed, the mood changed. Rollins began to return from his sessions with the girl with a strange look in his eyes, a bewilderment that he gave no voice to and that he tried to soothe with whiskey. By the third day Dallas stopped his boasting, and by the fourth he even passed up his nightly indulgence. Always the girl returned to the fire as stony-faced as before, stiff-backed, expressionless, and distant.

WHEN THE SON LOOKED DOWN UPON HIS HOME with his companion, his heart was light. He turned to his friend and spoke, telling him how he would now meet his sisters and he’d see that they were the most beautiful girls in all of the Spanish-speaking world. There was something of the flavor of Mexico in him, and of Spain and that country’s ancient vaquero traditions. He wore Chihuahua spurs and dark pantalones and a low-brimmed black hat with crimson needlework decorating the band. His face was tan and handsome and warm still from the touch of a young woman in Santa Fe, a woman he decided he loved, although he’d yet to tell her this.

As he descended toward the house, a strange feeling came over him. The stillness of the place made no sense, as it was midday. He checked his horse and angled slightly, moving around toward the front of the house. Then he saw them. He thundered down at a gallop, calling out for his family members by name and relation. The buzzards around his father’s body took flight with cries of protest, like avian undertakers disturbed at their rightful work. The son was off his horse before he’d even stopped it, slipping over its shoulder and hitting the ground at a full run. He bent to his father and just as quickly drew back from him. The man lay on his stomach, with his cheek resting on the ground, but even so the son could see that he had no eyes. He could see from the shredded material of his clothing where the birds had stuck their grotesque heads into his body.

Just then another bird plodded out of the house, stood teetering in the doorway like a drunken glutton, and took flight. The son was inside in four great bounds. What he saw there sent up a howl of pain like none that either his companion or the horses had heard before. The son’s friend tried to enter the house, but the son pushed him out, saying it was not for his eyes to see them so. He asked him to ride back to Santa Fe. He didn’t tell him why, and the man didn’t ask, because he knew already.

Through the afternoon, the son worked on the bodies of his mother and sister. He bathed them as best he could, laid them out upon their beds, and pulled their blankets up to their chins, as most of the damage done to their bodies began below the neck. He brought his father inside also, and he burned candles for them all, praying as if he still believed in God. After that, he walked out to the river and sank into its water on all fours. He purged himself into the flowing current and knelt there long after in silence. In this silence was a misery too loud to pronounce, and within that misery was a chaos of thoughts such as a man should never have. He wished to quiet them.

Before the sun set that evening he had found the riders’ tracks. He knew the direction they rode and their number and guessed that they had only three days on him. He recognized the shoes of the gelding and understood then that it was not only for the dead that he must mourn. While he awaited his companions, he shot three buzzards from their circular flight and set their bodies aflame, asking God to do the same with their souls.

IN FOUR DAYS THEY COVERED ALMOST TWO HUNDRED MILES and saw no other human beings. On the afternoon of the fifth day they bisected a wide expanse of open mesa, the soil clothed almost uniformly with short fat shrubs, small plants abloom with pale white flowers. That evening they stopped early and set the horses to graze. Rollins blindfolded the girl again, and the men slipped naked into the creek near camp and washed the filth off their bodies. Gabriel had to be instructed to do so by Marshall, but once in the chilly, forgiving water, he felt some of the tension within him slip away. He imagined the water could wash him clean, could not just soothe his skin but enter into him and ease away the stains, the pain, the guilt that wrapped around his heart and slowed its beating. He closed his eyes and tried to quiet his thoughts.

When he opened his eyes the sun was setting. From where he sat, in a small bowl of water, it seemed to be dropping directly into the pool with him. He wondered if this was what the sunset looked like in California, wondered if he’d ever see that place, or see his family again, or ever again feel that his life was in his own hands.

As if in answer to some of these questions, Marshall came into view. He spotted Gabriel and walked toward him, barechested and seeming larger than usual. He carried a metal canteen in one hand. The skin of his chest was thin and opaque, pink and, despite the girth of his torso and the muscles clearly outlined there, somehow fragile. Gabriel realized he’d never seen the man shirtless, and something about it struck him as obscene. He turned his gaze down to the dark water in which he sat.

Marshall sat down at the edge of the pool. He slipped one bare foot into the water. Dirt and debris floated away from it. He fingered the canteen, then lifted it absently to his mouth and took several large gulps. The wince that ran across his face and the way it eased into a sort of relaxed pleasure indicated to the boy that the canteen was full of whiskey. Marshall wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and sat contemplating the reflection of the sky in the water’s surface.

“You think killing’s wrong, don’t you? That’s what’s got you acting so damn high and mighty. You gonna tell me you never thought of killing someone yourself?” Gabriel didn’t answer, but the man didn’t seem to expect him to. “What if somebody raped your mother? What if some lanky, no-toothed son-of-a-bitch Confederate tied you to a pole and made you watch while he did it to her? Had her get on her knees like a dog.” Marshall paused and allowed the boy to form the image. He met the boy’s eyes this time and waited for an answer. “Wouldn’t you track the bastard down and put a bullet through him?”

“I might—”

“You might?” He offered the boy a drink. Gabriel started to refuse, but his hand seemed to rise from the water of its own accord and grasp the metal canteen. “Shit, I know you better’n that. You wouldn’t even need a gun. You’d beat the living shit out of him with your bare hands. You got an anger in you just like all your race. Rightly so. All it takes is enough anger. Put the right person through the right ordeal, and they’ll kill faster than they can think.”

Gabriel took a drink. He surprised himself, not actually knowing he was going to do so until he felt the thick liquid sliding down his throat.

Marshall looked up at a thin line of birds passing above them, then continued. “Yeah, I reckon anybody’s been born out of a woman can understand that. But if you’re gonna say that killing somebody is wrong, then it’s got to always be wrong. It don’t get right just cause they deserve it, does it? And it don’t get wrong just cause they don’t deserve it. You following me?” The man motioned for the whiskey and took another swallow. “Shit. You ain’t following me. I ain’t even following myself. That’s a problem I developed lately. When I was your age, I used to have notions that made some sense, but then I grew up, and I saw more than my share of things, and then sense got plain thrown out the window, along with God and all his lick-spittle little angels. I’ll tell you something. Listen here. We’ll see if I can’t add a little more clarifying confusion to your thoughts.” He motioned Gabriel closer and told him a tale he said was of his youth, a thing he’d seen with his own eyes and knew to be truer than most things he’d seen since.

While a boy, he’d worked on a ranch outside Austin owned by a man named Clemmins. This Clemmins was a strange man in Marshall’s eyes, was then and always would be. He had an avowed faith in Christianity, something that he pressed on his men, so losing many of them to less religious operations. One spring a traveling preacher came through, calling himself a missionary and intent on continuing the work the Spaniards had begun with the natives to the south. He stayed a fortnight, drank with Clemmins, and talked of religion and God and the destiny of mankind. When he left, he was full of zeal; two months later he was dead, scalped and robbed of everything on him.

When Clemmins heard this news, he went into a murderous fury. He hunted the lands of the murder with his men, never tiring, hungry to avenge the man of God. It so happened that he and Marshall were out alone one afternoon when they came upon the camp of a stray Indian, burning a low fire that let off almost no smoke. There was perhaps nothing unusual about this, but to Clemmins it was a hint of guilt. The two rode in. The Indian jumped up and started to run, stopped and came back and began talking to them in Spanish. Clemmins leveled his shotgun at the man and asked him if he knew the padre who had been killed. The man took a moment to answer, and in this hesitation Clemmins saw guilt. He drove the man to his knees, then had him lie spread-eagled on the ground, and before long he had him tied and bound to a tree. “Bit like you were back at McKutcheon’s,” Marshall added. He nudged Gabriel playfully on the shoulder.

Gabriel looked away and caught sight of Dunlop, who had just climbed up from the hollow in which he’d bathed, hands still tied behind his back. He met the boy’s gaze from a distance of a hundred yards, then walked on to camp. Gabriel lost the thread of Marshall’s story for a moment, but when he picked it up again, it had turned worse than he could have imagined.

“He made a slit about four inches long in the red’s belly. Cut right through to the insides.” Marshall demonstrated where on his own body, then went on to tell how Clemmins reached in and probed the man’s insides with his fingers, watching his face the whole time, poking him, watching the pain writhe across his features in spasms, his living hand within the man’s living body. He asked him did he remember it now, was it coming back to him, was he a filthy red murderer and was he regretting it now? That hand found what it was looking for, paused for a moment; then, with one tremendous effort, he yanked from the man’s body a loop of his small intestine. He got a bit of the stuff out into the open air, with the Indian screaming and convulsing and watching Clemmins tug his life out of him. Clemmins stopped when a good portion of the man’s insides had been pulled through the incision. He stepped back, pleased by his actions, looking from the Indian to Marshall with a grin of pure joy. But he was not finished yet.

“He told me to pull the man’s trousers down. I thought I couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that, but when a man like that tells you to pull, you pull.”

Marshall did as he was told, an awkward job what with the man’s dangling, bloody intestines. In the end he used the knife to cut the cord that held the Indian’s trousers up, and he pulled them to the ground. He returned the knife to Clemmins and watched as the man handled the Indian’s privates, measuring their weight and texture and length. Gripping the Indian’s penis in one hand and pulling it taut, Clemmins cut it from his body. The Indian flinched but could no longer cry out. It wasn’t even obvious that he still knew what was happening to him. Clemmins held the member up in his bare hand, commented on the size and shape of it, then threw it away, losing it in a landscape of stone and sand. Clemmins nearly split himself laughing. They left the man that way, food for the scavengers of the night. Justice done.

“All this for a minister who should’ve left them people alone in the first place. What’s worse is, they found the man who really killed the minister a week later. He wasn’t even an Indian, was a halfbreed Mexican-American. Still had the minister’s Bible with him. It had gold leaf, see, and that fool got it in his head that must be worth something, figured gold was gold.” Marshall leaned back and contemplated the boy from a distance that suddenly seemed great. “What do you make of that? Don’t that just seem like a right mistake on God’s part?”

“I reckon.”

“Damn right, you reckon. Clemmins claimed he was doing it all in God’s name, and God never said a word against him, never said, ‘Clemmins you’re a right demented son of a bitch, and I don’t want you cutting people up in my name.’ Never said a thing like that. True enough, the man did come to a bloody end himself, but that ain’t no surprise. He didn’t die half as slow as some that he’d killed, or half as early.” Marshall raised the canteen and smelled the liquor. He frowned, but whether at the smell of the whiskey or at his own thoughts was unclear.

“Anyway, what we done at Three Bars wasn’t a big thing— wasn’t no big thing at the Mexican’s either. That’s my point, even if I didn’t make it properly. Truth is, God don’t give a good goddamn who we kill here on earth. Never did and never will. So you shouldn’t worry about it either. I’m not saying to go and make a habit outta gutting people. I’m just saying if you’re gonna be anything in this world other than a dirt-poor nigger, you’re gonna have to take a few things from some other people. There ain’t enough of the good stuff to go around. So you take it—some gold from this one, some pussy from that one, a life from another. That’s all there is to it. The devil’s an iron horse, my boy. You either get aboard or you eat the lead.”

The man rose, his foot stirring the water, and drank once more. “As far as the girl goes, hell, she’s just in training. She’ll make more as a whore in San Francisco than she ever would’ve otherwise. She’s a lot better off than her parents, that’s for sure. You just gotta learn how to look at things the right way.” With that he turned and moved off, leaving Gabriel with a mind full of new images to crowd out the old.

ON THE MORNING OF THE EIGHTH DAY out of Santa Fe, Caleb walked into camp as the others were sipping coffee. He sat down next to Marshall, took off his hat, and set it on his knee. He leaned close to the man and spoke his words directly into his ear. The others all went about their business, drinking coffee, picking bits of food from their teeth, looking over their saddles, but they watched the two men from the corners of their eyes.

Gabriel knew that Caleb had been out since before sunset. There was nothing new about that, but something in the man’s movements made him uneasy immediately. He had just finished cutting James’s bacon into bite-sized pieces, a chore he’d taken to over the last few days as the boy seemed weary of using the implements himself. He pushed a bowl toward him and told him to eat, then bent to his own meal.

He’d taken a few bites when Marshall tossed his coffee into the fire. “If that ain’t perfect, I don’t know what is. Get up, y’all. We’re being tracked. And they’re making time on us.”

“Son of a sodomite!” Dallas said. “Are you kidding me?”

Marshall stood up and waved his coffee cup in the air, drying it. “Dallas, you ever heard Caleb kid?”

The boy thought about this for a moment and answered candidly. “No, I ain’t never heard Caleb say nothing, to tell the truth.”

“Well, I have. He figures we’ve got a day and a half on em.”

“Day and a half?” Rollins asked.

“No more than two, but seeing as how they’re closing in faster than a hungry coyote chasing a plump hen, we best make our plans fast and quick.”

Marshall began to gather up his things, but the others were perplexed, Rollins more so than any. “Now, hang on a second. That don’t sound right. Not by a jugful, it don’t,” he said. “If they’ve been tracking us all the way from Texas, how come we’ve just now noticed them? We done put in hundreds of miles without no sign of anybody. And nobody would track us this far into the territory just for killing Rickles and that whore. That’s for damn sure.”

This seemed to give the men pause. Marshall pursed his lips and mumbled something that sounded like agreement, then fell silent, contemplating the situation at a different angle. Gabriel was more surprised than anyone to hear James’s voice, cracked and raspy but loud enough to be heard by all. “Could be the Mexicans. Cause of what you done to them and the girl.” He didn’t raise his eyes from the food in his lap, and after speaking these words, he began eating again.

Gabriel noticed the girl’s eyes flick toward James. She took him in in one quick glance, as if it was the first time she’d done so, then she looked back down into her lap, letting her black hair fall before her face.

“Well, I’ll be damned! The Lazarus speaks. I feel honored.” Marshall smiled and looked around the group in amazement. His gaze settled on Dunlop. “Maybe next we’ll hear from Jesus Christ himself. You got anything to say, Messiah?”

Dunlop’s gag hung around his neck, but traces of it were clearly to be seen in the indentations running across his cheeks. He looked at Marshall directly when he answered. “Yes, I have something to say. I hope they hang you.”

Again Gabriel saw the girl look up, at Dunlop this time. She looked down again before anybody else noticed.

“If it comes to that, they might hang you too.”

“That’s fine, so long as they hang you first, so I can watch.”

Dallas stepped toward the Scot as if to strike him, but Marshall discouraged him with a wave. “Don’t get riled, Alabama. I like a man who speaks his mind. And, yeah, a pack of greasers could be trailing us. The man did say he had a son. For that matter, it could be on account of that damn fool at McKutcheon’s. There’s more than one son of a bitch out there with a grudge against us.”

Dallas pushed his hat up high over his brow, a position Marshall often favored. “I’m not even thinking bout who the hell it might be—I’m thinking, how can Caleb see them if they’re two days away?” He looked at Caleb and cast his voice a bit lower than usual. “You see somebody’s fire? And if you did, how you know they’re after us?”

Again it was Marshall who answered. “He didn’t see them.”

“What?” This was too much for Dallas. “I don’t mean no disrespect, Caleb, but damn. Shit. You had me worried. I don’t know what planet you from, but right here on earth we don’t say someone’s after us till we got good reason. Shit.”

Caleb stared at him.

“Hold your shits, Dallas,” Marshall said. “I don’t reckon Caleb’s wrong. You don’t have to understand it, just have sense enough to believe it. So let’s say some son of a bitch is trailing us.” He waved away Dallas’s protests. “Let’s just say that’s so. We still got a decision to make. We gonna hightail it away? We gonna set ourselves up and ambush em?” He paused and looked around the group.

Dallas cast his vote: “I’ll ambush em, if they ever existed anyhow.” He drew his pistol and pointed it in the air and almost fired. He checked himself at the last minute and burst into laughter. “That’s right. That’s right. Gotta save them bullets. Might be somebody following us.” He pretended to look around cautiously, then fell to laughing again.

But the other men voted to ride. Marshall ordered the boys to their horses and nudged Dunlop with his boot, saying, “Get up, Scotland. You’re an outlaw too.” But the man didn’t move immediately. The Scot’s eyes were turned to the horizon once more, with a different sort of hunger this time. Try as he might, Gabriel couldn’t figure out how to read this gaze.

THEY CROSSED THE UPPER REACHES OF A BRANCH of the Colorado River that morning and rode into a landscape that changed again. The mountains before them rose like sand blankets draped around skeletons of rock. As they came closer, Gabriel could almost believe they were the ancient carcasses of some giant creatures—backbones, ribs, limbs, and digits stretched out and decaying beneath a godawful sun that followed them and beat down as if to warn them off.

They rode fueled by fear of the unseen hunters behind them. No man save Caleb was sure of their presence, but all pushed onward just the same. They didn’t gallop for fear of overheating the horses, but they pushed them at a speed that sorely tested their endurance. The pursuers might have been little more than a notion at first, but after a day they all woke up with this notion woven into the fabric of their dreams, making it much realer during their waking hours. Gabriel noticed that each member of the party had his own way of looking behind him. Marshall tugged the brim of his hat down on his forehead and stared back at the land with humorless candor. Rollins rode with his body almost sidesaddle, eyes probing the land. Dallas would canter along, conversing loudly and casually, then wheel his horse around as if he could surprise their pursuers. James and Dunlop and the girl shared a silence on the subject, but each of them could be seen taking in the land with wide sweeping gazes that seemed as hungry as they were desperate. Caleb ignored their pursuers altogether during the waking hours, disappearing only at night on his solitary missions. As for Gabriel, he tried not to look back, but he couldn’t help doing just that, searching with hope or fear—he was never sure which—and finding nothing save land and more land.

The chaparral became sparser. Saguaros grew up instead, strange, multilimbed figures standing in the distance. Prickly pears, yuccas, and cushion cacti all dotted the landscape. After two days in the mountains, Gabriel felt his body had become a pincushion. Everything in this country, it seemed, came armed with thorns and stingers. Each rock seemed to hide something venomous. He twice found scorpions in his boots and once woke eye to eye with a spiny lizard. And more times than he could count, their horses stirred up the now familiar whir that was a rattler.

He fought to keep James with him, but the boy showed little improvement. The emotional toll was starting to show on his body. His thin frame grew gaunter each day, his cheeks hollower, nose thinner, each of his features more and more measured by its simple geometry—skin on bone, flesh over muscle. His lips had long ago chapped beneath the sun, and one of his only movements over the long days became the frequent probing of them with his tongue, wetting them again and again, like a lizard testing the air. But his saliva simply sped the drying process. Sometimes when Gabriel prompted him to eat, he noticed creases of blood as the boy chewed. James showed no sign that this caused him any pain, or that he was even aware of why he was eating. Only Gabriel’s efforts made him eat at all, and Gabriel knew things couldn’t continue like this for long. It seemed the boy wouldn’t last another week, much less survive this trek turned flight across desert, mesa, and mountain.

ONE EVENING THEY CAMPED IN A WEST-FACING CAVE beneath a tall shelf of rock. Dallas spotted a herd of peccaries, small piglike creatures, grazing in a ravine. Against Marshall’s advice, he climbed down the rocky slope and disappeared. Gabriel heard the echo of five shots, and a half-hour later Dallas returned, scuffed and scratched and sweaty but dragging two of the creatures at a rope’s length behind him. For the first time in several days they built a large fire and sat around it to enjoy the smell of fresh-killed meat.

Rollins complained that the peccary meat was coarse and hard to chew, and furthermore a little hairy for his liking, but he ate a fair share of it. Marshall said he liked it fine: “Puts me in mind of dog.” Dallas challenged him to name the place and date when he’d eaten dog meat, but Marshall just smiled, said he’d eaten worse things than dog in his time, and would proceed no further on the subject.

Gabriel cut a plate of meat for James, but neither boy had the hunger to consume it. Gabriel’s eyes nervously flicked over the walls of the cave around him. He saw shapes within the sandstone contours, creatures and spirits and other things, but he couldn’t tell if it was just the play of the firelight against the wavering stone or if they were images conjured out of his own mind. It was Marshall who provided the answer.

“Those are Injun drawings. I see you thinking about it, Archangel. Your mind ain’t playing tricks on ya.” He stood up and pointed with a half-consumed leg. He traced over the lines only partially there, giving them shape as he spoke. “This here’s a deer. That’s something looks like a buffalo, although I doubt there were ever buffalo in this territory. And see that, you know what that is?” He motioned toward a creature on the far wall. “You ever heard the word conquistador? I don’t figure you have, cause that’s not in the average black boy’s education. But that there is a conquistador. One of the first so-called white men to enter this country. Bunch of damn fools, the whole lot of them. Thought they’d find themselves a mountain of gold around here and save their souls at the same time. Spent years hunting for the stuff, making good Christian slaves out of all the redskins they didn’t kill straight away. They got themselves a good many pieces of Indian pussy while they were at it.” He looked at Rollins and smiled. “Fucked em so hard and long they damn near wiped out the race.”

“That’s the way I’d do it.”

The two men talked on, occasionally interrupted by questions from Dallas, who seemed to take quite an interest in the conquistadors. Gabriel only half listened, still studying the image and finding in it nothing human. It was a creature with four legs, with a stout, amorphous circle of a body and two protrusions that might have been heads. Around it were rings of wavering red, as if the creature were encased in circles of fire. Gabriel could make no sense of it, and he saw nothing in it to match Marshall’s words, only a chaos that began in a time that he couldn’t even fathom. He turned from it uneasily and again picked up the men’s conversation.

“I say we’re carrying too much dead weight,” Rollins said. He didn’t look at the boys when he spoke, but Gabriel understood immediately the turn the conversation had taken. “Can’t expect to make time when half the group ain’t up to it.”

“I second that,” Dallas said. He took a quick swig of mescal and tossed the canteen toward Rollins. “I second that, for damn sure.”

Marshall turned this over in his mind. “Could be you got something there,” he said at last. “We ain’t exactly shoveling coal up the devil’s ass, if you know what I mean.” He waited, but none of the others indicated whether they did or not. “But you could look at it another way. You could figure the larger the force, the stronger. Maybe give these two coloreds some arms and let them fight along with us. Y’all would like that, wouldn’t ya?”

Rollins didn’t give the boys time to answer. “You must’ve lost the little bit of sense you was born with. One of them boys is as useless as a lame horse, other one’d probably put the bullet in you himself.”

“Rightly so,” Marshall said. “Wouldn’t blame him if he did. But I don’t think the Archangel’s that type of nigger. I think he’s more the faithful dog type.” He turned and scrutinized Gabriel for a long moment, then rose with the energy of sudden inspiration. “I’ll prove it, too,” he said. He strode over to his saddlebags, rummaged around while the others waited in silence, and finally came back into the light of the fire. Upheld for all to see was a tiny nickel-plated gun, barely large enough to fill his palm. “This here belonged to the old heifer herself. Some say it’s a whore’s weapon, but I figure a derringer will kill a man as quick as anything else. Here you go, boy, arm yourself.” He tossed the gun toward Gabriel, who snatched it out of the air with a defensive motion, then set it down just as quickly on the sand before him. “Keep it,” Marshall said. “Just remember not to shoot your load too soon. Hear? Wait till you see the whites of their eyes.”

This set Dallas to laughing. He clapped his hands as if somebody had suddenly struck up a tune, repeating “the whites of their eyes, whites of their eyes” as if the phrase were a song in itself. Rollins was none too sure about it. He began to caution Marshall, but then he gave up in disgust and stalked away.

Gabriel felt someone’s eyes on him. He looked up into the frank stare of the Mexican girl. It was the first time she’d looked directly at him, and it made his heart beat faster. There was an openness in those sad, beautiful eyes that he’d never glimpsed, as if they were two small portals into a world as yet unimagined. He saw that there was also a question, a whole host of questions, etched in the lines that creased her forehead. And further, as his eyes began to water from an unblinking stare, he read a challenge written in her tight lips. Then she lay down on her side, eyes blank once more.

Before long Marshall moved away from the fire. He settled himself against the wall of the cave and whispered a song just under his breath. He sang just softly enough that Gabriel couldn’t hear the words, and just loudly enough that he couldn’t escape them. Gabriel looked down at the pistol before him, a tiny thing, inanimate although lit by moving firelight. He could still feel it in his hand, the coolness, the weight, the corrugated roughness of its handle. He didn’t pick it up, but neither did he move away from it.

The boy pushed a half-burned log further into the fire, slowly regaining his calm, easing his heart. His eyes fell on Dunlop, who lay on the other side of the fire, on his side, hands still tied behind his back. His head rested at an odd angle, as if he were relaxed in an awkward sleep, but his eyes met Gabriel’s as if they’d been waiting. He mouthed a word.

Gabriel craned forward, feeling the heat of the fire on his chin. The man repeated the word and added a few more. Gabriel shook his head. His eyes darted over to Marshall, but he was turned the other way. “What?” Gabriel whispered, but Dunlop still didn’t speak aloud. He watched the boy with a face of complete sorrow. It was sadder, Gabriel thought, than the face of a dying man. Dunlop nodded, as if he heard the boy’s thoughts. He turned away from the fire and curled into himself and spoke no more.

As Gabriel stretched out to sleep, he slid his hand over the derringer. He didn’t pick it up, but he cupped it within his palm, between his flesh and the sand, and slept holding it in partnership with the earth.

THE SCOT LED HIS HORSE AWAY in the quiet, dead hours of deep night. He held the reins twined tight in the fingers of his bound hands, taking small steps and placing his feet lightly on the earth. He asked the horse for silence, but the creature seemed to know already that this was called for. It made no noise but looked with round, anxious eyes back toward the sleeping men.

Thirty minutes later, the man found a ridge of rock about waist high. He led the horse beside it and asked it to stand still. He scrambled up unto the shelf. A second later, he was astride the horse. He gripped it with his knees and urged it forward. He did his best to head to the east, galloping across the flats and letting the horse pick its way through the chaparral groves. He spoke to his horse, asking it to help him have strength, telling it that he had feared for so long his head was clouded with the stuff and he couldn’t think straight. He asked it to help him think, to give him speed, and he promised it that this was not flight. That it could not be flight, because he had too many cords binding him to others, too many things incomplete.

He rode on through the dawn, hatless, his brown hair flapping with the breeze against him, up and down with the motion of the horse. His face was red in the sun’s light, stern, coppered by it as if he were made of that metal. Never before had the world looked so bleak to him, so crimson and aflame and pockmarked and lonely, so much like hell. He thought of things he hadn’t thought of in a long time, of family dead and buried, of days spent in another land, and of times when the burdens on his soul had been but the yearnings of a child. Those times seemed filled with sadness, and he wondered why he hadn’t realized it then.

He clucked to his horse and urged it to greater speed.

GABRIEL AWOKE TO A COMMOTION IN CAMP. Rollins was cursing and Dallas was looking around with sleepy eyes and Marshall was laughing. “That cheeky bastard,” he said. “Everybody up. We got us a runaway.”

The men sought out Dunlop’s tracks from where his horse had been staked and saw that he had led it away on foot, only mounting up about a mile away, with the help of a shelf of rock. It was obvious that he was still hand-tied. But it didn’t matter. He was away.

Marshall seemed more amused than angered by the whole thing. Dallas wanted to ride out immediately, but Marshall said it could wait a bit. Rollins said he didn’t give two shits what happened to Dunlop anymore. He figured he’d end up dead anyway, a hand-tied idjit out in the wilderness, maybe heading straight for a posse that was out to kill him. “To my mind, he’s as dead as if I shot him myself,” Rollins said.

Marshall heard him out but seemed less sure of Dunlop’s demise. He said he’d hired the Scot himself, and he didn’t hire fools. “But still. Some things can’t be helped. Dallas, that idea of yours about Hawaii’s sounding better by the minute.”

It had taken James the entire length of the conversation to process the most fundamental aspect of the news. “He’s gone?” He spoke through cracked lips, looking from one person to the next as if seeing them for the first time, checking each one to confirm what he’d thought he heard. “He’s gone?” His eyes settled on Gabriel. “Gabe, he gone and left us? He didn’t do that. Did he? He . . . He . . .” The boy struggled to his feet, a wide-eyed and crazed intensity suddenly taking him over. “He’s leaving us to die?”

Rollins strode over to him, saying, “Shut your mouth, boy. We got things to think about.” With one movement he kicked James’s legs from under him, sending him sprawling. He turned and resumed his conversation.

James was up in a second. Faster than Gabriel had ever seen him move, he ran toward the man’s receding back, jumped, and landed with his hands like claws in Rollins’s neck. He tore at the man’s flesh with his fingers, dug his heels into his sides, and pounded him with the full force of his body.

But only for a few seconds. Rollins spun with the boy on his back, grabbed him with one hand across his collar, and threw him to the ground with a force that completely knocked the air out of him. He lashed into the boy’s face with his boot, kicking like a man possessed as James writhed in a cloud of dust.

Gabriel rose to his feet unsteadily, for the first time able to grasp the possibility of his own death. It grew as suddenly within him as James’s anger had. If he had to watch this in order to live, life was not something he wanted anymore. Let him die and let this end. So he thought, and with this thought he asked his legs to carry him forward. But something happened before he’d even taken a step.

He didn’t see the girl move, but somehow she slipped like mercury into the whirlwind of violence. She placed herself between the man and the boy and looked up at Rollins with a defiance that gave the man pause. She yelled something at him in Spanish. Rollins backed away, but only long enough to draw. His gun appeared in his hand as if it had always been there, and he aimed it pointblank at the boy’s head and told the girl to get the hell out of the way or she’d die on the spot. Only then did Marshall caution him to stop.

“Why can’t I kill him? Kill them both, for fuck’s sake. Marshall, he done scratched my neck. Not to mention that he’s a damn fool nigger that never should’ve been with us in the first place and will probably get us killed.”

“One could say the same about you—the damn fool part, I mean,” Marshall replied. “Leave him for now, Rollins. Just do it, cause I said so. You already kicked the tar out of him, and it’s your fault the girl’s here in the first place.”

“And I wish we had never brought her. She ain’t even a decent fuck no more. She just lies there hating ya, looking away like yer not even doing it to her. Goddamn, she makes ya feel . . .”

“Dickless? Makes you feel like you ain’t even got a pecker and are no more a man than one of them Chihuahua rats is a dog? I know the feeling. And it’s a neat trick. But put your fucking gun away and let’s talk.”

Rollins did reholster his pistol, but he only managed to control his anger by venting it on an unburned log. He stamped the thing till it broke in half and then kicked one section of it till it rolled down the ravine and out of sight.

The girl helped Gabriel tend to James. His trembling face was bloody and smeared with dirt. Rollins’s boot had bruised and sliced the flesh open in several places, and the boy’s lip had been cut so deeply that blood ran down his chin. The girl said something to him in Spanish, got him to meet her eyes, and so convinced him to let his face be cleaned. She touched him gently, her bound hands still skillful enough to know the proper motions to clean his wounds best. Gabriel watched her, following the directions she gave with her eyes, fetching water when she asked, scrounging up a plate of food. Together they calmed James and made him eat. James’s eyes were wary, but beneath the girl’s care he grew less anxious than he’d been for some time.

Before long the men decided to damn Dunlop and just ride. Marshall ordered the boys and the girl to mount up, but he stopped Gabriel as he prepared to saddle his horse. He held him at arm’s length and stared him down. The boy held his gaze for as long as he could, then lowered it.

“You need to be tied too? I see you sulking and thinking and plotting things out. But you ain’t gonna give me any trouble, are you?”

Gabriel tried not to answer, but eventually he moved his head, a motion that might have been a nervous tic but that passed as a no.

“Good. You boys don’t need to give us no trouble. You all ride on with us like you’re doing and you’ll be rich men soon. You hear?” He shook Gabriel by the shoulder and moved his face into the boy’s line of vision. “Some of that gold’s yours. You can do with it what you want, but try and do us like Dunlop’s done, and you’re as dead as he is. Deader, I suppose. Where I come from, niggers die slower than whites and in a hell of a lot more pain. I’m a camel’s hair from shooting the whole lot of you and doing this on my own. Believe me.” He released the boy’s arm and called to the others to mount up.

THE MEXICAN SAW THE LONE HORSEMAN from a half-mile out. He stopped his men, and together they watched him. He asked the man beside him what he saw, and the man told him, confirming that his own eyes were not in error. He led his men forward slowly.

The horseman stood on a sandstone ridge as the Mexicans rode up. They paused before him. No greetings passed, but the men watched each other and waited.

You were with them?

The man answered that he was.

Have you come to me to die?

That was not my intention.

Were you part of their crime?

The man answered that he felt some guilt because he had been there and had been unable to stop them but that no, he had not taken part in the crime. He wished with all his heart that it had not happened, and he prayed for the family’s forgiveness.

The son cocked an eyebrow. He studied the man closely: his honest, sun-reddened face, the deep hurt in his blue eyes, the slope of his shoulders. He had not expected one of them to look like this.

Why are your hands tied?

The man told him. The others sat silent, looking between the stranger and their friend.

The son listened. He touched his mustache with his fingers, felt the give of the hairs against his skin.

You don’t know what happened, do you?

The son helped the bound man dismount from his horse. He sat with him on the ground a little distance from the others, who watched with mistrustful eyes. The son told him the truth of his family, of their fate, and the other man, the Scot, dropped his head and cried and tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. The son looked away and waited.

The Scot tried to find the words to share his grief over the other’s loss, but again words failed him. The son nodded, but he said, This thing that was done to my family was not God’s work. It was not in the plan of his universe. It was something that God had no hand in. Sometimes man forgets himself and thinks he is God, but he is not, and nothing good can come of this. Sometimes the acts of man rip open wounds in the world that cry to be healed but that can’t be. Perhaps they can only be bandaged. Maybe not even that.

But you’ll try?

I will. What would I be if I didn’t?

They were silent for some time. The horses nearby cropped the grass. The men watched them and watched the horizon and smoked. Eventually the son rose and pulled a knife from his boot. He asked the Scot about his missing sister; the man told what he knew. The son breathed in the news, closed his eyes for a second to control it, then knelt and cut the ropes that bound the man’s hands.

Go with God.

He met the man’s eyes and studied them, checking once more that he was not making an error, then he turned and signaled with his hand for the others to mount up. They did so, although they cast glances at the young man and seemed to think that all was not as it should be.

The son was astride his horse and had turned it to the west before the Scot called to him. He turned. The Scot asked his question. The Mexican nodded his answer and waited as the other mounted up.

THE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED IN A BLUR OF MOTION that halted only late in the evenings. They’d come into a high, dry land, baked by the unrelenting Arizona sun, through which only the barren ghosts of rivers ran. Water had grown increasingly scarce for some time, but now they found themselves eating up miles of desert without the slightest sign of moisture. The horses had little forage. They all showed signs of fatigue. The girl’s gelding walked with tender-footed steps, and Rollins’s black mare grew too weak to ride. She was let loose in the wilderness, and Rollins mounted the spare horse taken from the Mexicans. He rode away without a backward glance. The horse watched them go, seemed for a moment to consider following, and then decided against it.

Early that evening the group shared a few cans of tomatoes, their juice more delicious than Gabriel had ever imagined. His share was so small, however, that when they finally stopped, just after midnight, he sat with a dry mouth, sucking what moisture he could from the grease of bacon fat. The men had grown increasingly surly and taciturn. Rollins complained of a “stomping” headache. Dallas was a silent ghost of his normal self, although this had only partially to do with his fatigue and dehydration. Marshall had found out that Dallas had dumped some of their tinned tomatoes back at the Mexican homestead so he could use the space for mescal. He’d hit the boy hard enough to lay him out, then threatened to make him drink the foul liquid till he puked the stuff up and then make him drink it again.

None of the men showed any interest in the girl, and neither did they stop her from sitting with James and Gabriel, the only two with whom she voluntarily shared space. Once the men were all asleep, she roused the two boys, produced a tin of tomatoes, and shared it with them. She made sure that each drank slowly, and made it clear through gestures that James should let the moisture soothe his lips.

Gabriel thanked her, the first words he had actually spoken to her, but she shook away his thanks and hid the empty can. She slept between the two boys, again speaking with gestures that made it clear she would do so as long as neither of them touched her. They didn’t, but as the night grew cool Gabriel swore he could feel heat coming off her body. He looked at her outline in the starlight and felt something for her that was not desire, something that was deeper, as if he saw in her all that he had ever seen of things kind, of things beautiful and feminine, and of God and mother. He felt no desire, save for the bone-deep longing for the world to be set right once more.

THE ENTIRETY OF THE NEXT DAY WAS SPENT EXPLORING a canyon that roughly followed their course west. The group dropped down into it with the hope of finding the stream that had carved it. But they found a dry creekbed choked with house-sized boulders. For much of the way the canyon was so narrow and jumbled that they couldn’t even ride their horses but had to lead them instead. They climbed out of the canyon around dusk, seared and hollow versions of the people they had been that morning. The horses hung their heads low and sniffed the soil for moisture and shook their heads at the folly that had brought them here. James’s horse threw a shoe coming out of the canyon. Gabriel had to hold her hind leg cupped in his armpit as Rollins chiseled away at the horse’s hoof wall and then banged a new shoe in place with a fury that seemed a punishment. Dallas’s pony watched the procedure, then stamped the ground with her right hoof as if demanding an end to this madness that very instant. But it didn’t end.

That night the three adolescents again shared the evening’s space. Again the girl made it clear she was not to be touched, and again she produced a can of tomatoes and shared it equally among them. James broke down crying as she fed him, the tears slowly progressing down his cheeks and into the corners of his lips. The girl smiled when she saw this and said something to him that she found humorous. But later she whispered to calm him, words of no lullaby and words that neither boy could understand but that brought some semblance of peace nonetheless.

AROUND NOON THE NEXT DAY they came upon three bowls carved by nature into a large, bare shelf of rock. They were each a couple of yards in diameter, a couple of feet in depth, and half filled with green, putrid water. The men thanked God and Satan both and drank it down like animals. They calmed the horses and let them cool off and allowed them to drink slowly. Once their canteens were full and each of them had drunk all he could take in, the men set out to destroy the water source. Dallas splashed around in the bowls, kicking the water into the wind, spraying it out across the parched granite and so exposing it to the heat of the sun. Before he left, he wrote his name in urine. They rode on, Dallas spitting into the wind and challenging their pursuers to follow them now to their own parched deaths.

That evening the girl indicated that she had no more tomatoes. She lay down as on the previous nights and Gabriel felt the closeness of her once more. As she whispered between the two boys, Gabriel stared out at the firmament, a canopy of stars brighter now than he’d ever seen before. Before long James fell asleep, his breathing a dry rasp that was painful just to listen to. Gabriel tried to listen to the girl instead and was surprised to discover that she’d begun to speak in English. The shock of it lasted only a second. He realized he’d always known she could understand them. Of course she could.

At first her whispers seemed strewn together in a meaningless string of recognizable words. It was only gradually that Gabriel began to understand her fully. She was telling them goodbye. She said that she believed in them, that she understood them. She said that they both wore their hearts on their faces and that their hearts were good. “I know that you are afraid and that you are good. You thank me for helping your friend, but it is not him I help. It is me. I help my soul. You must do the same. I help him now, yes, but when my time comes, I will go and not look back. You should do the same.” She paused and lay still for some time. “You have a gun. One day . . . use it.”

Gabriel turned over and looked at her. “I’m sorry . . . for what they did to you.”

But the girl shook off his sorrow. She motioned with her hand that she didn’t need this from him, then she stretched out a thin finger and touched his chest. “Your name is Gabriel, yes?” The boy nodded. “Then don’t forget who you’re named after. I have the name of the first woman that God created. Understand? They are the ones who will be sorry. They will all die.”

Gabriel began to say something else, but she silenced him with a finger. She touched it to his lips. “Sleep. My brother comes for me tomorrow. Rest, Gabriel.”

THE NEXT AFTERNOON THEY DESCENDED through a pass in the hills and rode out across a wide plateau of scoured land that stretched for miles in each direction. It was already late in the day. The sky to the north had darkened with ominous roils of gray clouds that seethed southward with a Biblical bulk. There was a wavering line of darkness on the land far ahead, perhaps twenty miles or so, which Gabriel knew to be a river. Beyond that the land stretched out in all its barrenness to the horizon, where there was only the faintest yellow hint of more mountains. Gabriel knew that once out on that flat expanse, they’d be in clear view through a full day of riding. If he knew this, the others must too. But none commented or even slowed their horses. They rode into this new terrain in silence.

Two hours later they caught their first glimpse of their trackers, and for the first time the whole group understood the reality of their situation. The trackers were no myth of Caleb’s, nor were they their own fears, no phantoms haunting their conscience. They were a band of twelve, riding down into the basin and across the plateau like a military phalanx. There was something uncanny in their progress. They took chunks out of the land with each passing minute, as if mounted on ever-fresh horses. They rode with bold and undisguised vigor, like preordained missionaries who did not fear their own death for the glory of their cause and were propelled onward to destiny with a knowledge unknown to the heathen. As they came on, so did the clouds, laying a blanket of darkness across the plains and bringing with them deep rolls of thunder as if the belly of the earth were hungry.

“For fuck’s sake!” Rollins said. “Can you believe this? Who the hell are they?”

Marshall wheeled his horse and studied them, bringing the group to a sudden halt. “They ain’t Texans, that’s for sure. No Texan has that kind of religion.” He spat, then looked down at the circle in the dust as if he regretted it. “Tell you what. Let’s give them the girl. If it’s her they’re after, maybe that’ll satisfy them.”

“And if they ain’t after her?” Dallas asked.

“Maybe she’ll satisfy them anyway. Leastways, distract them a bit.” He turned and looked at the girl. “It was a pleasure, miss. Consider yourself free to go. I think we’ll be doing the same. Let’s go. And that means you too, boys. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to meet up with that bunch anyway. Off we go.” He spurred his horse forward a few steps. The others started forward as well, but paused when Marshall did. He turned his eyes hard on the boys. “Come on.”

Gabriel’s and James’s horses whinnied and moved forward a few steps, but still the boys didn’t ride. Gabriel met the girl’s eyes. She was calm, calmer now than ever. She sat almost serenely in the saddle, as wind whipped her garments about her and the clouds billowed. She held the hair that was blowing about her face with one hand and gestured with the other, a motion somewhere between a dismissal and an absolution.

“Go. I cannot say they wouldn’t kill you.”

Marshall looked at her wide-eyed. He cracked a smile and said, “I’ll be damned. But you heard her, boys. They got killing on the mind. Let’s not make it too easy for them.” A moment later he was off, the others fast behind him.

“Go,” she repeated.

This time the boys did as she instructed. Gabriel looked back often as he galloped. The girl never changed her position. She sat on the horse, growing smaller with distance, waiting.

The boys caught up with the group when they paused to study a canyon. It began as a small depression in the plateau but soon narrowed and deepened and dropped out of sight. They rode along its rim for another half-mile, then came abruptly to the river that Gabriel had seen from the hills. But it was not as he imagined. It was not a river to be forded but a canyon that dropped down a hundred feet or more, with sheer sandstone walls that dizzied Gabriel with their muted colors and fine, wavering designs.

Caleb rode out to the left, paused and studied the canyon, and returned. He believed there was no way across and would be none for many miles. They could ride along the rim and hope that somehow this would lead them to something before the horses died of thirst. Or they could drop down into the canyon via the smaller one they’d ridden past. If they were held up there, they could fight, perhaps, or find some route out.

Marshall looked from one to the other among the group, his eyes for once not full of answers. There was a quivering tension in his face, and he cast his vote for the canyon. For Gabriel, the smell of fear from Marshall was more frightening even than the sight of the riders behind them.

As the storm broke and rain fell from the sky in quarter-sized drops, the group dropped down into the canyon. They had to dismount and lead their horses, cooing to them and humming and trying to keep them calm as they skittered and fought for footing. The men slipped and bashed their shins on the loose flakes of stone, and lightning lit the sky and thunder rolled across the prairie like someone tossing out a blanket of stones. Gabriel could barely keep his footing. His horse supported him as he dangled and stumbled at the end of its reins and followed him down out of a sense of obligation that had nothing in common with its own wishes.

Soon the descent eased to a more gradual slope, but as it did, the walls on either side grew higher, narrow and carved by the workings of water into smooth organic shapes, so it seemed as if they were descending into a living creature. The walls played tricks with the already mysterious flashes of light, each bolt creating around them a moving landscape of contours. The horses didn’t like it. James’s horse began to buck. Gabriel saw it in brilliant, electric detail, the horse dancing from side to side, fighting against the walls, then kicking out behind it and lunging forward. The canyon darkened for a long moment of commotion, and when Gabriel could see again, James’s horse was gone, having somehow bolted past the boy and pushed through the line ahead. James rose from the ground, sore, groaning, and cursing. He set out after the horse.

Feeling as though he were alone for a moment, Gabriel turned and looked past his own horse. Caleb stood only a few feet away, watching him, with his horse so close behind him that the creature’s muzzle nearly rested on his shoulder. Gabriel moved forward again. A few hundred yards in and the walls gradually widened, enough that they could walk two abreast. The rain still fell steadily, and Gabriel noticed for the first time the water through which he sloshed. It was only ankle deep, but it rushed by him in a stream that seemed to increase in volume even as he watched. It was as if the earth, parched for so long beneath the sun, had forgotten how to absorb the moisture and was trying to shed it instead. He stumbled through it with careless feet, kicking them forward and trusting his boots to find their footing of their own accord.

Then they reached a dead end. The walls around them curved into a sort of bowl, twenty feet wide, facing a branch of the river, which rolled by in swirls of boiling current, mud-laden and brown like the walls around them. It seemed a different form of the same substance: rock turned to water, sand to flowing current. The horses shied and brushed against each other and looked around with wild eyes. The men let loose their headstalls and the horses bent to drink, only in this activity finding a moment of calm.

Dallas scrambled back up the canyon to keep lookout, and the men huddled in the rain and tried to think. None of them stated it, but they seemed of a single mind on one point. They had no wish to do battle with those twelve, not here, not like this, not with the rain pelting them and the horses wild and their hearts trembling with a terror they couldn’t fully name. James stood close to the others, his eyes hard on each of the men as they spoke. He seemed to have forgotten his fear of these men and his loathing for their deeds. For a moment, he was united with them by a greater fear. Gabriel stood a little away from the others, watching the horses, the current of the river before them, and the walls of the canyon up to their brim, above which the sky had darkened almost to night. He thought of the girl as he’d last seen her. From where did her serenity come?

Dallas returned at a dead run, stumbling and tripping, moving forward more like a rolling boulder than a two-legged creature. “They’re coming,” he cried. The men were in motion instantly. They moved toward the horses, and as they did so, a clap of thunder brought its hand down on the canyon, sending a jarring rumble of echoes through the place. The horses grew frantic. One reached for another with its teeth; two others passed a few blurred seconds exchanging kicks. The men tried to separate them, to soothe them so that they could be ridden. But in the end Marshall yelled to just grab a horse and mount up, damn it, or die here. He was on a horse the next second, apparently having jumped from the ground and landed dead in the saddle.

In the flickering light, Gabriel watched him spur the horse into the water. The horse fought and neighed and would have balked, but Marshall’s will was stronger. Horse and man entered the water, sank into it, and were swept away. Gabriel stood without moving, and it was only by accident that he caught a horse. The creature was running past him, up the canyon, and its reins brushed his hand. He grabbed them. The horse stopped, and Gabriel mounted. He watched Dallas and Rollins go into the water, and it was only then, as they were swept downstream, that he knew what he could do.

As James entered the river, Gabriel felt a sudden desire to yell to him, to call him back. He didn’t have the plan formulated clearly in his mind. It was only a vague notion of a possibility, and he needed extra seconds to think. But James’s mount kicked free of the shore. The boy turned and shot a glance back over his shoulder. Gabriel didn’t move. He met James’s eyes, but he didn’t beckon. He didn’t call to him. He didn’t gesture. It was too late for any of these things. He simply met his eyes and watched him slip away.

Caleb followed James’s gaze back to Gabriel. It was just a momentary glimpse, and the next second he was in the current and moving. Gabriel almost followed, so strong had the touch of the man’s eyes been, but when he heard a sound behind him he found his resolve once more. He moved the horse to the water, talking to it, asking for its strength and for its faith in him, and also calling silently to James to forgive him. They entered the water, and he turned the horse upstream.

At first Gabriel had to fight to keep the horse pointed into the current. It tried every few seconds to turn, but he yanked it back on course each time. To his surprise, the horse found some footing. It strove forward a few good strides, water billowing off its chest, then it fell into deeper water. Gabriel shot glances behind him but could see nothing. It seemed they had already put a cornice of stone between him and the beach, although he scarcely thought this was possible.

His attention was drawn back to the horse as he almost pitched from the saddle. The creature had swum into a swirling eddy that sent the confused horse and boy circling in a strange flow of gurgling, recirculating water. Gabriel felt the horse fighting panic beneath him, trying desperately to sort out the currents and make sense of it all. In a moment between swells, it slipped forward again and crossed the main current. Gabriel thought for a moment that all was lost and that the horse was retreating. But the creature never turned the side of its body to the current. Instead, it ferried across the current at a slight angle, touched land, and a second later was up on a shore that Gabriel hadn’t even noticed.

The horse didn’t await further command. It bounded up a shallow wash, paused, and went on, slipping where it got steeper. Gabriel pitched forward in the saddle. The horn twisted into his abdomen, and as he called out in pain, he fell from the saddle, his foot tangled in the stirrup and his body dangerously close to the horse’s frantic hooves. He rolled away, sprang to his feet, and was back with the horse in a second. He tried to stroke its muzzle, but the horse snapped its head up and bared its teeth. Gabriel gave it the full length of the reins and then led it forward until the ground sloped more gradually. He mounted again, and the horse pushed forward in a frantic set of strides.

Horse and boy burst into the open air of the prairie like creatures expelled from the earth by force. The horse paused, shocked by the sudden change. For a second, Gabriel thought that all was silence, but then he realized it was just the opposite—all was sound, the steady beating of the rain on the earth, of the wind across it. He shot a glance behind him but wasn’t even sure he could see the wash through which they had traveled. He was sure of one thing: there was not a living person left on God’s earth, not a living creature to be seen at all, save for the horse and himself.

A sputter of sheet lightning afforded a quick illumination of the land. Under its light, the boy realized for the first time why he’d felt so little control over the horse. It wasn’t his horse. He looked down on the long silver withers and sharp ears of Marshall’s dun. He spurred her forward and was off, fighting through motion the deep sense of foreboding that this realization left within him.