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really.”
    A small crowd had bunched up at the door, straining forward, pushing past one another. From outside came a swipe of loud, angry voices. Father John stood up, crossed the hall, and shouldered his way outdoors. Warriors stood in a circle around the white man, advancing toward him, closing in. Todd Paxton looked calm, the effort stamped on his face. Shoulders back, eyes fixed on Lionel Red Bull, and the Arapaho shouting: “Get off the rez! Take your cameras and let us be!”
    Father John lunged through the circle of warriors and stood next to Paxton. He could smell the fear rolling off the man. “What’s going on?” He faced Red Bull, a troublemaker in the past, but lately he’d been coming to church with his wife, Lu, and the kids. Lu said he had stopped drinking. He was working again, a good job at the casino.
    â€œThis guy comes here.” Red Bull hissed the words. “He’s gonna make a film, show it all over TV. DVD forever. So folks out there”—he lifted both arms as if he could encircle the world beyond the rez—“they think Butch Cassidy’s loot is buried on the rez. Gold and silver. Banknotes. Whatever he got from the railroads and banks. Could be a lot of money. We’ll have a thousand treasure hunters, two thousand, roaming round, making nuisances of themselves, digging up the rez, crawling around the mountains, all thinking they’re gonna get rich. Any loot Butch left here, he left for us. You get it, Paxton? It belongs to us. Maybe nobody has found it yet, but someday. Someday! We don’t need outsiders roaming around.”
    â€œLook, what’s your name?” A note of logic sounded in Paxton’s voice. Searching for neutral ground.
Come, let us reason together.
He lifted his hands palms up, and Father John wondered if Paxton knew this was the Plains Indian sign of peace. There was the slightest trembling in his hands.
    â€œI’m Red Bull.” The man pulled himself to his full height and looked down on the director.
    â€œLook, Red Bull. If some outsider, as you call the rest of us, got lucky enough to find Cassidy’s loot, it would still belong to the tribes here. Nobody could take it away.”
    â€œYeah.” The Arapaho turned and spit onto the ground next to his boot. “What world do you live in?”
    â€œOkay, enough.” Father John took a step forward and the circle fell back. Red Bull shrugged and looked as if he were about to walk away. “Paxton and his crew are making a film about Butch Cassidy. Who he was. How he lived.” He glanced back at the white man, clasping his hands now, rubbing his palms together.
    â€œRight.” Paxton nodded. “If nobody’s found any loot in a hundred and thirty years, why would they find it now?”
    â€œThey’ll come looking,” Red Bull said. “Fools, all of them. Think they’ll win the Butch Cassidy lottery. Take your cameras somewhere else.”
    The circle had broken. The warriors wandering off, Red Bull himself stepping backward, swinging around and hurtling back inside Eagle Hall. Little groups of people were making their way down the alley to the pickups and cars parked in Circle Drive. Engines coughed and sputtered. After a moment, Red Bull ushered his wife and two kids outside and into the silver pickup parked in the alley.
    Father John turned to Paxton. “I’m sorry about this.”
    â€œIt’s what we’ve been running into. Most folks we’ve met are polite, but I guess they feel the same as Red Bull. Funny.” He was smiling now, relaxed, hands hooked into the pockets of his blue jeans. “I never took that buried treasure yarn seriously. I’m starting to think I was wrong.”

8
    THE FRAME HOUSE sheltered under a lone cottonwood, branches swaying against the sky. White cottonwood fluff blew through the air. There was no other traffic on the narrow strip of asphalt that cut