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fight.” He jabs a thumb to Hathaway’s Snider-Enfield slung on his saddle in its bucket scabbard. “How many rounds you got for that carbine?”
    “Twenty-five.”
    “You fight them until you got one round left. Save the last for yourself.” McMullen slides his finger into his mouth, clicks his thumb to the side of his hand mimicking the action of a rifle hammer striking a round. Withdrawing the finger, he wipes it with an exaggerated flourish on his trousers. “Son,” he says, “you don’t want them cats playing with you if you’re a live mouse.”
    The three men sit in silence, contemplating American soil across the Milk. The sun is a vestige of burnt-orange dome glowing on the horizon. Bank swallows are skimming above the stream, snatching insects, curvetting, rocketing up against the dying light. McMullen carries the pans and mess tins to the river, gives them a rinse, comes back, and douses the fire. “Allright,” he says, “let’s make a mile.”
    They mount, splash into the shallows of the Milk, scramble their horses up the opposite bank, fall into their former line of march. Individual stars spark into life against the dove-grey sky, the glitter steadily multiplying as the heavens turn blue-black. Soon the Milky Way hangs its trembling canopy over them. McMullen, the notorious saddle-dozer, remains alertly awake, guiding them down every twist and turn in the wagon road. Shoulders square, back straight as a plumb line, Joe is their compass needle.
    Still, with every passing hour, Case feels anxiety building. It isn’t McMullen’s advocating self-destruction in the event of defeat at the hands of the enemy that disturbs him. It is the texture of the night itself, the way the minutes crawl by, the feeling Joe is dragging them towards peril just as years ago the train locomotive dragged him through the darkness to Ridgeway. It’s the light he dreads, what it might reveal.
    Even darkness is capable of revealing that he had no business bringing Hathaway along. The boy can’t keep awake. Every half-hour, like clockwork, he begins to sway in the saddle, and Case has to ride up and give him a sharp poke. Peregrine mutters a shamefaced apology, promises to be more vigilant, but thirty minutes later he succumbs again. Hathaway needs looking after and, if nothing else, the Battle of Ridgeway taught Case he can’t be trusted with anyone’s life.
    False dawn shimmers slate-green, snaps back into a final, intense blackness. Then there is a slow flush of light; a pile of cloud becomes visible in the east, heaped like rumpled bedclothes, small birds begin to chitter and whistle in the sagebrush and juniper. As day breaks, Case twists in the saddle, sweeping all points north, south, east, and west. The sun climbs; the bunch-grass and twitch grass sweat dew. He thinks he spots mounted men in the distance, clustered at the foot of a butte, but then they resolve into harmless antelope. He feels something out there waiting for him. He would prefer it to make itself known.
    Hathaway turns his horse, comes up to him, looking worried. “Shouldn’t you have a word with Mr. McMullen? Isn’t it time to secrete ourselves?”
    “When Joe finds cover he’ll take it,” Case says tersely. His eyes move to McMullen as he says this and sees that he has halted on a small rise and is beckoning to them. They trot to his side. Joe is staring down at a coulee, its rim scribbled with brush.
    Case asks, “You thinking that’s a likely place to camp?”
    “Maybe,” Joe answers. “But that’s got me pondering.” He points to a dark mass humped in the grass near the ravine.
    “Buffalo carcass?” says Case.
    “Looks like it. Might be Indians was using that coulee for a buffalo jump. Might be they dropped that one before it reached the gulch. Might be there’s a party of Sioux down there, horses tucked away, sleeping off a feast. Wouldn’t want to stumble on them.”
    “So we move on?”
    Joe scans the horizon, looking for