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coat and wiped his face and hands on the liner, and rolled it as he would a cloak and dropped it into the flames, then walked up the slope to the place where Traveler waited for him.
    L ATER HE WOULD remember little of his ride back to the border. He knew he was drunk part of the time; he suspected he had an attack of food poisoning and was delirious for a night and a day; he thought he and Traveler rode in a boxcar in which the chaff spun like dust devils; he bathed in a gush of ice-cold water he released from a chute under a tower by train tracks; he saw bodies floating in a river at sunset, their clothes puffed with air. He was sure of almost all these things, at least for a few moments. Then he would remember the peyote buttons he ate in an Indian’s hovel, the rum he drank for breakfast, the fear he saw in the eyes of everyone he passed, and the voice of Wes Hardin whispering, You’re mine forever, Holland, a killer like myself, odious in the sight of God and Man. How does it feel?
    Then one bright morning Hackberry found himself on the banks of a river bordered with willow trees that had turned yellow with the end of summer. The air smelled of rain and schooled-up fish and a farmer on the far side of the river plowing under his thatch with a steam tractor. In the distance he could see cattle on a hillside and a white ranch house with a red tile roof, and a single oil derrick and poplars planted along a driveway that led to a rural church.
    Was it Sunday? He couldn’t remember. He paid a ferryman to take him across the river. On the landing a man reading a newspaper under a pole shed set aside his paper and got up and put on his hat and walked toward Hackberry, a revolver hanging on his hip like a pocket watch swinging on the vest of a blind man. “American citizen?” he said.
    “Do I look or sound like a Mexican?”
    “It’s just a question. You don’t have to act smart.”
    “My name is Hackberry Holland and this is my horse, Traveler. I’m a Texas Ranger. He’s not. I’m a citizen. He is not. Is there a town up there where we can get something to eat?”
    “Yes, sir, about three miles.”
    “Can I come inside my country now?”
    “It’s nothing personal, Mr. Holland, but maybe somebody ought to tell you.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You don’t look half human.”
    “That’s because I’m not,” Hackberry replied.

1891

H ER NAME WAS Ruby Dansen. Some said her parents came from Amsterdam and died in a circus fire set by the mother. Others said she was a foundling left in a shoe box on a sidewalk in Houston. Hackberry met her in 1890 at a Texas Ranger gathering in a deluxe hotel on Galveston Island, where a drunken United States congressman tried to feel her up and she threw a cherry pie in his face.
    “Do you know who that man is, dutchie?” Hackberry asked.
    “A potbellied old gink who just cost me my job. Call me ‘dutchie’ again and I’ll give you some of the same.”
    He looked her up and down. “Doing anything later?”
    That was how it began. She was twenty-two, she said. Then she confessed she was only nineteen. After dinner in the restaurant of the massive hotel on the beach, she changed her mind again and said she wasn’t sure how old she was. She was from either Germany or Denmark. She had been a waitress and a laundress since at least age thirteen. She also cleaned fish in the open-air market by the pier. What else did he want to know?
    “You don’t remember where you grew up?” he said.
    “What difference does it make? I don’t sell my cuny on Post Office Street, like some others I know.”
    “You’re a pretty girl. Why do you want to talk rough like that?”
    “What’s being pretty got to do with it? Don’t put on airs. You’re not in Galveston to milk through the fence?”
    He gazed out the window at the green waves cresting and breaking on the beach, the foam sliding back into the surf. “I have a ranch up on the Guadalupe. I live there by myself.”
    “You’re