Part 4

FOR THE FIRST HALF-MILE THEY CLUNG TO THEIR EXhausted horses with little semblance of control. They bobbed and swirled with the current, both men and horses fighting to keep their heads above the waves. The torrent pushed them onward. The walls rushed past on either side, adding to the chaos of speed and amplifying the roar of the river, which was now the only sound save for the muffled shouts of one man to another.

The blond man held the lead by a good forty yards. His eyes were riveted downstream, but he realized too late that the flood of water in which they flowed was not this river’s main stem. He saw the sky open before him, and as he rose on the crest of a wave, he saw the junction of the two currents, this one and the larger one it fed. When the rivers merged, the two currents tore into each other. Both he and his horse were sucked under. He felt the horse slip away from him, though he tried with all his strength to hold the reins. The current was a hand that pushed him down and twisted his limbs and rolled him over. It held him down long enough that he feared for his life, and then thrust him up to the surface. He turned and would have shouted to the rest, but he spat water instead of words.

Each of the others hit the boil line and overturned just as quickly. Feet and hooves gashed the air, and then all went under. They were tumbled about like straw figures and came up gasping and as white as their skin tones would allow. The large man breached the surface with both hands raised above him as in supplication to God; the young man lashed out toward the air and broke into it cursing; the thin-chested black boy came up stroking toward one shore with all his might; the dark man in the rear only lost his horse for the space of a few seconds. Alone of them all, he seemed to find purchase on top of the water.

The horses swam for shore, but the current was swifter now and even more chaotic. The black horse reached a sieve of boulders and tried to mount them. It scrabbled against the stone with its shins but could find no footing. The water pushed against it, and its body buckled between two rocks and stuck fast. Another horse, the glossy-hued sorrel, scrambled onto a shelf of rock, but it was so crazed that it ran into the wall and slipped. Its hind legs twisted, and it came down against the edge of the shelf with a force that broke its back.

Having witnessed most of this, the blond man turned his gaze back downstream. He breathed deeply, and rode impassively through a train of twenty-foot waves, finding a rhythm within them and breathing each time he broke the surface, resting when he went under. Breathing and resting. So he rode them out. A half-mile further down, he crossed an eddy line. He swirled downward, but once more the depths found him distasteful. When he breathed again, it was in quiet water behind a jutting shelf of rock. He pulled himself halfway out of the river and collapsed. The black man and his horse joined him sometime later. They sat beside him and shared the dripping night in silence.

Neither of them knew the fate of the other three. They didn’t see them swim around the bend and onward. The young man made it to shore by the sheer force of his cursing efforts. The other white man tried but could gain no control of his squat body. His long arms lashed out in a chaos of motion, and in the end he simply watched with wide eyes as he slid down a flume of water and into a wall of foaming backwash. It hit him in the face with a force beyond anything he would have thought possible. The down-rushing current flipped him over and pushed him to the bottom of the river. When he surfaced, he was blue and nearly dead and so exhausted he could not move his limbs. It wouldn’t have helped if he could. He came up in water bubbling upstream. He was pushed back into the same flume. When he next hit the surface, he didn’t try to breathe but only looked at the sky for a few seconds. The current pushed him down and let him up again and again, like a rag doll, like a toy meant to look human but that had never had, and would never have, a beating heart.

It was the black boy who swam the farthest. He slid along the canyon wall, his fingers searching vainly for a hold. He had just about given up in body and mind when the river calmed into a long pool of slow-moving water. He floated on his back, buoyant now that he’d stopped fighting. The evening’s light dimmed; the clouds above him rolled on and spent their fury. He cried. Finally, after so many days under the weight of his own mind, he floated free of it. He felt himself wrapped within a deep, somber embrace that was beyond reason or conscious thought but was emotion wrung to its core, to its length and breadth, and left exhausted.

It was strange, he thought, floating like this, letting go like this. Strange that everything now seemed so clear. Stars appeared, and the boy watched the dancing play of their light across the river’s surface. He found a beauty in this that was akin to no portion of his soul. He knew now that he would not swim for shore. He thought of his friend and almost formed his name on his lips. If his friend could only feel what he now felt coming . . . If he could only know what it feels like to swim into the heavens.

GABRIEL RODE AT A GALLOP as long as the light held. He slowed to a canter when he could no longer see the land before him or make any sense of directions, then eventually eased into a dull, halting plod. He could barely make out the highlights that were the horse’s gray ears, and he could feel the animal’s fatigue in her labored breathing and reluctant steps. But he wouldn’t let her stop. All he thought of was movement. It seemed the only thing that could save him, and he rode the entire night, his eyes open and his mind alert. More than once he believed he heard pursuers. More than once he asked the horse to tread less heavily on the ground and to keep to herself her complaints and neighs.

By morning he had put fifteen miles between himself and the others. As the sun rose, he realized he’d crossed the great bowl and risen into a rugged, rust-colored wilderness of decaying hills and cacti. He was amazed that the horse had managed to pick her way through the thorny landscape, but he didn’t pause to commend the creature. He didn’t trust the distance. He didn’t trust his own eyes. The coast was clear, not a soul to be seen, yet still, each time he turned his gaze forward, he felt riders at his back—which ones, why, and with what motive didn’t matter. He must flee them all.

He kept it up all day, pausing only to water the horse at another fork of the Colorado River, a shallow canyon that proved not difficult to cross. The horse would have stayed by its waters, but Gabriel pushed her on. The afternoon took them into a landscape dotted with buttes and strewn with rocks. Water pooled in sulfurous depressions that made their progress a winding, uncertain one. The air was a rank substance, thick in the nostrils and more like a liquid than the thin gas it was meant to be. It attacked the boy’s eyes and stung the back of his throat. But he pushed on, forgetting the land behind him and not even pausing to consider the land to come.

Gabriel remembered late in the afternoon that a horse could be ridden to death. He dismounted, suddenly aware that the creature had been pushed to the limit of her endurance and teetered at the edge of oblivion. She walked delicately on her left forehoof, and judging by the way she shook her head, she seemed to have trouble seeing. Gabriel led her on patiently, slowly, and yet unrelentingly. He wished her to live, but life meant movement.

The two camped that evening beside a shallow creek that held water only in stagnant pools between the rocks. It took Gabriel some time to find an opening deep enough to scoop up water with his hands. His fingers stirred up muck from the rocks, but he drank anyway, till he was bloated and exhausted from the effort of it. Only then, lying on his back and staring into the sky of early evening, with the horse still lapping at the water a few feet away, did he pause long enough to wonder what had happened to the others. Yes, he’d seen them drive their horses into a raging river. He’d seen the phalanx of riders closing in behind them, he’d felt the palpable fear in each man, and he’d cringed beneath the pressure of the downpour that sought to drown them all where they stood. But what had happened next? It seemed impossible that they could live through the moments to follow, and yet he could believe only so much as he’d seen. And he hadn’t seen Marshall die, or Caleb. Those two might never die, at least not through an act of man.

Nonetheless, he believed quite completely that James was now dead. It had been written on his face for some time. He saw James’s face before him with a clarity beyond that of the actual moment, and he asked himself questions whose answers he already knew by heart. Had his eyes really been so torn by betrayal? Had he been so painfully aware of all that came before and all that would come to him in the next few moments? Was it death written there?

The horse raised its head and exhaled a long breath. Gabriel knew the creature was still saddled and waited to be tended to. But still he didn’t rise. It seemed too great an action beneath the weight of the stars. He remembered once hearing a tale in which stars were the souls of men after death and the earliest stars to appear were the most recently passed. Looking at them now, he could believe this to be so. His eyes followed the appearance of one star, then another, the faint trace of a third, then a bloom in which the purple velvet of the night seemed alive with points of light. So many souls. He said a prayer for them all, knowing with a certainty beyond reason that one of those points was the soul of his companion.

He didn’t fully mourn that night, but he knew he would someday. That night, the future lay before him like an enormous question, a puzzle that he looked at from a distance that grew greater and greater as his fatigue overcame him. When he finally slept, he did so with a stony heaviness that was broken neither by the calls of the coyotes that swarmed around him to drink at the pool nor by the enormous rush of sound and movement that was the awakening of desert bats. They surged up from a cave mouth less than a half-mile from where he slept, circled in ascending spirals of thousands upon thousands of separate beings, then shot into the night air in a fury of hunger. When he rose the next morning, he would feel that during his sleep he had traveled very far in the company of a great host of beings.

THEY FOUND THE WHITE BOY SITTING on a rock at the edge of the water, shirtless, weaponless, horseless, and dejected. He turned as they approached. He spat.

Well, shit, if this ain’t just perfect. You hombres know where a man can get a shirt around here?

The men didn’t speak to him, other than to have him rise and climb out of the canyon at gunpoint.

Didn’t figure you did.

The trek out took three hours. At the rim, the boy looked back down upon the river. Damn. He let his eyes follow its course as it meandered away in a bizarre, circuitous route, the canyon walls layering in on each other in dozens of colors and shapes, growing deeper with the passing miles and so stretching to the horizon like a disease eating into the land. The men prodded him to movement.

They walked another twenty minutes before they came to a simple camp. The son was there. He rose when he saw the boy and set down his coffee and walked to him. The son’s face had aged in the past week. Lines furrowed his forehead, and the weight of mourning sat at the back of his eyes. His lips were parched and peeling. He touched them before he spoke.

Were you party to the murder of Diego Maria Fuentes?

Who?

My father. Mi padre y mi familia. Did you kill them?

Hell, no, I didn’t kill nobody.

The son asked him who did, but the boy said he had no goddamn idea. The man did not believe him. The other men beat the boy for several minutes, and the man asked him again. He still had no goddamn idea, but he figured it might have been the nigger.

He’s a murdering son of bitch if ever there was one. I ain’t had nothing to do with that, though.

You believe it was the Negro?

The boy told him yes. He named the man and called him a stinking nigger.

Now can I go? He’s probably dead down in that canyon anyhow.

The son asked him if he had defiled the girl along with the others. The boy was slow in answering. He said that he might’ve had a little poke but that it wasn’t what the man thought.

The girl liked it when I did it to her. It was that hairy son of a bitch and the nigger that she didn’t like. I always gave it to her gentle-like. Don’t tell me you ain’t never done the same.

But the son gave a signal, and one of the men knocked the boy unconscious with the butt of his rifle. When the boy awoke, it was to a stinging pain in his groin. His head heaved, and the world seemed skewed, and before he was conscious of anything else he was conscious of his own nudity. He was tied down on the desert floor, with his arms and legs pulled taut toward the world’s four quarters by horsehair ropes that bit into his skin. The ropes were held in place by boulders, on each of which a Mexican sat watching. Between his legs was the conspicuous mound of an anthill. It was these creatures that had begun to attack the flesh between his legs.

The boy screamed out, first with pain, then with curses, then with pleas for mercy. He twisted and yanked at the ropes and thrashed his legs, but it was no use. He asked if he was to die this way, and they told him yes. He asked how long it would take, and they told him only a day or two. They watched him with cold black eyes, and not one of them seemed to feel the boy’s pain, or care. They looked at him, then off at the horizon, with the indifference of men who had seen much worse. Two of them smoked; one bit his nails and spat the splinters to the wind.

The insects rose from the mound in great numbers, but they went to their work with a single mind, their pincers slicing into his flesh like the knives of so many whalers into a huge beast. The boy lay back, writhing in pain. He begged, but none moved; he cried, but none even flinched; he cursed, but the men only watched. Only when he whispered a woman’s name did the son decide it was enough. He rode up to him and, from horseback, placed the barrels of his shotgun on the right portion of the boy’s chest. The boy was silenced with one blast, and mercy was awarded. The other men looked at the son, but the son turned without comment. He caught sight of the Scot and the girl coming toward them and rode out to intercept them.

WHEN GABRIEL AWOKE FROM HIS FIRST LONG SLEEP, it was midday and the horse was nowhere to be found. The boy viewed this fact with quiet eyes and set out to find her. As she had made no attempt to conceal her movements, he soon found her settled down in the shade of a large boulder. The horse registered the boy’s presence with a nicker, then slowly rose and came out of the shade to greet him, clanking and sore beneath the saddle.

Gabriel apologized to her silently for the mistreatment, then thought again and spoke aloud. The horse’s ears pricked up. She eyed the boy, then turned broadside to him and stood as he unfastened the saddle and its accounterments. The saddlebags were heavier than he’d anticipated. He dropped the first one hard on his toe. He laid them out on the ground and sorted through the supplies provided to him by providence—or accident, he wasn’t sure which. There were ample matches, a large sack of flour, half a block of bacon, a lump of lard, several twists of tobacco, and a frying pan lid. No pan was to be found, but Gabriel only half registered this fact. His attention was drawn to a jar of preserves, a rich, sugary jam of a fruit similar to strawberries but somehow different. He ate it straight from the jar, shoveling it into his mouth with his fingers and soon feeling an exhilarated lightheadedness. He let the horse lick his fingers.

Marshall’s Winchester was still loaded and heavy. Gabriel studied it carefully, afraid to shift any of its levers or to fire it but staring at each section of the thing as if its function could be divined through sight alone. He set it away from the rest of the supplies. He did likewise with the two Smith and Wesson thirty-two-caliber revolvers, along with the cartridges for both makes of weapon and even his tiny derringer.

Only after his arsenal had been so displayed did the boy turn his attention to the remaining sack. He slipped the gold brick out of it carefully, cradling its soft, dense weight with all the care he’d give an infant. He set it down, remembering how it had once looked like a coffin. It didn’t look so anymore. Coffins were for beings who had given up their lives and so moved on. But this square of gold was not of the same make at all. It had never lived, never breathed. It was simply a bit of metal that, through no fault of its own, drove men to acts of passion. What should he do with it? What could he do with it? He stood above the display trying to think it out, to answer the question right there and have it over with. But no option that he mulled over seemed quite right. It made no sense to leave it where it lay, or to hide it, or to give it away, or to take it home and fall prey to the dreams and schemes such things lead men to. Men like Marshall . . .

The thought sent chills through the boy. He looked anxiously around him, for fear that his thoughts might instantly become reality. Then he packed hastily. Because he could not answer his own questions, he would try to conquer them through motion. He would ride; he would walk if the horse was tired; he would keep up a steady movement for as long as it took to find his way home. He threw the saddle over one shoulder and carried the bags dangling from his other arm. As he led the horse away, Gabriel had the feeling that he was just now beginning his real journey.

FOR THREE DAYS THE MEXICAN, his companions, and the Scot patrolled the rim of the canyon. They ranged down its edge some thirty miles, stationed at different points, searching for signs of the living or the dead. They spotted the bodies of two horses, one floating in a section of flat water twenty miles downstream, another where the waters of the storm receded, wedged between several rocks, its legs splayed out in bizarre directions. It looked like thrown-together pieces of a horse. Its muzzle pointed up toward the canyon walls, so that the man who found it thought the creature was looking at him. They found a few pieces of debris, some saddlebags, and a waterskin.

It wasn’t until the second day, at the full extension of their search, that they found the black boy. He had washed ashore on a narrow strip of beach lining a sheer cliff face. To get to him, the Scot led several of the men down a ravine and into the river upstream of the body. They floated a quarter-mile down to him in the slack water. The boy was lying face down, and the Scot rolled him over most gently. The boy’s eyes were closed, something remarked upon by one of the men. His clothes were all in order except for his boots, which had been sucked off by the current. The Scot probed various portions of his body, as if he might find the source of the injury that ailed the boy, but there was none. His body was completely intact, whole and undamaged. He was simply dead. They considered the trek back to the rim with this dead one carried between them, and as it scarcely seemed possible, they agreed to bury him where he lay. The one who knew the proper words spoke only Spanish. The Scot shrugged and asked him to proceed, and the man did, intoning solemn foreign words that the Scot couldn’t understand but that he trusted would lead the boy to heaven as surely as any others.

In the evenings the son sat with his sister. They talked little about what had happened. They spoke as if they were not sitting on a bowled scoop of the high desert, as if they had not lost the things they had lost and not seen the things they had seen. Only once did the brother speak to his sister of the future they must now share. He said he didn’t see it yet, didn’t understand how there could be such a thing, although he knew there must be, because the world did not stop to notice the pain of any one person, no matter how deep it was. He promised her that they would find a way, a path in life that would honor those they’d left behind. He promised her that one day she would be whole again and he would be whole again. Everything that was Papi lives on in us, everything that was Mama and that was Cristina. They all live on in us. The girl nodded and said that she believed this. Perhaps more even than you do, she said.

Late on the third day, the son thanked the men for their help. He called them brothers now and forever and praised their bravery and let them know that he would lay down his life for theirs at a moment’s notice. Then he told them to go home. It was over. They drank together that evening, although they did so with the most somber reverence. The son’s first companion asked what he would do, and the son said he would stay away a few more days; he needed the solitude if he was to find a reason to live on. He confessed to this one that it was not as he’d told his sister. He did not believe his own words. I should have killed them with my own hands. I should have eaten their hearts and dragged them into hell by their entrails.

The companion offered to stay with him, but the son would not let him. The next morning the men rode home, taking the girl with them. The son watched them to the eastern horizon, then mounted his horse and sat. The Scot had stayed as well, saying that he too needed solitude to find a future. He sat on a rock. The son thanked him for all he had done and called him a brother like the others and assured him that his guilt had vanished as his heart was good. He bade the man to go once more with God, and with that he moved off. He gave his horse no direction but let it graze where it would. As there was little that could be thought of as food, the horse wandered upstream. The man eventually dismounted and followed behind the horse, like a shepherd with a flock of one.

He spent the day like this, and it was in this way that he came upon the narrow ravine upriver from where the fugitives had entered, beyond the area searched by his men. It was little more than a crack in the earth, and it stretched down toward the river at such a sharp angle that he doubted the possibility of the tracks he saw within it. But they were there. He saw where the tracks ascended, where they reached the surface, and how the lone horse had risen out of the earth. He saw that it had pawed the ground and twisted in a half-circle. And then he saw it move off to the north. He followed the tracks to the horizon. He asked for God’s presence, and then he whistled for his horse.

He found the Scot sitting in the same place he had left him, in the same posture. I think this is not over, he said.

The Scot looked up at him and searched his features for the meaning behind his words. He found it. He rose.

Good. It didn’t feel quite like it was.

GABRIEL HAD LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GEOGRAPHY of the western portions of his country. He simply knew that with the men he had traveled south to Texas and then west through the New Mexico territory and into Arizona, all the way to the river canyon where he’d made his escape. As he would not retrace that route, his course seemed obvious. First north, then east. Somehow, he hoped, that simple elbow of direction would lead him home. It would, but it would also take him over territory he had never conceived of before.

For the first few days on his own, Gabriel headed to the north-east through a landscape that he’d become familiar with over the recent weeks. He intersected once more with a main stem of the Colorado River and followed its scarred banks. When the river forked off either due east or in a more northerly direction, Gabriel opted for the east, feeling comforted by the notion that he was moving closer to the rising sun with each step. It was a deserted country, nowhere marked by boundary or fence line, roadless and empty save for the animal life, for birds, for shad-scale, sagebrush, and the wind in all of its various moods.

Through the days of silent travel he developed a routine, a discipline almost, enforced by nobody but himself and therefore that much more natural. He tried to eat frugally. In the mornings, he collected the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, as he’d seen Dunlop do once. He skinned each one carefully and took small bites of it, finding it sweet and good, although it stained his fingertips a deep maroon and left a strange sensation in his mouth, the unshakable feeling that his gums and tongue were being stuck by tiny pins. At midday he’d pause long enough to roll a cigarette and sit with one leg thrown over the horn of his saddle, inhaling the smoke and taking in the country. He’d never smoked before, but now, with his solitude close around him, it seemed a natural thing to do. He made only the smallest of fires in the evenings. Huddled beside it, with the horse just a few steps away, he fried strips of bacon and baked bread, a hard, greasy loaf shaped decidedly like the frying pan lid. He followed this with coffee, an oily syrup that he drank straight from the all-purpose lid. It was a foul mixture, and yet somehow it seemed right, just the stuff to fill his stomach and fuel his imaginings as he stared up at the night sky.

His mind during the first few nights was uneasy, anxious, barely able to dream of the future, alert to any noise not of his own making. A tumble of rolling stones, the crackle of dry brush on the ground, an unexpected movement behind a greasewood plant: all these sent adrenaline reeling through his body. It wasn’t any natural creature that he feared. He’d learned to avoid rattle-snakes, to check his blanket and boots carefully for scorpions. He’d heard coyotes so often and so nearby that they were necessary features of the land, and unexpectedly sighting a gray fox caused him more embarrassment than alarm. The canine paused not more than twenty yards from the boy and watched curiously as he squatted above a shallow depression to relieve himself, pants around his knees, flat rock held in one hand. But no, it was man that Gabriel feared. And he was aware of the irony of being so alone in a wilderness yet so troubled by the notion of other people.

When the river turned south, Gabriel abandoned it and kept heading east toward the San Juan range of the Rocky Mountains. With the growing elevation, the air grew cooler. Though the days were still warmed by the sun, the nights dropped quickly in temperature. Gabriel found water sources more varied than in the south. The blue skies of morning gave way on a daily basis to a host of billowing clouds which sometimes actually rained but more often than not just threatened.

By the second week of his solitary journey, Gabriel realized he’d come to know his horse as he’d never known another animal. He’d grown accustomed to the feel of her, the swell and release of her breathing. Her earthy scent was around him always, in the fibers of his clothes, on his hands, in his very skin. He came to know her temperament, her gestures, the manner in which she raised her head at a certain angle to scent the air, the way she sidestepped on being brought to a halt, as if she agreed to stop but could never quite agree to do so on his chosen spot. Through the daily chore of saddling and unsaddling her, he’d come to know the feel of her coat, to find a beauty in the play of the light over her creamy gray hair. He’d run his fingers over her ribs in the evening, up over her rump and down her thigh, thinking of the parts that made her all and completely a horse, so perfect for her function, a tool in but no true accomplice to the crimes of man.

Late one morning Gabriel picked his way through a juniper woodland. He led the horse by the reins, listening to the progress of his feet and the horse’s hooves across the earth, inhaling the rich scent of the massive trees, and watching the leaping of squirrels from ground to air, branch to branch. He told the horse the history that he had never told James. He spoke of his childhood in the distant east, of his father, now more a notion than a true memory, of his brother, whom he longed to see again, and of his stepfather and uncle, two men who’d grown in stature and wisdom in his eyes, such kind, strong men, so rare in the world. Of his mother he spoke haltingly, as if the horse might judge him. He said that it would be the hardest to see her again. He couldn’t imagine explaining to her. It was as if he not only owned the guilt of having abandoned them but also owned the crimes of the men he’d traveled with. How could he deny that? He’d never fought them. He’d never voiced his beliefs, like Dunlop, or even like James. He’d done nothing to be proud of since his first days in Kansas, and he’d only managed to escape Marshall because he’d abandoned a friend who needed him. How could he tell his mother this and expect her to take him back? For that was what he realized he most wanted now. Just to be let back. To be a child, a son, and a brother.

He came to the lip of a sandstone canyon without even noticing. He stepped right up to its edge and paused only when he felt a rush of air catch against his face and realized that the land dropped away before him into a bowl a couple of hundred feet deep. He was dizzied by the realization, and still holding the horse’s reins, he fell to one knee. For a moment the earth tilted before him, so expansive was the scale compared to the closed greenness of the forest. But when the ground steadied and settled into proportion, another surprise followed. The cliff wall on the opposite side of the canyon was carved with geometric lines, dotted with black squares, fenced with looping circles and corridors of stone. Gabriel blinked, shook his head, and inched closer to the edge.

An eagle flew over the canyon, again throwing off his perceptions, placing a distance of a half-mile between him and the far wall. It was a city, a palace built in stone, carved into a cliff face that stretched above it for several hundred feet. The windows and doors of the place gaped black and empty, strangely like the eyes and mouths of people mourning. And it was still, so still. Not a living thing moved in the city; no one walked the streets. There were no fires, no children at play.

When next a gust of air brushed his face and shoulders, he couldn’t help but feel something ghostly in the touch, as if spirits had flown up from the hollow rooms to inspect him. A breeze swirled around him, and he knew it was no breeze but really the force that remains after death, at least on consecrated ground. The horse felt it too. She backed a step and snorted, clicked her teeth and urged the boy away from this place.

Gabriel stood and slowly turned, taking in as much of the deserted city as he could in one far-reaching gaze. As he led the horse away, he felt sure that as beautiful as the city was, it was not for him to look upon too closely. It belonged to another time, to another people, whose ancient joys and miseries and passing from the earth had very little to do with him. He almost felt he should say a prayer, but he couldn’t imagine the words to use and didn’t wish to offend whatever gods ruled that place. A few hundred yards away from the canyon, he slipped aboard the dun and rode steadily through the afternoon, away from the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde.

THE TWO HAD COVERED THEIR TRACKS UP and out of the canyon meticulously. They traveled through the cover of night for the first few days, as the land was so flat and scoured that they might be seen from many miles away. They shared the black man’s horse, and they left no waste behind. With a dry bundle of snake-weed, they brushed away any footprint or scuffmark that could be read. It was slow progress, but the desert gave way beneath them and they moved steadily to freedom. After four days they came upon a mining town. The place had seen a short-lived boom and bust, and the streets were empty save for a three-legged dog that watched them through blurred, suspicious eyes. They found no people, but the blond man did manage to rope a burro that had been living wild on the outskirts of town, and so he had a mount once more.

Outside of Prescott, Arizona, the two came upon a lawman who didn’t like the look of them. He rode alone, upon a large bay horse, and he spoke to them with a smirk verging on belligerence. He asked them their business, their destination, their intentions. He laughed at the burro beneath the white man. It was short-lived laughter, however. The blond pulled his silver-inlaid twenty-two from his shoulder holster and shot the lawman through the neck. He shot him again through the chest and slipped off his burro and yanked the man from his horse. He asked the black man for his rifle. He put the barrel of the Winchester against the deputy’s face and shot out both his eyes, shot out the space that made his nose, shot till he had emptied the chamber and the man’s head was a lumpy jumble of flesh and bone, brain matter and hair.

The black man watched the white from on horseback, ready to ride, but the other was not so inclined. He took a seat beside the lawman and rolled a cigarette. He spoke to him, asked him his name, and apologized for the inconvenience regarding his face. He explained that he’d been feeling a bit out of sorts the last few weeks. It seemed that aspects of his destiny had been taken out of his own hands and manipulated by others, and this was one thing he couldn’t happily put up with. He now wanted to get some of that control back, and the lawman had just been in the wrong place, asking the wrong man questions at a trying time in his life.

I apologize. I’m sure Saint Peter will understand.

Against the black man’s wishes, they camped right there next to the dead man. The black listened to the white as he talked on, but he thought of other things, of the past they had shared, of the things done between them that no other knew of. They each contained an anger, but it came out in such different ways. The black man would have taken no joy from the lawman’s death. It was a death with a function, yes, but it lacked meaning. He preferred to kill in a different way, quietly, slowly, with more time for both him and the other to realize the significance of the act.

When the blond man finally talked himself to sleep, the black sat watching his profile. He had a desire, a momentary, fleeting urge that he’d felt more than once before, to wake that man into pain. But it passed as quickly as it came, and he just watched. There were features the two had in common: the wide, high reach of their foreheads, the lines cut by their eyebrows, and the heavy set of their jaws. The black sometimes wondered if anyone had ever noted these similarities, but he thought not. This was a world that saw only difference, and there was as much at odds about their features as there was in common: pale skin to dark brown, thin nose to wide, white-blond hair on one, loose curls of black on the other. No, there was nobody alive to comment on their bond. Not even the blond man knew that the same man had fathered them both.

The black remembered this man now, saw his weathered face and heard again his vitriolic tirades in the name of God. To the blond man, he’d bequeathed a tortured bloodline; to the black, he’d given blood but denied it and so planted the seeds of rage. The black man did something then that he never did before the eyes of men. He reached up and touched his fingers to his lips. He parted them and let his fingertips caress the scar tissue that had once been his tongue. He tried to remember the last clear words he had spoken with it, words that were somehow so vile as to rile that weathered holy man to anger. He had been only a boy, perhaps twelve, when he had named the white man as his father. The father had cursed the very thought of it and with his knife silenced the boy forever after. Silenced his speech, at least, but never silenced the anger within, or the questions.

Rarely did the black man think of his mother, but he did so that evening. He remembered her only from the fragmented view of a child, as an emotion, as a few images pasted together without logical connection. She was the being who defined words that otherwise had no definition for him. She, with blue-black skin, with white-white teeth, with giving flesh to her arms and a smell to her sweat that was like fruit. She was the warm glow of his beginning. She had once been life stripped of all other trappings. And yet . . .

There he was, staring in through the cracks in their shack as the white man mounted her, rode her in a way the boy had thought was meant only for four-legged creatures. And there she was after the holy man departed, hugging her child to her breast, humming and asking him to forget that which mattered not. But he hadn’t forgotten, and he couldn’t imagine that he ever would. He knew that it was this, at least partly, that made him ask the things he did of other people’s flesh.

When the blond man rose in the early hours of the morning, the black made no mention of his thoughts. The two saddled up silently and left the dead man stripped of weapons, tobacco, and horse, with the burro grazing nearby to keep him company. They had no need for words, for they both knew their destination. There could be only one way for this now. Once released, chaos must run its course, and these brothers would see it to completion.

THE SAN JUANS ROSE BEFORE GABRIEL like a great receding barricade conceived by the gods and built of the earth itself. He knew he would have to learn mountain travel through trial and error. He could construct an image of what was to come from dimly remembered descriptions, but he felt surer each day that he could complete this journey—if not the whole of it, at least that day’s portion. He wove his way into the foothills, seeking passage through small gaps in the hillsides, over mounds of wind-scoured sandstone, around tilted slabs of granite. Each ridge gave way to another and another, each higher than the one before. He learned to gauge the scale of the peaks only slowly, with his weary progress from base to peak and down again. He felt minuscule below the mountains, like an ant, a tiny thief crawling over the toes of giants. Thus he rode or led the horse with hushed respect, as if he feared to wake the mountains, and he listened—at first for signs of other people, but increasingly to the many voices around him.

There was a pattern to the world, a meaning modeled by the land itself, that he began to divine through his silent journey. When did he begin to recognize the feel of the sun on south-facing slopes and the smell of the large pines that grew there? When did he first come to expect the moist feel of the valley floors, or to know the call of that shy bird with the forward-leaning plume above its eyes? And when did he become the person who would spend an entire afternoon standing in a knee-deep stream, watching the progress of a rainbow trout against the current, feeling that he couldn’t possibly move on because moments of pure connection were so rare?

More and more it seemed that creatures without language were speaking to him. For one full day a magpie stalked him. The black-and-white bird leapt from tree to tree, watching the boy with cagy sidelong glances, calling out in a sharp, rising call that sounded like a question. Another time he found himself dining with a family of skunks. The creatures plodded into camp like formally dressed dinner guests. They helped themselves to several slices of bacon, most of the lard, and a chunk of bread. Gabriel knew enough of these creatures to keep his distance. He thought a few well-placed rifle blasts might discourage them, but he had neither the heart for killing nor the desire to attract attention to himself. He spent the night watching the banquet from a nearby hollow.

And there were more frightening dialogues as well. Once the night was interrupted by eerie, tortured screams that seemed to echo across the mountains, gaining breadth and scale with each reverberation. The boy held the rifle tightly, staring into the dark. He could hear a beast moving through the trees, circling his camp in a close circuit that put terror into the horse. It seemed that the cries were those of a troubled soul, a creature part human, part animal, and part demon. He believed it was coming for him and he awaited it. But it never did come, just circled and cried, circled and cried.

The next morning Gabriel found a mountain lion’s tracks less than fifty yards from where he’d slept. The cat had indeed paced round and round the camp. The large pawprints layered over each other. There were no claw marks, as the boy expected, just soft, padded orbs so numerous that he might have been surrounded by a pack of the cats. Gabriel knew that lions traveled alone. Hiram had told him that long ago. He didn’t doubt the man for a moment, didn’t question how he came to the knowledge, but still he saddled up with haste and rode the anxious horse into the dawn.

Mid-morning of his sixteenth day alone, Gabriel emerged from the treeline onto a long sloping scree. He gazed up at the pure skeleton of the earth, the ivory itself in naked and dizzying height. The granite peaks cut jagged lines against the sky. Enormous slabs of rock lay about the incline like the wreckage of demolished buildings. Brilliant white snowfields filled in the shaded northern slopes, and the sky loomed above it all, as infinite in ether as the mountains were in stone. Gabriel stood in awe for several minutes, then urged the mare forward.

That night he camped above the treeline, and it turned bitterly cold. A wind blew up from the valley and spread a dusting of ice crystals across his camp. He huddled beneath his blanket, shivering and fireless, wondering how long this could continue. Do these mountains end, or do they stairstep all the way to God’s throne? That night he thought anything was possible, so near was he to the roof of the sky and so great was the friction of the clouds across the world’s backbone.

Two days later, he saw a mining camp from a distance of perhaps five miles. He stopped in a windswept pass and looked down upon the wound. For some time he watched the activity of the antlike things that moved around the mouth of the mine. They seemed little more than curiosities to him, tiny creatures to be neither loved nor despised, just watched from a distance. Later, when he would try to describe his time in the mountains, the images would crowd in one on another, each clamoring for attention, each adding to the collage of memory that seemed thick enough to represent a complete lifetime of its own. If this were so, it was a life of earth and sky, rock and wind. It was spent in the company of mountain goats and bighorn sheep, picas and marmots and beavers. It was a life lived leanly, beneath pine trees and along riversides, growing thin in the saddle and yet stronger for it, a bone-deep strength that would never leave him. And it was a life that marked its maturity when he looked down upon that mine. From that day on, his journey changed. He’d crossed the Continental Divide without knowing it, and he’d begun the descent that would eventually lead him back onto the Great Plains, back into the world of men. He clucked to the dun and proceeded, looping off to the north and so avoiding the mine by a good few miles.

GABRIEL KEPT TO HIMSELF as he passed the settlements along the Arkansas River. He gave the homes a wide berth and spent the nights in secluded spots away from the homesteads. Those who did see him pass looked at him with a strange mixture of curiosity and respect. There was something old and trailworn about him, despite his young face. He was comfortable with his mount’s movements beneath him, and it showed in the way he sat the horse. It seemed to a stranger’s eyes that he was at ease with his place in the world. People’s gazes noted the quality of the horse, the value of the saddle, and always the holstered rifle and the thirty-two he’d begun to wear on his hip. If they questioned a young black boy’s right to these things, they did not do so within Gabriel’s hearing.

When his supplies dwindled, Gabriel ventured into a town that sat cradled in a bend of the river. He could discern no name for the place, but it was easy enough to find the general store, as the building bore the traits of all such establishments. He bought a few supplies with the coin he’d earned in that long-ago time with Marshall: a small sack of potatoes, some more bacon and cornmeal and matches. He didn’t see the need for a proper frying pan, but as the coin was worth more than the food, the boy also purchased a hat. It was neither newly made nor of a current style. It was of an older make, more like an old Mexican poblano. The shopkeeper kept it on display above the counter, and he happily traded it to the boy, although he still claimed he couldn’t make change for the coin. A small crowd of scrawny youths gathered around and watched, as if this boy’s shopping was the best amusement to be had that day. A few yards of calico balanced the sums, and Gabriel walked from the store with the fabric under his arm like a man shopping for his sweetheart. The boys walked out behind him, silently watched him mount the dun, and watched him ride away, the hush broken only by a mumbled phrase that Gabriel didn’t catch.

He had his first and only real trouble that evening. He camped on the southern bank of the Arkansas, in a grove of low-slung trees. The evening had been alive with song: crickets in the tall grass nearby, swallows from somewhere along the far bank. He lay on his back with his head propped against the saddle, listening to the night music and recalling that Native Americans could communicate by birdcalls. As he drifted off to sleep, the avian music had so captured his mind that his dreams began as a string of melodies and only slowly took visible shape.

When he opened his eyes sometime later, the first thing he noticed was the absence of song. He listened to the silence and then realized why he’d woken. The dun snorted a protest and stamped its foot once more. Gabriel turned on his side and took in the moonlit scene in one glance. Three boys stood in a loose line along the riverbank. A fourth had ventured near enough to throw a hackamore over the horse.

He knew they had seen him move, but he didn’t let that stop him. Before he’d fully thought out the action, Gabriel unholstered the thirty-two and trained it on the boy holding the hackamore. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t imagine the appropriate words. Neither could he imagine what would follow, what he would do with the gun if events didn’t somehow turn the right way. But despite his inner hesitation, his arm held the pistol steadily, pointed dead on the other boy’s chest. Time passed very slowly, but nobody moved.

The boy beside the horse eventually looked to the others for support. “His hand’s shaking. Ain’t it, y’all?” His voice quavered when he spoke, nearly cracking with each word, and Gabriel couldn’t help noticing how childlike it sounded. His nose was a hooked bill outlined in gray. His eyes were tiny black specks beside it. The others kept their distance, and the boy eventually had to turn back to Gabriel. “You wouldn’t kill a man for a horse, would ya?” He spoke with a clear intention of sounding calm and confident, but his voice betrayed him again.

Gabriel knew that his hand was not shaking, but he felt an almost irresistible urge to clasp his other hand over it. That hand even went so far as to rise from his side. He fought it back, redirected it to his chin, where it stroked the thin traces of hair like an intellectual giving the question a full breadth and depth of thought. It was a hard stance to hold, and Gabriel was aware that it verged on the ridiculous. He cocked the gun, a noise that was absurdly loud in the night. His hand still held his chin. But once the gun was cocked, feeling that he needed to do something more, he let his hand fall from his chin and float away from his side. It was a gesture without reason, stranger than the one that preceded it, but somehow it was just the thing to break the other boy’s resolve.

The boy cleared his throat. “I wasn’t . . . I mean, I ain’t meant nothing . . . It was Whittle said we should do it.” He pointed a thin finger toward the others. “I never did . . .” The boy lost his flow of words, paused, then was struck dumb by the realization that he was holding the hackamore. He dropped the rope. All three of the others had been inching back throughout the conversation. One of them called to the boy with the horse, but still he didn’t move.

Gabriel held his stance. His arm was just as steady as when he’d begun, his eyes just as attentively focused on the boy, but it still took all his effort just to state one word with authority.

“Go.”

That was all the boy needed. He whispered something under his breath and gestured to the others, who were already moving away before him. There was the motion of them dispersing in the moonlight, the sound of their feet thudding on the earth, an occasional twig breaking, and then they were gone into the night from which they’d come. Only when the distance between them was great enough did the boys find voice, naming Gabriel’s race and threatening him with words that had escaped them only a moment before.

Gabriel saddled the horse by the same gray light and rode out twenty minutes later, aware that he had just avoided considerable danger, and even more aware that he’d just drawn a gun on another person for the first time.

WHEN HE ENTERED WESTERN KANSAS, Gabriel found a troubled land. The dry heat of summer had left the plains a tinderbox. Clouds gathered, thunder rumbled, and rain loomed imminent, but time and again the heavens withheld their moisture and threw down bolts of lightning instead. By the time of Gabriel’s passage, in the second week of September, wide swaths of prairie lay charred and brittle.

He traveled for three days through such territory. The first day the turf crackled beneath him. Gabriel rode carefully, as if the horse’s hooves were actually his own and he could feel the heat of the ground through them. On the second day, he often dismounted and touched the earth with his hand to test its warmth. In some places the fires were so recent that the heat of them still rippled the air. Eerie phantoms of smoke crept up from the ground and flew away before the wind. He saw more than one wheat field ruined, more than one home destroyed, and many white faces rendered far blacker than his by soot. The third day was one long and weary progress through a land of damned souls. The towns had swollen with people in search of aid or rest or friendship. The roads to and from them were strung their full length with a sad procession of the beleaguered. He watched one man hurl bits of wood and tools into the ravished hull of his home, fueling the fire within it. And he passed within fifty yards of a soot-covered family dressed in their Sunday best, standing with heads bowed before a miniature grave.

In some long-ago time, it seemed, Gabriel had called such curses on all who were fool enough to tempt the land. But now he rode back among them with mumbled prayers on his lips, both for those around him and for his own wayward soul. Despite their hardships, the people were still proud. Three times thirsty men refused his offer of water; once a mother turned her back on him as he nodded his condolences. He managed to make only one present. As he passed a young girl walking barefoot behind her mother, he sank low in the saddle and handed her the folded square of calico. He silenced the girl’s thanks with a finger to his lips and rode on before his gift might be refused. Hiram used to say something about pride coming before a fall, but Gabriel hoped that no further fall need follow for these people.

THE SCOT WAS SURE THAT HE RECOGNIZED THE TRACKS of the dun horse. He said as much to the Mexican, and they followed, each with the hope that this trail would lead him to a final act of vengeance. But with each passing day the Scot grew less sure. Yes, it was the dun, but why did its rider choose such a circuitous course? Why did he not cover his tracks, and why leave such clear markers at his campsites? Why did he cross rivers so directly, never using the opportunity for deception? It was a lone rider, yes, a certain horse, yes, but this was all they could be sure of. That, and that the rider rode with an unrelenting pace that they gained on only slowly.

They lost the trail many times as it changed terrain. Through the scrubland it was easy enough, and in the mesa land of juniper and pine they rode silently, sharing each other’s company with the trail clear before them. It wasn’t until the mountains proper that they felt the trail become truly difficult. They lost it on scree and tallus slopes, found it in the slow progress of horse and man across a glacier, then lost it again in an area of chaotic felsenmeers, a jagged plain of jumbled rock thrust upward like geometric offspring growing from their mother rock. They continued to move east, but spent a week with no clear sign to follow.

Camped one evening in the foothills of the Front range, the Scot and the Mexican decided to descend onto the flatlands to resupply themselves and determine their course, which way it would take them, and if it would take them together. The Scot did not fancy the notion of what the future held. He had grown close to this man in their days together. He had talked to him the way men should, but rarely do, talk to one another. They told the tales that were their lives and so conveyed the meanings they had found or that had escaped them, the fears they had conquered and those left unvanquished. The Scot came to know what this man’s family had meant to him. He heard the father’s words through the son’s mouth and learned of a mother’s kindness, and he closed his eyes at the thought of the dreams two girls had conjured for themselves but could now never have.

They bought food and supplies beside the Arkansas River, and it was there that they asked if any had noted the passing of a rider on a dun horse. It was there that they got their answer, from a hook-nosed adolescent. Yes. Less than a week ago. They asked who the rider was, and the Scot couldn’t help hiding his surprise at the answer.

A black boy.

A Negro? A man or a boy?

I said he was a boy. Younger than me, anyhow. I remember cause he had a right uppity look about him.

This story was confirmed in the next town, and once more by a wagon train carrying supplies west. The two men talked it out. The Scot told what he knew of this boy, and the Mexican nodded, saying that his sister had said much the same. He wasn’t the one they wanted, but they should be sure. And perhaps he would know something more of the fate of the others. They decided to stay the course a little longer.

GABRIEL RECOGNIZED THE LAND: the slow undulations and sweeping breadth of it, the creek that snaked its way to the south, the shallow depression that framed his family’s homestead, and the squat building itself, a little larger, yet mostly unchanged by the passing months. But this was all that he recognized. He sat on a rise that he’d walked many a time the previous spring and surveyed the farm. There was not the faintest sign of the fires that troubled the western plains, no swarm of locusts and no withering hot wind. The corn crop stood tall and erect, cut in wavering lines and yet all the more beautiful for the imprecision. To the east the sloping field devoted to wheat had grown into a sun-tanned, golden expanse. The family plot showed an array of life. There were crops short and tall, gray-brown to deep green, plants that Gabriel knew and some that he didn’t. Melons sat in the fields like giant seeds; pumpkins grew in ground that had been uncut sod when he’d left. Raleigh stood staked near the barn, and the pig was just visible in its pen. There were no people to be seen.

It had all changed so much. At first Gabriel felt a nagging desire to retreat. He could turn away now before anybody saw him and fade into the plains. It seemed that might be better for them all. Look, there before him was the proof that they didn’t need him, the clear and irrefutable evidence that all he’d said had been wrong. The land had prospered through the hard work of others. A family he had deserted had persevered. How could he return now?

So he thought, but he didn’t turn away. Without consciously deciding to, he urged the horse forward. He rode down toward the house, shy and respectful, a tight lump in his throat and tension ringing his eyes. He gripped the reins firmly, and he was no more relaxed when he finally stopped in the clearing before the house. Raleigh looked up at him and studied the new horse. The sow’s grunts floated into the air. Other than that, all was quiet, still.

It was Ben who first emerged. He stepped out into the bright midday light and paused dead in his tracks. His jaw dropped, and his face was fogged by an expression of utter confusion. He was much changed—a full inch taller, Gabriel would have guessed, and a few pounds heavier around the shoulders and chest. He was shirtless beneath his overalls, and his tight torso was cast in much the same dark material as Gabriel’s. But there was no mistaking him. Here was Ben, wholly and completely and undeniably this horseman’s kin but a young man in his own right.

“Gabe?”

Before Gabriel had time to answer, another shape appeared in the doorway—Solomon, followed shortly after by Hiram and finally by Eliza. They were all as he remembered them. It was strange for them to be flesh and blood and standing before him, but they were unchanged from the images of his dreams and hopes. They looked up at him and took him in with disbelieving eyes—Gabriel, saddled and sitting on a silver horse, rifle and pistol at hand, hatted and tall. For the first time, the boy fully imagined the image he must cut. He felt a wave of shame wash over him. They would think . . . They would see him as . . . But he didn’t even have time to shape the thoughts fully.

Eliza pushed between the others and stepped forward. She stared up at her son with a face that was guarded in its recognition, as if she saw and hoped but couldn’t believe just yet. As she came closer, the sun brought out the sharp contours of her features. There were lines, not so fine anymore, around her eyes, and ribbons of gray touched her thick black hair. She ran a hand up over her forehead and tried to smooth down some of the unruly strands.

“Gabriel, I done gone hoarse from praying for you.”

Her voice was instantly familiar, although the boy wasn’t sure how to read it, as frank a declaration as it was. He made to speak, but he didn’t yet have the words. Only a few seconds had passed, but he wasn’t even sure that he had heard her right, or that she had spoken at all.

The woman seemed to understand this. “We’ve just started eating,” she said. “There’s a place at the table for you if you’re inclined.” She let this sit in the air between them, but this was not enough either, and she knew it. She waited a second longer, then she stretched her arms out to him as if her feet were rooted to the ground but her arms could reach however far they had to. “Come here.”

It took the boy a moment to recognize her posture, so long had it been since he’d seen it. She stood thus as he slipped from the dun. His feet touched the earth, and his legs instantly went wobbly. In three strides he covered a lifetime of distance. With the first step he forgot that he was Gabriel the hunted. With the second he knew nothing but the nearness of his mother. And by that third step he was a child who’d just learned to stand. He fell into her embrace with a force that almost knocked the woman down. She wrapped her arms around him and whispered to him and soothed him as she would a baby. He didn’t know when he began to cry, but at some point he realized his body was shaking with sobs. He felt the tears squeezing through his tight-shut eyelids and falling onto the warm shoulder of his mother, felt her hand brush his hat off and stroke his head, and heard her words soft and soothing in his ears. In the space of a few seconds, he was her child again.

THAT EVENING THEY SAT AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE as Gabriel told his tale. He began with halting phrases and apologetic glances. The others prompted him cautiously. Eliza sat next to him, rubbing his hand and affirming his words with faint murmurs of understanding. Solomon made a pot of coffee. He fumbled with the small cups in his large hands. Hiram sat silent and attentive, an expression of troubled joy written on his face. And Ben stood near at hand, with undisguised awe in his large eyes.

Gabriel stumbled forward as if it were not only the tale but the words themselves that he needed to recall from the past. He told of the ride south in the wagon, of the men he rode with and the homesteads they passed. He told of the chain of events that broke the group up, of the long walk he and James made together, of the things that came to pass at McKutcheon’s, of being twice shot at. He told of the wonder of the land across which he’d traveled, losing himself in the unpeopled landscape of his mind, creating a panorama of desolate expanses and flesh-covered mountains and temples carved in stone. He told of the gold. He let it be known that he had seen things he wished he never had and that people had been wronged greatly, some even to death, but he did not give details.

It was difficult, but manageable, to tell of those things. It was another thing altogether to find the right words to form the images that haunted him still. Ugly Mary and Rickles staring out at the rising sun, a deer impaled upon a living tree, smoke hanging in the air above Santa Fe, the sight of a homestead and a river glistening in the morning sun: of these things he didn’t speak. Of friendships made and lost; of James and how he was betrayed; of Dunlop, whom he’d last seen bound and tied in the light of campfire; and of the girl, so abused, robbed of blood and history and kin: of these he did not speak, only bowed his head and prayed for the images to pass in silence.

Eliza watched him, both as he spoke and through his silences, and she never took her hand from his. By the time he finished, more than one pot of coffee had been consumed. He had told his tale incompletely, with great chunks left yawning with questions, but Gabriel felt more exhausted than ever before. It seemed the toil of all those days in fear had been relived in one evening, and he sat with his head heavy between his shoulders. The night had grown thick about them, and each member of the family was alive with questions. Most of these they held to themselves, either to keep safely unspoken or to ask at some later, gentler time. But some questions were too urgent to wait.

Ben swallowed before he spoke, a sound loud enough to warn the room of his intention. “Gabe? What’s happened to James?”

Gabriel seemed pained by the question. He closed his eyes and his lips and then inhaled through his nose and exhaled his words. “I don’t know. I couldn’t bring him with me.” He opened his eyes. His gaze met his mother’s, and something in the contact brought forth a flow of words, one fast upon another. He repeated that he hadn’t been able to bring him. He had tried and he had wanted to, but James wouldn’t have made it. He was in the water already. He was floating away, and Gabriel had only a second to make his choice. As quickly as his words came out, he lost composure. His lips worked and his forehead wrinkled into jagged lines and tears burst from his eyes. His words were twirling away, snapshots of thoughts and images that none in the room could follow.

Eliza pulled the boy close to her once more and held his head under her chin. She told him to let it go. “These things are past. Don’t hold them too tight.” With her eyes she cautioned Ben to question his brother no further. “You just let them go and pray for the souls of the departed,” she said.

She held Gabriel until he pulled back and wiped the moisture from his face. He seemed to want to speak more, but he didn’t. They sat in solemn thought for some time. Attempts at conversation went nowhere, and it wasn’t until Eliza suggested bed for them all that Gabriel again found he had something that needed saying. He got up from the table and stepped outside and returned with a saddlebag. He unbuckled the bag and set it on the table.

“I’ve got more I should tell you,” he said. “I will, but . . . I can’t say it all just yet. But you should maybe look at this.”

The others sat a moment looking at it, as if the worn leather somehow spoke volumes all by itself. Eventually Solomon reached out and emptied the contents onto the table. The gold bar made a strangely muted sound against the wood. It was less than spectacular in appearance, but still it took the collective breath out of the room.

Solomon gripped his jaw in his hands and massaged the tension there. This done, he whistled. “You rode off on the man’s horse . . .”

Gabriel dropped his eyes to a dark space on the floor. “I didn’t mean to. It was crazy that night. The horse just came to me.”

“A blessing and a curse both,” Hiram said. He seemed to have trouble controlling the lump in his throat. “I’ll be damned.”

Ben stepped closer, the tip of his tongue protruding through his teeth as if he might touch it to the metal. “Man alive. That’s gold? It don’t even look that nice.” He reached a tentative hand toward the bar.

Eliza stopped him, saying, “You leave that where it lies, Ben.” Her gaze flicked up to Solomon, who seemed to have one eye on her and one on the gold at the same time. She again placed her hand on her son’s and squeezed it. “Let’s not forget what’s happened today. We done got Gabriel back. He’s walked along the valley of death, but he’s come home.”

She allowed no more conversation. She said it was time for them all to sleep, and she carefully put the gold back into the saddlebag. They left it there on the table and went off to their troubled sleep, each trying to work out through dreams the questions that the morrow would bring.

GABRIEL WAS AWAKE BEFORE SUNRISE. He lay listening to the room around him. It seemed that the sounds of his sleeping kin were the most comforting noises in the world. He tried to remember a time when this had not been so, but it seemed impossible. How could he ever have wanted to be anyplace else? What’s better than waking to the touch of your brother at your elbow? Or the sound of your stepfather’s snoring? Or the rustle of the linen when your mother rolls over in her sleep? All of the closeness that had once seemed suffocating and wrong now seemed life-giving and so fundamentally right as to be unquestionable.

He heard Solomon rise before any of the others. He listened as the man dressed, following each motion betrayed by sound, from pulling on his thick overalls to sliding his feet into his boots and doing up the laces. The leather creaked as the boots grew tight, and Gabriel almost thought he could hear the protests of the man’s gnarled fingers. Just after Solomon had slipped quietly through the door, Gabriel rose, dressed, and followed him out.

Although the western horizon lay gray and slatelike, the east was already growing light. The very rim of the eastern sky was tinted a tranquil turquoise. A lone bird called its greeting to the morning from the roof of the house, then darted for cover when Gabriel turned toward it. He couldn’t see Solomon, and it took him a minute of listening to the prairie silence to locate the man. He found him hefting the slop bucket up onto the fence of the sow’s enclosure.

Solomon paused when he saw the boy and said, “Morning.” Gabriel nodded his greeting and indicated that he would like to help. Solomon made it clear that he didn’t have to. Actually, he said, it was normally Ben’s job to feed the animals. He had just figured they could all use some rest, what with staying up late the previous night. Gabriel wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a backhanded bite to these words, as if Solomon would offer his generosity while reminding the boy of the disruption he had caused. His face betrayed no such double meaning, but the boy heard it all the same. Gabriel took the bucket from him and climbed into the pigpen.

They worked slowly, the two of them. After tending the sow, Solomon led Gabriel around to the newly constructed chicken coop. It was a thing hardly resembling a manmade structure, a motley conglomeration of posts and sticks and curving loops of wire that held the chickens only as long as they consented. Solomon looked at the structure sadly but cautioned Gabriel against disparaging it. “Ben built it hisself, and he right proud of it,” he said. He tried a smile, but Gabriel nodded and considered the coop without a hint of humor. They let the nervous birds loose and tossed out feed to them.

As Gabriel showed no inclination to speak, Solomon filled the silence with his own halting string of words. He told of the work of the summer, what crops they had planted, where and why, which things grew well and which didn’t grow at all. There had been a scare in late July with the appearance of cinchbugs in some of the corn, and later, in early August, they’d watched the crops bake under a cloudless sky. But the Lord protects, as Hiram said. Nothing truly came of the insects, and rain did fall in time to save most of the crops. While those to the west were ravaged by fires, some to the south by drought, and many pockets all around the plains by locusts, they had fared well. “I been telling them we need to harvest what we got fore we lose it,” Solomon said, “but Hiram and your mother are the most patientest types you’d come across. Almost seems like they were waiting for you to show up. Myself, I told them they best not wait.” The man bent to examine a piece of wire that stuck out in a ragged loop from the chicken coop. He studied it intently. “I don’t mean to sound coarse, Gabriel. I’m happy to have you home, and I thank God you’re safe. But I do wonder . . . I wonder how long you’re staying for, whether you come to work or whether you just passing through.”

The boy’s eyes tried to hold on to the man’s face, but as Solomon spoke, they grew wearier and wearier, until they eventually floated away and settled on the dry earth. There was a cringing tension in Gabriel’s face that both accepted and sought to deny the man’s questions. He felt a whole host of words tumbling around within him. He wanted to let them out. He wanted to shout and make it clear how much he wanted to stay, how he’d learned from this journey and come back different and would prove it with time. He wanted them all to understand him completely, to read him like a slate before them so they could know the things he’d been through while permitting him never to say them out loud. But each claim seemed anchored to a refuting fact, denied by his own words, damned forever by actions taken and untaken, choked to silence by them all.

Solomon straightened and watched him for a few moments, giving him time to speak. But when the hush went unbroken, he sucked his lips and patted the boy on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s get us some breakfast. Figure your mother will make her best for you.”

IT WASN’T UNTIL THAT EVENING that Gabriel found himself alone with his mother for more than a few minutes. He sat across the table from her, both of them shucking corn. The green richness of the husks was thick in the room, temporarily covering the damp smell that had so disturbed Gabriel in the early days out here. He wrapped his fingers around the cornhusks, pulling them away with a satisfying ripping sound. He ran his fingers down the firm white kernels, finding a pleasure just in the touch of them, in their neat near-uniformity, in the way they fit so tightly together. He tried to think about them only, to feel the pleasure of this work, the close comfort of the soddy, and the nearness of his mother. But from one moment to the next, his mind would wander. He would find himself staring blankly at a space on the wall. He was not sure how long these lapses lasted, and he was not sure just what images were tugging at his mind’s eye. But one came up time and again.

“Sometimes it helps to talk, Gabriel.” The boy was suddenly aware that his mother had been staring at him for some time. “I see you got a confusion in you. Sometimes it helps just to say it out loud. I don’t know what it is, son, but spit it out to the world. Having a tortured rememoration ain’t no different from taking a bit of some spoiled fruit. You spit it out fore you swallow it. Cause if you swallow it down, it’ll be a long time fore it passes.”

The boy looked as though he would disdain the comparison, but instead he said, “There was a girl.”

Eliza waited, but the boy stared at his hands. “Yes? Tell me about her.”

Gabriel shook his head. It didn’t seem possible. He turned from her as if he would rise from the table and move away. Somehow this motion helped him. The slight angle at which he’d turned away gave him strength, although it looked as though he were ready to flee. “There was a girl,” he repeated, and slowly, haltingly, this segment of his untold story emerged. He spoke of the family, describing their homestead with a certain pained detail: the fir trees shimmering in the breeze, the tiny creek, and the fields that lined it. As he began to speak of the father, he paused. He retraced something in his mind and met his mother’s eyes. He dropped them and moved on, skipping forward and leaving things unsaid but thereby conveying the substance of the events clearly enough. He had known all along what the men were doing. He had watched them beat down the father and mother, bind them, and defile their daughters. He had seen them lead the girl off each evening and heard the lewd words with which they bragged. And yet he’d done nothing.

Lines of frustration furrowed his brow, crept down the bridge of his nose, and tightened around his eyes as he continued. “She fed us. When we was on the run and didn’t have any water . . . She had some canned tomatoes, and she would feed them to me and James. Even after all of that.” He looked at his mother as if she might understand this act and render some meaning back to him. She smiled sadly and simply waited. The boy finished his story, leaving the girl once more astride her horse in the desert.

Eliza listened through it all, watching her son and sometimes closing her eyes. In the end she walked around the table and hugged him. She told him he was a good boy, a good man, and he shouldn’t take the guilt for other men’s crimes too much to his heart. She said that such things can rarely be explained, even using the lessons of the church, and that sometimes things must simply be lived with. “Men will do awful things without laws to bind them. Even with laws to bind them. They say that all men are good at heart until Satan gets within them. But I don’t know if I believe that. It’s awful hard for me to separate the sinner from the sin. So what do you do? You go on. You be the person that you are, but be stronger for the things you seen. Know that the Lord let you live for a reason, and don’t let him down.”

She loosened her grip and studied her son from a different angle. “Us mothers, we always want to save our children from the awful things we seen, and we want to give them a future better than anything we seen. Looks like I ain’t more than half accomplished it on the first count. The things you seen are part of my life too. You hear? There are things that happen in a life that aren’t fit for a mother to tell a son. I got my own share of rememoration, and some of it awful bad. That’s as plain as I can make it.” She paused when the door opened. Ben peeked in, hesitated a moment, then smiled. Eliza motioned for him to enter, then said, “I haven’t saved you from seeing evil at work, but I’m still here with you. And I’ll be here as long as you need me. You gonna get to see them good things I never did. You gonna find this life is a good thing, a gift that just humbles you to think on. Maybe that girl knew the same thing.”

Later that evening a number of things were decided. The gold and the pistols were to be buried deep in the earth on the far side of the cornfield. The family voted with one voice that they could see fit neither to spend nor to discard the bullion, so let it be buried and see if time couldn’t make something of it. They’d see if they couldn’t trade Marshall’s saddle at market next weekend, along with any saddlebags and accouterments that had adorned the mount. The rifle they’d keep in the soddy for security, and the dun horse would remain, for the time being, in the barn with Raleigh. This was the hardest decision. They knew the horse might bring unwelcome attention, but it was the horse that had brought Gabriel home to them, a beautiful creature with no guilt for her master’s crimes and with nobody in the world with more claim to her than the boy.

GABRIEL WAS HOME, and there was work to be done. Before he knew it, he was adjusting once more to the patterns of farm life. He was up in the morning with Ben, tending the animals and walking from the chill of the night into the first rays of sun. It was harvest time, and the corn needed to be cut by hand. The brothers took turns swinging the long knife that served as harvester. It blistered his hands, as did the rough stalks that they piled into bundles to dry, but he welcomed these blisters. They were so different in their feel and function from the worn patches of skin he’d developed from holding the reins.

After supper, Hiram still read from the Bible. To Gabriel, listening now with an attention he had never given before, the stories were vividly evocative of his life-and-death struggles. He understood the words now in a way he never had before. Yes, the hand of God was in it all, but he acted only through the deeds of humans. The boy couldn’t help wondering if that hand directed or followed. Was it there to guide, or was it there simply to witness with shame the beings God had created? And also he thought it strange that the crimes of man had never really changed. These were stories of murder and betrayal, of avarice and lust, and of lives lived with and without faith. Those Biblical times were not so different after all.

One Saturday afternoon the two boys saddled the horses and rode along the creek together, Ben on the dun and Gabriel once more on calm old Raleigh. At first they talked of simple things: the weather and the coming of fall, horses and saddles and the colored church that had sprung up on the prairie north of Crownsville. It was a long way to go, and the congregation was little more than a handful of families, but there was something special to it all the same. Ben spoke of new friends he’d made there: a boy named Kip, his brother, Eustace, and a girl named Jessica, about whom Ben had more than a few words to say. It was only after this flow of conversation slowed and the horses drew to a halt and munched the grass beneath them that Ben asked his brother more about his travels.

Gabriel spoke without looking at Ben much. His gaze studied the rippling water of the creek next to them or watched the clouds that were floating in from the north, high and silent. Ben didn’t push him too long or too hard. He let up when tension showed on his brother’s face, and he found other things to talk about. He told of his experience with the wolf, how it had scared him to the very core and yet he’d felt a need, a destiny almost, to hunt the beast. And he described the first time he’d shot an antelope, hinting at the emotions he felt and watching Gabriel to read his reaction.

“You ever kill anything while you was out there?” he asked. “That’s a couple times now I’ve shot something. Least I think I shot the wolf—never did find it, though.”

Gabriel threw his leg over the saddlehorn and slipped to the ground. Raleigh shied to the side, surprised by the sudden movement, but Gabriel tugged his reins just enough to reassure him. Then he kneeled down beside the shallow stream and answered. “Naw, I didn’t really need to hunt. Had supplies . . . bacon and that.”

“Oh.” Ben nodded. He looked down and wrapped the dun’s coarse hair around his fingers. “This a fine horse, Gabe. Damn. I didn’t think I’d ever ride a horse like this. You think we could breed her? That’s a good business, don’t you think?” He laid out a plan of breeding and horse-rearing. His scheme tumbled out so quickly it must have been long held and mulled over. He spoke of a hundred head of horses, all bred for particular purposes, trained by himself and Gabe, if he was up to it. He said he’d seen a book about it in Howe’s shop, and when he saved up some money he was gonna . . . He stopped in mid-sentence, staring at his brother as if he’d just been struck dumb by a thought.

Gabriel noticed the look and had some inkling of the boy’s thoughts. “I don’t know,” he said. “Truth is, I don’t really think she’s my horse.”

“Whose is she, then? I’ll claim her. Slap a brand on her, gentle-like, but—”

Gabriel cupped a handful of the cool water in his palm, raised it, then let the moisture slip through his fingers. “Ben, I was lucky to get away. I could’ve died out there. Wouldn’t’ve been the only one.”

“You seen people killed?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Bad folks or good?”

Gabriel looked at his brother and then away. “They were just people. Don’t know what good or bad had to do with it.”

“Well . . . Hiram says that’s all there really is in the world. Good, bad, and runction they cause fighting each other.”

“I don’t know. Maybe in Bible times it was like that.” Gabriel stood and pulled Raleigh close to him. He looked into the horse’s eyes and touched his muzzle. “Nowadays the devil’s an iron horse.”

This raised Ben’s eyebrows. It was obvious he wanted to ask more, but Gabriel mounted and squeezed Raleigh with his ankles. Gabriel knew a statement like that would only fuel his brother’s questions, but he couldn’t help uttering portions of the thoughts that plagued him, just as he couldn’t help keeping other things hidden. He hoped—he believed—that time would bring it all out. This story needed time to unfold, and Gabriel wished nothing more than a long lifetime to tell it slowly, to heal himself among these people.

Behind him, Ben let the dun follow of her own accord, watching the sway of his brother’s back before him.

IT WAS A TUESDAY MORNING. The family was just up and beginning breakfast when Ben burst through the door, slops bucket splashing his leg and spilling onto the floor. “Two riders,” he said.

The room was a blur of motion. Gabriel was up and moving toward the door before Ben’s words had faded from the room. Solomon reached for the Kentucky long and tossed it to Hiram, who breached it on his knee and checked the load. Solomon yanked the Winchester from the wall. “It’s okay, Eliza,” he said, his words overtly at odds with his actions. “We’ll see who it is.” He strode into the morning, with Hiram fast beside him.

Gabriel was five paces out into the yard before he saw them. They were closer than he expected, moving in along the edge of the cornfield. At first he saw only the men’s bobbing torsos and their horses’ heads, but it was enough to send a chill reeling through his body. He recognized the man in front, and it was recognition that he feared. He began to spin around, ready to shout at the others, but something caught in his mind and made him falter. It wasn’t a clear thought at first, just a hesitation that he tried to fight against but that kept him still and silent. He recognized the rider, but . . .

Solomon and Hiram were standing beside him by the time the horsemen rode clear of the corn and turned toward the house, and it was only then that Gabriel understood his own mind. The way the rider sat his horse, the loose comfort of his dangling legs, the supple to-and-fro of his torso . . . He fell to his knees with the relief of the recognition.

Solomon, not knowing how to read the boy, grasped his shoulder and said something about standing together. “We all here, Gabriel.”

But the boy smiled and shook his head, saying, “It’s okay. He’s a friend.”

DUNLOP AND THE MEXICAN SHARED THE BREAKFAST that morning. The family watched the transaction between them and Gabriel with cautious eyes. They didn’t speak of the events that had brought them together and the trials that had forged their relationship. While this was in the back of their eyes and was clear for all to see, the Scot kept the conversation on simple things. He asked the men about the summer’s work and commented on Eliza’s cooking and praised the homestead as a fine product of such a short time’s labor. Gabriel nodded and listened and looked around at his family to see how these words affected them.

Dunlop’s face betrayed the fatigue of his torments. Tiny lines sprang from the corners of his eyes. His lips had a thin, slack quality while they were at rest. Only when he smiled did they spring to full life. Indeed, that was just how he was—saddened during the quiet moments but as likely as ever to move the conversation to things of joy, to state for all to remember the simple things for which one might give thanks.

The Mexican sat, silent and polite. He was not a tall man but was proportioned in such a way that he gave that impression. His posture was erect, almost formal, and his features were composed of strong lines. His eyes were two black stones; his nose was prominent and bent at its midpoint. A scar above his left eyebrow cut diagonally across his forehead, and his mustache was trimmed in a style Gabriel had seen only on the streets of Santa Fe. The olive skin of his cheeks had been shaved recently. Dunlop introduced him as Ludovico, Ludovico Maria Fuentes. He looked at Gabriel when he said this name, and it was clear that the boy listened carefully and grasped its import. But no more was said of it just then.

It was not a day that could be spent idly, but the two visitors insisted that they share the day’s labor. Solomon looked at them doubtfully and at first wouldn’t hear of it. But Ludovico was firm on the point. He said he was not a stranger to this work, and he considered it only proper that hospitality should flow two ways. He walked out to the field beside Ben, looking oddly attired for farm life but falling into it with a vigor that impressed all.

It was Dunlop who needed direction. He was awkward with the corn knife, seemed both afraid of damaging the stalks and at risk of damaging himself. Gabriel asked if his family had not been farmers, and the Scot answered, aye, they, but not he. Some skills were not hereditary, it seemed. He carried the bundles of corn in a full embrace, finding some humor in this and turning the work into a comic dance with cornsheaf partners. He had Gabriel laughing from the outset, something that Eliza didn’t fail to notice, even from a considerable distance.

The morning passed quickly into afternoon. Eliza made lunch and brought it out to them, then asked Ben for his assistance back at the house, leaving Gabriel with his two companions. The three, as if aware of the import of the moment, fell quiet. They ate studiously, chunks of rough-cut bread and slices of ham, with some greenish jelly that Gabriel had never taken to. The day was fair and breezy, with high wisps of clouds far to the north. A cowbird landed on a patch of trodden grass nearby, hopped around in curious circles, then flew off to join a company of passing blackbirds.

Eventually Ludovico sighed. He wiped his lips and smoothed his fingers over his mustache. He praised Eliza’s preparation of the meal, as simple as it was, then began to speak in earnest.

“You know my family?”

Gabriel nodded that he did.

“I think you may not know what happened to them.” Gabriel glanced at Dunlop and waited. And so the Mexican told him all, filling in that further portion of the nightmare.

As he spoke, Gabriel realized that he had known it all along. He hadn’t let himself state it clearly. How could he? But he had known. He remembered the very night, being awakened by that form in the darkness, the mumbling voice and the sound that must have been laughter but was no kin to joy. Of course he had known. But the equally shocking revelation was that the girl must have known too. It was in her eyes the whole time. Full, complete knowledge, beyond his. Had she simply known of her own accord, or had she been told? He knew the answer right away. Caleb, who so rarely shaped words but could do it occasionally . . . Caleb had whispered it in her ear.

“My sister spoke of you,” Ludovico said.

Gabriel’s thoughts snapped back to the present. “She did?”

“Yes. She said you were kind to her, that you were a good person, honorable. She said that you did what you could to help her and have no guilt like the others. She said this of your friend too, the one we found.”

Dunlop had been tugging absently at the stitching of his trouser leg, but his head snapped up. His eyes went straight to Gabriel, who stared at the man as if his words had made no sense whatsoever.

“I’m sorry. Perhaps you didn’t know what became of him. Is that so?”

“I didn’t know for sure,” Gabriel said.

Ludovico pursed his lips and looked at Dunlop. “I see.”

The Scot adjusted his hat, shifting the angle of it, then finding it not to his liking. He took it off and held it in his lap as he explained. “We found James, Gabe. Found him downstream a good few miles from where Marshall and them went in. I . . . I don’t know, Gabe, but I don’t think he had a hard time of it. He had his eyes closed. I’m no doctor, but most people I’ve seen die haven’t been happy about it, and they all pretty much had their eyes open. Not James. Looked more like he just went to sleep.” Ludovico watched him through all of this and didn’t comment. “That’s how it looked, at least.” Dunlop didn’t mention that the force of the water had sucked off the boy’s boots. He went on to tell of Dallas, that he was found alive and unrepentant in his views but had not remained so for long, and of the horses and what gear they’d found. But this was all he could speak of with certainty.

“We had hoped you might tell us more,” Ludovico said.

Gabriel said that he couldn’t. He told the man of his escape, and the Mexican listened gravely. He began to nod when the boy spoke of the mountains and his journey there. Before long the boy stopped.

The man didn’t ask him to continue but said, “Strange, when the acts of one man upon another so call out for justice, but nobody hears. This is hard for me to understand.” He stood up, stretched his legs, and scented the air blowing in from the west. “I think this is the end of it. It’s not the end I would have written, but . . .” Still looking off to the west, he motioned like one throwing out seeds. “I’ve been too long away. Thank you, Gabriel. Tomorrow I should leave.”

Gabriel seemed to be seeking those seeds where they might lie in the grass. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

Ludovico looked at Dunlop to see if he would answer first. He didn’t. “Well,” the Mexican said, “I’ll return to my sister. We’ll sell my family’s land. I’ll go to Santa Fe and speak to a lady I know. I’ll ask her if she will have me for a husband. If she will, I’ll ask her and my sister to go with me to Mexico. There is a man there, back in my father’s father’s country, in Guadalajara, who will employ me. We’ll try to live without forgetting. I don’t know if all these things will come, but I owe it to my parents to try. That’s what I’ll do.”

To the same question Dunlop shrugged. “I don’t know, Gabe. I’ve fair lost sense of myself.” He looked as if he might speak on, but he couldn’t state it any more clearly.

THE FAMILY CAME TO THE DECISION THAT EVENING. They spoke in the solitude of the soddy. Hiram said the choice was obvious. God had brought these two men here to help cleanse them of sin. Think of them not as men, he said, but as the instruments of our Lord. This was one time when God was showing them the way clearly; the least they could do was acknowledge it and do the right thing.

Solomon raised the question of a new plow, but he did so with a quiet voice that faded, saying, “That and some more sows. Could buy Franklin’s wagon off him, and next year . . .”

Hiram watched him. “You know I can’t tell you what to do with your own family, but you and me both been trying to build this place with hard work and good faith. That gold’s got blood on it, Solomon. You can’t build a life on blood. That’s what they tried to do down South, with our blood, and look how they paid for it. If we gonna do this, we gotta do it clean.”

Solomon sighed. “I know. Just wanted to say it, cause I know we was all thinking it. Just wanted to say it is all, so we know what we’re giving up.”

“And what we’re gaining.”

Solomon sighed again. “Truth is, I don’t know what we’d do with a gold brick anyway. Can you imagine me marching into Howe’s and throwing down that hunk of metal?” This finally brought out some of the man’s humor. “They’d lock me up faster than I could ask for change. And they’d keep the gold anyhow. A white man could get away with that, but naw, this land ain’t gonna give us nothing we don’t work for. Might not even give us that.”

Eliza said only that she wanted no part of any stolen property. “Let them have it.”

But before the decision was made final, they all looked at Gabriel. It was a long time before he answered. He saw something in Solomon’s eyes that belied his words. Not that the man didn’t agree, but there was a piece of him whose faith had been challenged too far, a piece of him that was of this world and willing to play by the rules of this world. Ben had hung his head low from the start of the conversation, but Gabriel remembered his dream of that hundred head of horses. In Eliza and Hiram he saw a firmer resolve, although he knew it was for different reasons. But they had asked for his voice, and for him the decision was easy: “Let them have it.”

Before the sun had lifted itself from the night, Gabriel and Ben strode off, shovel in hand, to the turned earth on the far side of the cornfield. They went to digging with a vigor that warmed their bodies and brought moisture to their foreheads. They made quick work of it, drawing out the saddlebags and tossing them to the side and filling the hole once more. They’d put the guns in a rough wooden crate, and this they buried again, shovelful by shovelful. The boys were careful to replace the block of sod neatly, smoothing out the edges and mussing the grass so that no sign of the treasure remained. Ben asked if Gabriel wanted to take one last look at the gold, but his brother declined, saying, “I’ve studied it enough.”

They presented the gold to the two men after they had mounted. Solomon laid it over Ludovico’s saddlehorn. The man tried to refuse it, but Solomon insisted. Ludovico looked at Dunlop, and together they denied their right to such treasure. “Keep it,” Dunlop said. “We wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

But Solomon would not allow the Mexican to give it back. He tried to form the words to explain the gift, but in the end he just stepped away and would have nothing more to do with it. “Take it. It’s a gift given, and that’s that,” he said.

Gabriel watched the two ride away quietly. They seemed ill at ease with the gold, unsure of what to do with it and completely surprised by its appearance. The boy couldn’t help feeling that something had been lost with their leavetaking. A moment had been thrown out of balance and couldn’t be retrieved. But it was all right. The right thing had been done. Perhaps, Gabriel thought, someday he’d see them again. Perhaps they’d return, having prospered and turned the gold to good use. If any could erase the sins that tarnished it and make of it something good, those two could.

The men went to work as usual that morning, although a hush pervaded the group. A farmer whom Gabriel hadn’t met, a Mr. March, appeared after lunch. He spoke to the men about helping with the wheat harvest, he having newly acquired a reaper that would speed the process.

Gabriel and Ben worked away at the last corner of the cornfield, moving more slowly as the uncut corner grew into a smaller and smaller triangle.

“We could go get Mr. Mitchell to bring out his stallion. Get him together with the dun,” Gabriel suddenly said.

Ben paused. He stood upright, knife in hand, and gazed away toward the south, the direction of the Mitchells’ farm. “You think?”

“Yeah. He’s a good horse, ain’t he?”

The boy thought this over. “Yeah. I reckon he is.” His eyes drifted over to his brother, but Gabriel turned away and continued working, the hint of a smile creasing his lips.

THE SCOT AND THE MEXICAN RODE WEST TOGETHER toward Crownsville, talking little, surveying the cloud-choked sky above them, each thinking through his private dialogues. Each man’s heart beat with sadness, and to this they wished to give no voice. The Mexican did not say that Gabriel’s family reminded him of his own, but this was so. The Scot did not voice his fear of the yawning loneliness he felt might soon engulf him, but he saw it coming just as clearly as he did the clouds.

They didn’t discuss the plan that they had conceived until they were actually before the general store. It seemed obvious. Inside the store, they asked if the shopkeeper knew the boy’s stepfather by name and description. The shopkeeper looked between the two men. He squinted in such a way that his eyebrows creased together and joined in one thick black line.

Course I do. Count him as one of my regulars.

The Scot nodded, and the Mexican brought forth a drawstring purse. He held it up for the man to see, then emptied it on the countertop. Gold coins, a few silver, several crumpled banknotes. He told the man the money’s worth and his intention. The two men went shopping. In the next half-hour they picked out a new plow with riggings, a wide, multipurpose woodstove, china plates and cutlery, a bolt of gingham and a wall clock, feed for the horses and, on a notion of the Scot’s, panes of glass for windows that did not yet exist. They requested that the goods be delivered within the week, and did so in public hearing, so that the small crowd that had gathered might serve as witnesses. They had the man swear to carry out the deal exactly as requested and made it known that if for any reason, he didn’t like the nature of this transaction, they would find somebody who did.

The shopkeeper told them to smooth their hackles over: I’m happier than a pig in shit. He said he liked the colored man well enough himself and would see that everything was carried out to their satisfaction. Only question he had was just what made them folks so popular these days?

The Scot asked him what he meant.

Well, damned if you’re not the second posse of cowboys through here on the day. Two other fellas came through this morning, asking directions out to their place.

The Scot looked at his companion, but the Mexican had already spun for the door.

THE CLOUDS STAYED HEAVY IN THE SKY as dusk approached, but Hiram doubted they’d actually let loose before the next morning. He and Ben hitched the mule to the wagon and rode off to the Mitchells’ with an offering of corn, payment that had never been requested but that was well deserved for services of friendship throughout the summer. Eliza made them swear to be back for suppertime, and the two joked that no such swearing was necessary. They’d be back.

The mood was light in the soddy. Eliza baked cornbread and prepared a stew thick with chicken and onion. Solomon sat across from Gabriel at the table. The man trimmed his nails with a pair of scissors and explained to the boy the state of the farm as he saw it and the profits that might be seen in the coming weeks. All told, their future looked promising, and despite his earlier reluctance over the gold, Solomon seemed content with their decision. Gabriel found this more of a relief than he could have imagined. Without realizing it, he fell into an easy flow of conversation with the man. Eliza didn’t turn from her cooking, but she did pause and listen for a while, her face more at ease than it had been in many months.

They heard the horses first: the clop of their hooves against the packed earth in front of the house, a high-pitched whinny, and then a silence different from the one that had preceded it. Gabriel looked at his mother and then at Solomon. A moment passed between them, and that was all they had. The door nearly came off its hinges with the pressure of the man’s kick. The first thing the boy saw was the man’s boot, and then his silhouette framed against the evening sky, and then he was inside. Marshall, followed by the black angel on his shoulder. It took the man a moment to take in the room, and in this time Solomon flew toward the rifle above the window, Eliza stood and gripped Gabriel by the elbow, and the boy faced them head on. All motion stopped there, however, as Marshall’s hands rose up, long-barreled forty-fours pointed at both man and boy. Caleb’s rifle made one sweeping scan that seemed to leave all vulnerable.

“Well,” Marshall said, “if this ain’t cozy. Nigger, go head and touch that. See if I don’t make your boy a bastard and your wife a whore.”

Solomon’s arm was extended toward the rifle, but he held it steady. His fingers trembled, his eyes shifted from man to man, and his lips were pressed so tightly together that it looked painful. He didn’t lower his hand; neither did he complete the motion.

“Look, you heard me, didn’t you? I wouldn’t hesitate, but before you go and do something stupid, I’ll just tell you I’m here on business. Simple as that. Business between me and the boy. Once completed, we’ll be on our way. Think about that fore you ruin your family’s life.”

In the space of these few sentences, Gabriel had heard and remembered all that was Marshall. The explosion of profanity, so quickly followed by his reasonable voice, his smooth cadence and confident eyes and that smile, which tickled one side of his lips and then the other as he spoke. Gabriel turned to speak to Solomon, but the man had already lowered his arm. The boy wanted to cry out, but again the room was in motion.

Caleb slipped from behind Marshall and in two strides covered the distance between him and Solomon. He hit Solomon hard with the flat of his rifle’s stock, snapping the man’s head to one side and leaving him dazed. Gabriel moved toward Caleb, but Marshall caught his foot and sent him sprawling. He rose in an instant, but by then Marshall had his arms around Eliza, one pistoled hand tight against her breast, the other aimed pointblank at her cheek. Solomon fell below Caleb’s weight.

Marshall smiled and for the first time addressed himself to Gabriel. He spoke slowly and courteously. “Left us for dead, didn’t you? Well, I can’t blame you. Things were getting a bit out of hand. But should have had more faith, my boy, should have had more faith.”

Caleb finished binding Solomon. He threw him facedown on the floor, bound his legs and hands together, and pulled them taut, so that he lay like a cradle against the matting. This done, Caleb proceeded to do the same to Gabriel, then to tie up Eliza.

Marshall talked throughout, telling of what had befallen himself and Caleb after they’d entered the river. He spoke not as one wielding a gun and binding prisoners but as an old companion to a friend who had, sadly, let him down. He told of his swim in the Colorado, the nights spent sharing a horse and sneaking across the desert, the mule that he had had to ride and the lawman who had found humor in this and so sealed his fate in this life. He said the whole affair had made for a pathetic show—“Nothing to be proud of, I’ll tell you that much.” He speculated that Gabriel had fared much better, on a stout horse like the dun mare, what with a little armory and a load of something special to boot.

Caleb’s fingers were as hard as wood. They were bony and long, yet so powerful that they cinched Gabriel’s wrists together in the grip of one hand. The man carried lengths of rope draped around his neck, as a tailor would a tape measure. And he went about his work with a similar crispness, snapping a few coils of the rope around the boy’s wrists, passing one piece over and under the other, then twisting the knot and threading the rope back through. Gabriel could feel the man’s breath on him, so close were their faces, and just as Caleb drew the knot taut, he met the boy’s gaze. His eyes were as jaundiced and coal-black as ever, but for once they looked at the boy with an expression he could read.

Gabriel slammed his eyes shut, for the man’s eyes projected a version of the future that threatened to crowd out all semblance of sanity. It was not that the boy had read Caleb’s thoughts. Rather, it seemed that the man had thrust them upon the boy, using an almost physical force to push against his eyelids and try to enter his being. Images clamored before him like spirits calling to be made flesh. They were so close, so strong. They were nearly everything, but Gabriel fought them off, knowing he had to think more clearly than ever before. The look in Caleb’s eyes had told him that completely. The end was written there, and it would be a very bad end. It would be unthinkable, unless he could find a way. He must find a way. He opened his eyes again.

Caleb had stepped away and turned his attention to Eliza. Marshall had been rolling a cigarette as he spoke. He didn’t light it, just rolled it between his fingers. He sat down with his legs spread wide. “Now what do you reckon? Should we have ourselves a little something to eat, or should we get right to business?” he said. The room answered with silence. Marshall looked at Caleb, smiled, and shrugged. “They ain’t got much to say, do they?” He looked over the table, working his mouth casually, a bit like an elderly man might with his dentures. He pulled off a chunk of bread, dipped it in the stew, and lifted it, dripping, to his mouth.

Eliza was tied to a chair beside the table. Caleb pushed it to the side and sat just before her. He folded back her dress, exposing the naked flesh of her legs. Solomon craned his head to see, muttering a curse, but Caleb kept his full attention on the woman’s face. He ran one thin finger up her inner thigh. He went just so far, lifted his finger away, and touched it to the other thigh. He did this mechanically, slowly, looking only into the woman’s eyes and never wavering in his gaze.

Speaking through a full mouth, Marshall complimented Eliza on her cooking. “That’s a fine, fine meal. You know, this kind of thing half puts me in the mind to find myself a wife. That might be just the thing I need. Course, a woman’s expensive. My kind of woman, anyway.” He glanced at Caleb as if he’d just remembered him. “What’s going on here?” he asked, cracking a smile that said he knew the answer well enough. He stood up and looked over Caleb’s shoulder, taking in the view. “Nice. Altogether a nice piece, for a colored. You’d like a little poke, wouldn’t you? That’s what you’re thinking about. You see the look on ole Caleb’s face?” He turned to Gabriel. “See that look? That’s a man thinking about getting himself up to some unholy, barbaric doings. The kind of stuff Clemmins used to get up to. Makes me wish we had the time for it.”

Marshall sat back down and crossed his legs. “But alas, time is not a thing to waste. And ya know, I may look a wealthy man, but I’ve nothing but my good name and misappropriated horse. That and a couple of guns. Couldn’t hardly go courting, could I? And that’s what’s brought me to you people. Your boy here rode off with a fair chunk of my property. A horse I loved like a . . . well, like a horse. My guns and ammo and a little something else. I don’t suppose he told you about that little extra something, did he?”

“We buried it,” Gabriel said.

Marshall had directed his question to Eliza, but he turned and looked at Gabriel. “You don’t say? You buried it?”

The boy nodded.

“You sure, now? I won’t be sore if you bought yourself something sweet along the way. Just make sure you’re not lying to me.”

“I’m not. It’s just outside a ways.”

Marshall pulled Gabriel up by his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll leave you folks in Caleb’s hands.” He shoved Gabriel toward the door.

Eliza met her son’s eyes. It was just a second of connection, a brief glance that asked him a whole host of questions. But then the boy was gone, the questions left unanswered.

MARSHALL UNTIED THE BOY’S HANDS and had him walk a few paces before him, carrying the spade. Gabriel led him to the spot beside the creek, the same spot he’d dug up and filled in that same morning. Marshall inspected the ground with suspicious eyes until he got his fingers into a crease in the turf and pulled up the flap as smoothly as one would a rug. He gestured to the boy to work.

With each stroke it seemed the spade dug farther into the soil than Gabriel would have liked. His muscles shoved the tool into the earth but recoiled as the iron blade bit. It was a strange motion, made even more awkward by the fact that Marshall sat watching him. Gabriel tried to ignore him, digging as if alone in the world and on a mission of his own accord. But he couldn’t help glancing at the man.

Marshall rested an elbow on one knee, drawing quietly on his cigarette and watching Gabriel dig. When he exhaled smoke, he tended to look off to the horizon, his eyes exploring it for only the length of the breath, then coming back to the boy. As casual as he seemed, Gabriel didn’t for a moment forget the pistol that he held cradled between his legs. He occasionally took his hand from it, to touch his hat brim or smooth over the coarse hair of his unshaven face. Each time he did this, Gabriel’s heart quickened. His mind surged. How quickly could he cover the three paces to the man? Could he drive the spade point first into his neck? Could he swing it up and smash the back of it across his face? Would he get an extra second if the man was looking into the distance?

Marshall chuckled, and Gabriel realized that he’d been staring at the gun and his digging had slowed. He bent to the work again.

“Don’t you wish?” Marshall said. “You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you? Boy, you are a piece of work. I did a better job on you than I knew. You know what I said that first day I saw you and the other one? I said, ‘Hell, this here boy’s greener than a blade of bluegrass.’ That’s exactly what I said. But I saw you had the potential. You had an anger I thought I might could redirect in a more useful direction, if you know what I mean. You can’t say I was all wrong, either. You did turn out to be a doublecrossing, thieving little chigger. Cept you stole from the wrong person. That, and you turned out to be a self-righteous son of a bitch to boot. I couldn’t’ve predicted all that. You got brains a dimwit like Dallas or Rollins never even thought of, you know that? My personal opinion is that you shouldn’t’ve used them brains to buck me. Most white folks think a boy like you is nothing but a hairless gorilla. You could’ve used that. Could’ve had the last laugh on all of them.” He shook his head and spat. “Well, fuck it. What am I wasting my words for? You done fucked yourself, Archangel. Fucked yourself and your whole damn family.” The man got up and stretched his legs.

Gabriel dug on, averting his eyes so completely from Marshall that he wasn’t actually looking at his work. He could barely control the chill that passed through his body when the shovel hit the trunk. He paused despite himself, and Marshall smiled.

“That’s the sound I was waiting for. Go on.”

Gabriel uncovered the top, brushed it off with his fingers, and worked the edges free of dirt. He used the shovel to pry the box loose, rocking it with his weight, and finally managed to get his fingers around either side of it and hoist it out. He fell to the side as he did so, and the weight landed hard on the soil next to him. Again Gabriel’s head reeled with fear, but the box made nothing more than an innocuous shifting sound. Marshall didn’t seem to notice.

“Okay, get up. Boy, you don’t how lucky you are. I’ve half a mind to call off my grudge and ride out of here unbloodied.” He knelt down and touched the lid of the box, finding its latch and tugging it with his fingers. “Yessir, but that’s only half my mind. Other half’s a different matter. Where the hell’s the key for this thing?”

“Inside.”

A flicker of annoyance passed over the man’s face. “We best go get it then,” he said, motioning with the gun, and Gabriel fell into step before him, crate in hand.

Gabriel’s boots swished through the grass. Behind him, Marshall’s spurs produced a slight jingling with each step. The boy tried to block out the sounds and plan what he would do next. He had set this in motion, and now he’d have to see it through. If he could just get the guns in his hands . . . He’d have to try to get the key himself, to open the box himself and hope that he’d have the chance to do what came next. There was no other way now.

Marshall started talking as they headed back along the cornfield, saying something about the strange behavior of people with a gun pointed at them, but Gabriel suddenly ceased listening. His eyes shot up at some inclination of their own, and there he saw the first ripple of movement coming over the hill. It was Hiram and Ben returning in the wagon. He wasn’t sure whether Marshall saw them, but the sight sent his mind reeling. It seemed that with this development, all notion of a plan was gone. He wanted to rise on the balls of his feet and shout for them to flee. He wished he could drop the box right there and have the revolvers in his hand. He would shoot this time. He would shoot with everything he had. He could—

Marshall clucked his tongue. “If that ain’t a hassle. Who’s that?”

Gabriel didn’t answer.

Marshall shoved him on the shoulder. “Who is it? They family?”

Gabriel listened to himself speak but barely felt that he was creating the words.

“That’s just dandy. Don’t get any ideas, Archangel. You know who you’re dealing with, don’t you? You know you only live as long as I say.” With that, Marshall urged the boy forward. “Keep it casual.”

They walked on, and the wagon rolled in. Gabriel tried to focus once more, to calm his mind and bring it back. He couldn’t signal to them. He knew that much. If he did, and if they somehow understood the signal and fled for help, they’d find the others dead on their return.

They closed to within two hundred yards. Before long, the squeaking of the wagon’s wheels carried over the distance. Hiram and Ben exchanged glances. They said something to each other, but they kept coming.

Marshall and Gabriel passed in front of the barn and moved across the trampled earth toward the house. “Just don’t do nothing stupid,” Marshall said. “Let them come on in.”

A hundred yards. The wheels moved slowly, wobbling. Gabriel could just make out the features of Hiram’s and Ben’s faces. He stared for a long moment and tried to pull Ben’s eyes to him. What he might say or how, he didn’t know, but he must make the contact. He did, and whether he had a message to convey or not, Ben read something there. He turned, spoke to Hiram, and reached for something behind him.

This was enough for Marshall. He lifted one of his pistols and fired. The shot missed Hiram but passed close enough that he cocked his head and listened to the bullet’s passage. He yanked the reins and turned toward Ben. In the time this took, Marshall backhanded Gabriel across the face, sending him sprawling and loosing the box from his hands. The man was on the boy in a moment. He pushed his face into the ground and planted the weight of his knee against Gabriel’s forearm and pressed the barrel of one of the pistols against the back of his hand.

Marshall resumed shooting with his free hand. This time Hiram fell back. He tried to get off the wagon, clutching his side as he did, then changed his mind and urged the horse to speed up. He yelled something to Ben, who jumped from the wagon and ran, rifle in hand. Marshall fired the pistol, hitting Hiram once more and leaving him sprawled across the seat of the moving wagon.

Gabriel tried to wrench his hand free. He punched at Marshall with his other hand, but the man’s eyes stayed on the field, following Ben.

He had spent the bullets of one gun. He let it drop and pulled the trigger of the other pistol, the one pressed against Gabriel’s flesh. The boy felt an explosion of pain that began in his hand but ripped through the rest of his body like an electric shock. He collapsed beneath it, rolling on his back and holding his hand by the wrist before him, staring at its trembling, blood-red image against the gray sky. He was aware that Marshall was standing up and emptying the second pistol, but he knew of Ben’s escape because of the man’s response.

“Goddamn the little chigger! He’s fast as a monkey, he is.” He yanked Gabriel to his feet. “Get up, you, and stop your wailing.” He pushed Gabriel forward and stepped toward the box.

Only then did Gabriel get some sense of purpose back. He circled around the man and motioned that he would still carry the box. He got the fingers of his good hand under it and, using his foot and then his elbow, hefted it up. Marshall commented that he mustn’t be hurt too bad, then walked behind him the rest of the way to the house, reloading the pistols along the way. Caleb was standing in the doorway to greet them.

THE YOUNGER BROTHER RAN OVER THE RISE and on to the west. Before long his lungs were scorched by the effort, his legs numb and exhausted. His breathing came in deep, labored gasps, and his ears rang with the sounds his body made as he flew into the wind. But it was none of these things that finally stopped him. It was the recollection, sudden and complete, of why he was running, and what that meant for those he loved. He slowed, stumbled over something, then sprawled on the grass, still clutching the rifle.

At first the boy just lay in the grass, so shocked that he could form no clear thought but felt only a jumble of emotions that he fought not to believe. He didn’t know these men. He’d never spoken to them or heard their voices or looked closely into their eyes. How could he know what was the right thing to do? He didn’t even know how many of them there were. He’d seen two horses, but . . . Maybe they just wanted the money. They might ride off at any second . . . But there was no money. They weren’t riding anywhere. They had already shot his uncle. They had shown themselves for what they were. He knew his brother had not yet told him the full extent of their evil, and now they had come to show them all.

He had to speak to himself in simple words, clearly, silently, to steady his mind. Think. Turn and go back. He must do something, for he couldn’t wait for them to do what they would. He tried to tell himself that his actions would not open a window to chaos. That window was already open. All he could do was try to close it. He had a glimpse of a world without those he loved, and the wave of anguish it sent through him was enough to send him to his feet. He would have to find a way, and he could run no farther than this very spot on the plains.

As he turned, his eyes fell on the thing that had tripped him. There in the tall grass were the sun-weathered bones of some creature’s skeleton. His mind immediately conjured up morbid images of a dead human, but almost as quickly his eyes noticed the ragged fur that cloaked some of the mass, the curves of an animal rib cage, and the long muzzle that could only be canine. Rows of incisors still clung to the jaw, but the flesh all about them and the rest of the bones had been cleaned almost completely, pulled at, no doubt, by vultures, and eaten by maggots, and attacked by various other creatures seen and unseen by the human eye.

His eyes rose and combed the grass nearby as if he expected to see burial markers. There was nothing, only the dry grass and the warm wind from the south and the cloudy sky. He turned his gaze toward the rise that separated him from his home. He didn’t ask what providence had brought this sign to him. He just started walking, cracking the gun open as he did so and checking that it was loaded. He steadied his mind around the fact that he had only one shot with this old Kentucky long. Only one. He had only the shot already primed in the rifle. The rest of his ammo lay in the back of the wagon.

The boy closed his eyes for the space of several breaths. He walked on, feeling the grass brush against his legs. Steady. Steady the mind. Hide in the trees along the creek. There would be a clear shot from there. Steady. This was the biggest thing he’d ever been asked to do. He pushed the questions away and filled their spaces with the words the uncle had taught him to say before killing.

MARSHALL INSTRUCTED CALEB TO BRING THE OTHERS OUT, and the key along with them. Caleb slipped back inside without comment. On a nod from Marshall, Gabriel set the box down beside the men’s horses. His hand gushed blood. He didn’t know whether to clench it or to let it hang limp, so he did both, alternately. Each time he flexed it, a searing pain shot up his arm. When he relaxed it, he could feel the painful pulse through his palm. His shirt and pants were soon stained a thick red.

When Solomon and Eliza stepped outside, their eyes flew straight to Gabriel. Eliza gasped and tried to go to him. Marshall stepped in her way and explained, “He’s all right. Just hand-shot. It’s painful, and it’s a bitch to heal, but it won’t be the thing that kills him.”

In answer to his mother’s questioning gaze, Gabriel muttered something. Marshall silenced him with a forceful blow to his abdomen, but the couple seemed to understand well enough. Within seconds they saw the wagon and the dim shape half hidden within it. Solomon called for the presence of God, and Eliza asked if she could go tend to Hiram. But Marshall told her to shut her trap. He figured the old fella was dead meat right enough, and there was nothing she could do about it.

She hung her head. “I guess we can’t expect a moment’s worth of decency from you.”

“No, don’t expect nothing from him,” Solomon said. His voice was tight. It was an exertion just to form the words, but he spat them out with vehemence. “The fool walketh in darkness, and so too shall he be damned to darkness.”

Marshall found this very amusing, but he chose not to answer either of them directly. “Another time I’d discourse with you. Unfortunately, we ain’t got much time, not with the way that monkey was running. We better keep ourselves to business. What do you say, Caleb? We gonna get this over with and pull foot?”

Caleb went on staring at Eliza.

“There’s time to finish this off, but that’s about it.”

Caleb turned his head toward Marshall. He didn’t speak but shared a moment in vision with the white man. There was a statement on his face, and Gabriel read it as clearly as Marshall did.

“Okay,” Marshall said, “you do what you want once I leave, but I’m getting the gold and going. The rest is up to yourself.”

Caleb nodded.

Marshall motioned with his hand, and Caleb nudged the couple in the back of the legs so they fell to their knees. “Now,” Marshall said, “open that crate, and let’s see what we got.” He tossed the boy the key. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll even give you one way out. All you gotta do is send a prayer to heaven asking for a miracle, and this is it. You’re gonna open up that crate now and pull out my rightful plunder. You’re gonna count out the bricks, and if they come to two—two solid bricks of gold bullion—I’ll consider it a divine intervention, and the lot of you will win yourselves a pardon. But if God don’t see fit to intervene in this way . . . then you can name the spot where you take the bullet. I won’t even take no joy from it. You just name your spot. We’ll take care of each of you the same way.”

Gabriel looked down at the box. He didn’t raise his eyes when he spoke. His voice was dry, forlorn, and older than ever before. “Marshall, there never were two bars.”

“Exactly. You sure do cut to the quick of things when you want to. That’s why I’m looking for an act of God. You people have faith, don’t ya? Let’s put it to the test.”

“We don’t test our God,” Solomon said. He kneeled beside his wife, both with their hands bound behind them, but he held himself straight, chin high and bruised face jutting up into the air. “He tests us. All else is vanity.” He didn’t look at Marshall directly but added, almost as an afterthought, “And you’re about the vainest man that ever walked the earth.”

Marshall thought this over for a second, seemed to consider ignoring it, but then walked over and leaned close to Solomon’s face. “Don’t quote Scripture to me. You think I can’t spit it back at ya, don’t ya? Well, ‘Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.’ Ecclesiastes. Same book that says, ‘If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth, and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.’ Now what the hell does that mean? Ain’t that the biggest piece of nonsense you ever heard? And I’ll tell you another thing. I grew up listening to this shit, and the man who taught it to me was my father. Called himself Clemmins, and that’s all I really ever called him myself, cause I wasn’t about to call him Papa. This man used to spout the gospel like nobody’s business. You woulda thought he had the spirit in him for sure, cept he was the evilest bastard I’ve ever known. Worse than Caleb here.”

He straightened up, looking as though he might conclude the matter with that, but he caught Eliza’s eye and remembered something. He moved over to her, pushing Caleb out of the way to get near her face.

“There were a few good things Clemmins did for me when I was a boy,” he said. “One of them was, he set me up with my first screw. She was a black woman, much like yourself.” Behind Marshall, Caleb shifted his eyes. He looked away from Eliza and focused on the back of Marshall’s head. “Pretty thing she was, in her way. She was dark, like she’d just got off the boat from Guinea. She knew how to be ridden, too.” He turned away and gestured at Gabriel with his gun. “Open that thing.”

Gabriel turned the key, and the padlock fell open silently, as if it had died in his hands and gone limp. The boy moved slowly, for he had seen the shift in Caleb’s gaze. He moved the lock away from the crate and set it on the ground, then brought his fingers to the rusted iron of the latch. Caleb’s eyes had been steel-cold upon his mother, until something Marshall said . . . He lifted the latch free and released it. Caleb’s face had undergone a slow recoiling, as if he’d been slapped by a hand moving in slow motion . . . The latch stayed exactly where he left it, pointing toward him. Gabriel half opened it. He tried to read Caleb’s expression, and still he could not. The man took a step toward Marshall; his lips moved; his eyes blinked; but he was wholly unreadable.

Gabriel slipped his hand inside the crate, and for a few frantic seconds he felt nothing but the dusty grain of the wood. Then his fingers brushed something. He grasped it in the palm of his hand. It was cool against his flesh, hard and small. His finger touched the trigger. It seemed so tiny in his hand. He held out a second longer, but that was all he had. His hand rose, and with it the top of the box swung open and up came the gun, tight in his grip. The boy fully realized what he’d done only when he saw the short muzzle of the derringer before him. He knew in a flash of clarity that with this gun he’d have only one shot, a small shot at that, one that would have to be taken at close range.

Before he had time to act, a shot came from the trees along the creek. Beyond Marshall, Caleb jerked suddenly. He turned to the left, and as he did so, a spray of moisture sprang from his shoulder and hung for a second in the air. A snap followed, a dull, muted sound that Gabriel recognized as rifle fire. Marshall might have seen the gun in Gabriel’s hand, but he moved before he’d fully comprehended it. In the second it took the man to call to Caleb, Gabriel sprang to his feet, leapt over the box, and laid the muzzle of the derringer against Marshall’s neck. The man’s eyes snapped toward him, full recognition there for the first time, and the boy pulled the trigger.

At first it seemed as if nothing had changed. Marshall stood with a look on his face that was not much different from his familiar smirk. He didn’t raise his gun. He didn’t move. Then all at once his eyes flushed red, deeply and darkly red, a crimson like that which suddenly poured forth from his nose and tinted his teeth. He opened his mouth and stepped toward the boy. Gabriel thought he was falling, but instead Marshall grabbed him by the neck and brought him to his chest with one all-powerful arm. He jerked his body in one direction and another, using Gabriel as a shield against any more bullets. But he could not find the source of the shot that hit Caleb, and he turned the boy to face his parents.

Caleb held his rifle in one hand, but the other arm dangled, limp. When Marshall tried to speak, his voice was muffled and altogether unintelligible. He twice tried to form words but came out with a rasping, gurgling chaos of sound. Instead he gestured his instructions to Caleb with his gun hand, then brought the barrel of his pistol to rest on Gabriel’s cheek. He turned the boy’s face toward his parents so that he would see them die.

Caleb looked slowly from Marshall to the bound couple, then back to Marshall again. If he felt the pain of his shoulder wound, he showed no sign. Neither did he show any inclination to follow the other man’s directions, although it was clear enough that he understood them.

Gabriel couldn’t see Marshall’s face from where he stood, but he could tell the man’s eyes were locked on Caleb’s. He ordered him once more to shoot the couple, his voice a loud rasp that managed to express his meaning through the rage of the sound alone. But again Caleb stared as if he’d heard no such command. Finally Marshall cursed the black man and pulled his pistol away from Gabriel to shoot the others himself.

Only then did Caleb move. He lifted the rifle up to sight. From Gabriel’s angle, it looked as if the man were aiming at him. When Caleb pulled the trigger, the boy even felt the impact of the bullet against the side of his head. The arm gripping him moved away, and he fell free, into space. He hit the ground with a thud that released him from the sensation, and his body sprang up of its own accord. He spun in a sharp half-circle and realized then that it was not he who had been shot.

Marshall lay sprawled on his back, arms wide and pistol thrown some distance away. The boy stared at him, disbelieving. He tore his eyes away to search out Caleb, who was slowly lowering the rifle. The black man’s eyes were dark pinpoints in his face, like stones embedded in him, rock-hard objects whose function was uncertain. He shifted them from the fallen body, up to the boy, then over to the kneeling couple. They all stared back at him, sharing a moment of silence louder than any they’d ever heard.

THE TWO MEN RODE as if the entire world depended on their speed. Their horses ran neck and neck, pushing through the high prairie grass, sending up a flock of doves before them, and leaving behind them that strange silence that is the wake of bodies slicing the air. The horses were lathered and exhausted and cried within themselves for this to stop. But it didn’t. It couldn’t. The Scot felt his horse throw a shoe, and he thanked the horse for being all and completely the beautiful creature that she was. The Mexican only rode, knowing that each second passing here was a second passing there as well.

Both men knew where they were as they approached a gently sloping rise. It was a subtle feature on an expanse of similar features. They knew that they should slow here and think this through. But they didn’t, and the distance closed. The momentum they had already created, which was many weeks old now, carried them on. They crested the rise, and the homestead came into view. Only then did they rein in their mounts.

They could barely make out the players’ identities from this distance, but they knew immediately that the scene was not one they could have predicted. They took it all in within the space of a few seconds: the wounded in the field, those bound beside the soddy, the two standing, and the dead form laid out motionless in the short grass. Before the Scot could converse with him, the Mexican had spurred his horse forward. He swept down the slope at a mad run, a confusion of hooves and flapping arms and a sound that the Scot realized only later was some sort of war cry.

The black man saw him coming. He looked from one to the other of the party around him, lingering on the dead man, and then he walked to his horse. He mounted, again surveyed the carnage that he had helped create, and moved his horse forward. First at a walk, then into a canter, and finally, as if gaining strength as he moved out of the orbit of the homestead, up to a gallop. He moved to the east, away from his pursuer. He didn’t look back. He managed to make his way out of the shallow depression that was the homestead, to rise up and watch as the sky opened before him in all of its magnificent breadth.

But he got little farther than this. He felt his horse shudder before he heard the rifle’s report. The beast paused in midstride, trembled, and lost step, then regained its footing and ran on as if it were mistaken about its own injury and could gallop away from it. It couldn’t. Within fifty yards it went down, falling onto its rear and spilling the man off its backside. The man rolled away, found his footing, and dodged as the horse’s hind legs flared out at the air. It tried to rise but couldn’t, and the man saw the wound and knew it was one of death. His rifle was trapped beneath the horse. He had a pistol in a hip holster. He touched it once, almost unconsciously, but he did not draw, and soon let his hand relax at his side.

The Mexican rode toward him, now unhurried, his rifle pointing to the sky. He stopped before him. There was much the Mexican had thought he would say at this moment. He had rehearsed his words in quiet hours both waking and sleeping, and he didn’t forget them now. Neither did he speak. The black man stood before him, but it was clear that words had little meaning at a time like this. In fact, words might simply defile the sanctity of what was to come. Instead, the Mexican lowered his rifle and shot the other through the chest. The blast blew the black man backward and laid him out flat, heart-shot and spine-broken. His fingers twitched at his side for a few seconds, but this was his last motion. The Mexican looked down only long enough to verify his death. Then he let his gaze rise up and float across the plains.

The sky was a deepening gray. The clouds lay like the underside of a great cotton blanket, with all its softness and ripples and curves and weight. The black man’s horse still breathed slow, labored breaths, and the wind rushed across the prairie, rippling the grass like the ghosts of the great herds. But these were the only sounds. In all the world, these were the only sounds. The labored breathing of the living. The whispers of ghosts.