Gods Without Men

1920

The Indian was up on the rocks. He must have watched them riding across the salt flat and decided to make a stand. When the posse men started to climb, he fired a couple of rounds, sending them squirming on their bellies for cover. They came back down, cursing. He couldn’t last forever. Food, ammunition or water: One of them would run short. Then it’d just be a question of who’d go up and get him. Until then, they’d have to sit and wait him out.

Deighton looked up at the sky. Though it wasn’t yet nine in the morning, the light was fierce. It fell on his head like a curse, a reminder of the guilt he bore. Without him and the lie he told, there would be no manhunt. He knew he ought to put a stop to it, to tell them he’d made a mistake, suffered a hallucination — whatever it would take. But they weren’t going to listen. The professor, the Boston Brahmin. Out here he was the lowest of the low, the lowest a white man could be.

He knew the place. That was what scared him most. Not by sight. From the last story Eliza had transcribed. You must travel to the Three-Finger Rocks and look inside the cave beneath them. There you will find Yucca Woman, weaving a basket. It was where the old Spanish friar had gone, during his missing days. She is weaving together this world and the Land of the Dead. It was the secret place, the womb of the mystery.

Death was in the sky, in the bone light hurting his eyes. Death was coursing through the sand under his feet.

He could taste it in his mouth.

He wasn’t even sure what he’d seen. But if he’d invented it, if it was some fragment of his unconscious mind, he should have been able to explain. A perception in the absence of a stimulus. A trick of his war-disordered brain.

It had begun in the Indian camp at Kairo, when he drove out to check Eliza’s work. She was sullen, as she usually was when he drew attention to her habitual sloppiness. He’d taught her his method of notation, and in the field she’d learned the value of rigor when checking grammar and pronunciation, yet she persisted in making elementary mistakes. He had every right to speak sharply. If there were to be any record of the desert Indian culture, it would have to be made now. The Indians were dying out. They were already impure, both culturally and in terms of blood. Take the informant, this Willie Prince. He admitted to a white grandparent. He’d grown up at least partly in a civilized context and had huge gaps in his tribal knowledge. And he was one of the more useful ones. There were at least two people in the camp who appeared to have some level of Negroid admixture. They were all far from pristine.

Unexpectedly, Eliza started to cry. He told her not to behave like a child. She’d known what marriage would entail. It wasn’t as if he’d sugarcoated the thing. He’d made clear when he proposed that if she didn’t feel she was cut out for the work, she should go back to New York and find herself some schoolteacher. She’d sworn she loved him. Still, she was a woman, and he had the impression she expected to be coddled. When he first left her out at Kairo, she’d utterly failed to see the logic. The two of them could gather twice as much material if they worked separately. Of course there was a certain amount of discomfort involved, but her objections were grounded in selfishness.

Checking her work took time, and he stayed at the camp longer than he intended. He had business in town, letters to write and send to Washington, and now it was too dark to drive across the desert. He told Eliza to find a spot by a fire and went to the car to fetch his bedroll. The cold was bitter. A fierce wind was blowing across the basin, the kind that cut through clothing and made its way deep into the bones. His hands already felt cramped, and he had no expectation of sleep.

When he came back, he was surprised to find that Eliza hadn’t waited for him. It took a few moments to spot her, just one shape among the dozen or so huddled inside the largest wickiup. He shook her and asked what she thought she was playing at. She told him flatly to go away. The figure lying next to her propped itself up on an elbow. It was Willie Prince. Deighton was taken aback by the frankness of the man’s stare. Indians usually avoided one’s gaze. This buck looked impassively out of his broad flat face, entirely unafraid of being caught lying next to a white man’s wife.

Deighton’s first instinct was to strike them both, but he mastered it. He was not about to have an argument in front of a research subject.

“Come outside, right now.”

Reluctantly Eliza got up, but not before a look passed between her and Prince that was unmistakable in its import. Deighton felt physically sick. Eliza was a half-educated girl. He’d worked hard on her, made her fit to assist him in his labor. He’d shown her every consideration. He expected if not gratitude, then at least a recognition of the distinction he’d conferred on her by asking her to be his wife.

They stood opposite each other, shivering in the cold.

“What in heaven’s name is going on?”

She shrugged. “Something’s happened.”

“Your vagueness is always infuriating. Now tell me precisely and clearly. I don’t want to hang about all night.”

“I can’t be your wife anymore.”

It was unthinkable. He couldn’t in good conscience call the man a savage, for he had too much respect for the People’s culture. Primitive would be the term, a consciousness whose horizons were limited in unimaginable ways. He had always considered himself tolerant, but now that he was forced to contemplate miscegenation as a real physical act, a wave of disgust rose up in his throat. She might be (what had his mother written in that foul letter?) a “little shopgirl,” but she was still a white woman.

While he struggled for a response, she told him she was going back to bed. They would talk properly in the morning. He rubbed the smooth scar tissue on his chin, unable to marshal his thoughts.

He commandeered Segunda’s ramada, spreading out his blankets as close as possible to the dying fire. Whether it was an effect of stress, or his general poor constitution, he felt a sudden need to evacuate his bowels and walked out into the desert to find a spot. Before he squatted, he looked warily around. As expected, several of the camp dogs had followed him and were sniffing about, waiting to eat the fresh excrement. He’d never been particularly bothered by the squalor of Indian settlements, but this he always found supremely disgusting. There was one animal in particular, a big black mastiff that sometimes tried to knock him out of the way even before he’d finished. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to be among the pack, and he threw a couple of stones at the others, which trotted out of range and loitered, waiting their chance.

He exhaled, trying to relax his sphincter. There was just enough light to see the little plume of his breath before the wind snatched it away. He’d been squatting a few minutes when he caught sight of something moving out in the desert. It gave off a faint greenish-white glow, and he indulged the momentary fantasy that he was on an ancient seabed, fathoms deep, watching some eerie bioluminescent fish. He stared, unable to decide what it was. Curiosity aroused, he buttoned himself up and set off to find out.

He walked into the teeth of the wind, shivering and wrapping his arms ineffectually over his chest. When he got closer he was amazed to be confronted by an Indian walking along hand in hand with a white child, a boy about five years of age. Neither seemed to be carrying any luggage, and though both were dressed in light clothes they didn’t look as if they were feeling the cold. They weren’t making for the camp. There was no settlement in the direction in which they were heading, nothing but barren desert for at least a hundred miles. Strangest of all, the child appeared to be the source of the glow.

The pair paid no attention to him. They didn’t even seem to register his existence. Hypnotized, he followed in their wake. Afterward he wouldn’t be able to say why he didn’t try to speak to them. Something prevented him. Not fear or shyness exactly. The feeling that he would be intruding. He trailed behind, trying to match their easy stride across the flat moonlit sand. He was walking quickly, fast enough to feel sharp stabs of pain in his chest, but he never seemed to gain on them. There was only one credible explanation: He was dreaming. The glowing boy and the Indian were just fragments, shrapnel thrown out by his restless brain. He slackened his pace, and the strange couple disappeared into the darkness.

The glow. Deighton couldn’t be sure. The moon was bright. Perhaps it was just reflecting off the child’s pale skin.

As he walked back to the camp, the world started to feel real again and with the return of normality, he began to be afraid. Every few paces, he felt compelled to look behind to check if he was being followed. At the edge of camp, he found Pete Mason carrying a load of kindling. Had he seen anything? Pete shook his head. Joe Pine was passing a bottle with Serrano Jackie. As Deighton came up they hid it. He waved his hands, trying to show he didn’t care about the whiskey. An Indian and a white boy? No, sir, no one like that.

Finally he shook Segunda Hipa awake.

“Segunda, there was a man and a boy here.”

“Go away!”

“A man, and a little white boy.”

“I didn’t see anything. I’m sleeping.”

“Yes, yes. But you must know something. Who has a white child?”

“White mothers have white children. Go away now.”

“I saw them, Segunda. The boy was glowing.”

She muttered irritably and rubbed her eyes. “Go to bed, you two-headed sheep. You didn’t see anything special.”

And she pulled the blanket over her head. He swore under his breath and put his head into the fug of the large wickiup. Picking his way over grumbling bodies, he found Eliza. The space beside her was vacant.

“Where is he? Where’s Willie Prince?”

“Go away. Please leave me alone.”

She rolled over. Exasperated, he went back to his spot under the ramada. Around him the camp was silent. He filched a few branches from Pete Mason’s kindling pile and sat up for a while in front of a desultory fire, trying to work out what he’d seen. After a while he gave up. It was just too cold to think. He wrapped himself up in his blankets and tried to go to sleep.

He was back in the Bois de Belleau. It was early in the morning and he was standing in a trench on the northern edge of the woods. It was a shallow trench, recently and hastily dug, and water was seeping through its unlined sides, pooling in a deep puddle at his feet. Across the field floated long white scarves of mist and the dawn chorus was in full swing, though when he looked up he couldn’t see any birds, just the charred, broken branches of the trees. High overhead hung a German observation balloon, a bloated eye looking balefully down on him. As he walked along the trench, the mud sucking at his boots, he realized he was completely alone. His unit had abandoned the position. Afraid, he watched for movement among the trees, signs of an advance. About the blackened stumps flowed a disembodied luminescence, an eerie algal glow.

At dawn he endured a shattering bout of coughing. His chest felt like it was on fire, and there was blood in the filthy handkerchief he tugged out of his pocket and pressed against his mouth. He’d known for a while that the desert air wasn’t having the effect the doctors had hoped. In his firm opinion, good health was largely a matter of mental attitude; he refused to become one of the prematurely aged, neurasthenic scarecrows he’d seen hobbling about the veterans’ hospital in New Jersey. They were men who’d left the best part of themselves in France.

He found Eliza brewing coffee. Wordlessly, she handed him a tin mug. They drank together companionably, and it was like the early days when he first brought her out to the desert, when he thought he’d found a companion.

“What now, Eliza?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to go back to town. Will you come?”

“No.”

“I see. And what do you propose to do out here in the wilderness?”

“I will shift for myself, I suppose.”

“That’s not a practical suggestion, not for an unprotected white woman.”

“That never seemed to concern you before.”

“You’re under my protection.”

“Really, David? I’ve never felt very protected.”

“Where will you go? How will you live?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“I must ask. Are you — this Willie Prince …” He couldn’t make the words come out.

“He’s a good man, David. A kind man. You were many things to me, but you were never kind.”

He could, he supposed, have talked to her about love, tried to woo her back. But that sort of thing had always seemed ridiculous. He’d never been able to play that character, the stage-door Johnny. Even when he still had all his face.

He went to the car, only to discover that the rest of his food had gone. There’d be nothing for breakfast, and it would be early afternoon before he made it back to town for a hot meal. A little gang of children watched him rummage in his footlocker. He knew they were probably the thieves, and though it broke all his rules — about decorum, about maintaining a good relationship with one’s informants — he found himself screaming at them, calling them degenerates, street Arabs, nonsensical insults that diminished him even as they came out of his mouth. Of course they just stared impassively until he’d worn himself out and collapsed into another fit of coughing. Angrily he cranked the starter on the Ford. The car was unhappy in the cold, but caught after a minute or two, the chassis juddering as he hunched in the driver’s seat and released the brake. He headed out of the camp, watched as he passed the communal trash heap by a little girl clutching an open can of corned beef, spooning out greasy chunks with her fingers.

He bumped his way along the track, following twin ruts he’d made more or less entirely himself in the months he’d been coming to Kairo. Gradually he picked up speed, his journey punctuated by evenly spaced creosote bushes. He’d often wondered about the gridlike regularity of their growth, something to do with the limited water supply; each kept the same considerable distance from its neighbors, like homesteaders on forty-acre plots. As he drove on, the circulation returned to his face and hands. The morning was crisp and bright, the hills the color of honey. He began to feel better, and regretted he’d lost his temper with the children. By the time he reached the main road and the first of the new cabins, he was humming snatches of doughboy marching songs, honking the horn for emphasis: smile! — smile! — smile!

He reached town earlier than expected and ran the car up in front of Mulligan’s Hotel, grunting a hello to the rheumy-eyed old clerk, who was sitting in his usual guard-dog position on the porch, studying a newspaper with the aid of a magnifying glass. As usual his room smelled like something had died under the floorboards. Deighton accepted full blame; the chambermaid, a timid Mexican girl of fourteen or so, had refused to touch it since he’d shouted at her for disturbing his papers.

He gulped down a cup of lukewarm water from the jug on the washstand and stripped down to his underwear, throwing his clothes over the pyramid of boxes that took up most of the floor space. Their contents, thousands upon thousands of index cards, some covered in his tiny backward-slanted handwriting, some in Eliza’s loops and whirls, represented the fruits of a year’s hard labor. Most of them were notes on the group of Uto-Aztecan languages he’d been studying, a card for each word or word stem, each distinct element of grammar. Others dealt with the People’s material culture, their philosophy, the fragments they still remembered of their old songs. His employer, the Bureau of American Ethnology, had given him a six-month grant to write a preliminary report, with a vague promise of more money if the findings were interesting. So far, through extreme frugality, he’d managed to make the money last twice the scheduled time. Eliza had complained about the poor rations and his absolute prohibition on fripperies, but he thought she’d grasped the importance of their sacrifice. It really was too bad that she’d fallen by the wayside. The time and effort he’d invested in training her had gone to waste.

Though Washington had little real interest in the ethnology of the Mojave, they liked the idea of sending a decorated veteran to a place where he might recover from his injuries. Before he volunteered for France, Deighton had worked with coastal tribes in Oregon and Washington state (it was his proud boast that he knew more about the mythology of salmon than any white man alive), but the doctor at the veterans’ hospital had told him the Northwest was out of the question. “All that rain and fog? You’d be dead within a year.” Deighton had worried the man would tell him he’d go blind. At the field hospital in Château-Thierry he’d spent a week in darkness, his weeping eyes like two rotten eggs beneath his bandages.

He trudged down the hall to the bathroom, got into the tub and crouched in a few brackish inches of water, scrubbing off a crust of sweat and dust. Then he went back to the room and rummaged around for something clean to put on, watched dolefully by the devotional print of the Virgin of Guadalupe he’d tacked up by the mirror. The image was a private joke, a dig at the Congregationalism of his youth, with its even temper, its puritan disdain for idolatry. Agony and redemption and lace and gold leaf. That, in his opinion, was a real religion.

He stood for a moment, holding a shoe, then knelt down to retrieve the other from the mess of reeds and willow twigs under the bed, relics of an attempt to teach himself some of Segunda’s basket weaves. Dressed at last, he ran a hand over his chin and realized to his annoyance that he’d forgotten to shave. There was always something. He couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of taking his shirt off, warming water, stropping the blade. Besides, there probably wasn’t a man in town who’d either notice or care.

He walked across the street to the Chinaman’s and sat down at a table as far away as possible from the chill draft blowing under the door. The Chinaman’s daughter served him a plate of some mess that tasted slightly of chicken. As usual, he tried out his few phrases of Cantonese on her. As usual, she giggled and pretended not to understand.

Back at the hotel he cleared the desk of some rubbish of Eliza’s, lit the lamp and tried to work on his latest batch of notes. It was impossible to concentrate, and for the hundredth time he found himself leafing through the Itinerary of the Spanish friar Garcés, the first white man to travel through the high desert, or at least the first to write an account of his journey. Deighton would very much have liked to converse with the old Franciscan, who’d had the privilege of seeing so many things as he wandered, carrying little but a cross and a picture of the Holy Virgin. He had the book in Professor Coues’s translation, which, though copiously annotated, was a source of great frustration. The Spaniard, intent on evangelizing the Indians, had recorded little about their language and culture. There were strange gaps in the narrative, periods of days or even weeks with no entry. One in particular bothered him. He suspected Garcés had been at the spring at Kairo, and from there had traveled back toward the river. But the Itinerary was silent, and Coues had provided no elucidation. All the country with which Deighton was most familiar was missing from the narrative. It was as if Garcés had just vanished and reappeared in another place.

At last he flopped into bed, dropping seamlessly out of consciousness and into the Bois de Belleau under heavy nighttime bombardment. Blue lightning flashes outlined splintering trees; shell bursts silhouetted running men and cascades of rock and earth. He was standing at the edge of a crater, shouting words of encouragement to troops that were no longer there. The whole scene was taking place in silence. He could touch things, see things — the vibration of the ground, the tangled undergrowth — but the only sound was a high-pitched insect whine. He woke into a blaze of winter sunlight, not knowing where or even who he was. For a few blissful seconds he was just a consciousness, a presence in the clean white flare, there to apprehend it for its own sake, without story or purpose or lack of any kind.

He dressed and went over to the Chinaman’s, where he found a table of local worthies setting the world to rights over plates of greasy eggs. Among them was Ellis Waghorn, the Indian agent. Deighton had never been able to fathom why Waghorn worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He spent as little time as possible on the reservations under his jurisdiction. Local rumor had it that his interests lay more with redrawing reservation land boundaries to the benefit of the Southern Pacific Railroad than with the welfare of native people. He was talking to the pharmacist and the owner of the general store. They nodded a greeting. Waghorn smirked, his mouth full of cornbread.

“Morning, Professor. Caught yourself any interesting diseases out there at Kairo?”

Deighton shrugged. For months, Waghorn had been insinuating that “some squaw” was the real reason for his interest in the Indian band at the oasis. As furious as the suggestion made him, he never took the bait. Waghorn pressed on.

“We were just discussing the lights Old Man Parker saw a few nights back. You see anything out where you were?”

“Lights?”

“Floating lights. Bill Parker said they was just hanging there like Edison bulbs.”

“I didn’t see anything of that sort.”

“So what are you up to out in the desert if it ain’t watching the stars?”

He ignored the other men’s hearty laughter. “Same as ever. Language work, mostly. They have a very unusual grammatical structure.”

“That a fact?”

“Actually, Mr. Waghorn, I have a question for you. Do you know of any recent intermarriages among the Indians out at Kairo?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, Indian men and white women?”

“No, sir, I should say not. They keep themselves to themselves.”

“It’s just — well, I saw a white child.”

“Half-breed, you say?”

“No, white. Very white, as a matter of fact. Boy about five years old. Walking along hand in hand with an Indian man.”

By now, people at neighboring tables were taking an interest.

“Hear that, Ben? Some Indian’s got hold of a white boy.”

“What do you mean, ‘got hold of’?”

“Professor saw him.”

“You sure about this?” asked Waghorn. “Where was it?”

“I don’t think it was — that is, I don’t think there was anything untoward about it. The boy seemed happy.”

“I ain’t heard of no one losing a child,” said Tompkins the pharmacist.

Waghorn looked puzzled. “Me neither. And this was out at Kairo? Who was the Indian?”

“It was — hard to say. I didn’t see his face.”

“Probably weren’t nothing. Just some breed. Lot of them are light-skinned.”

That seemed to be the end of it, but as Deighton pushed his food around his plate, he regretted bringing the matter up. All day he went about his business with the nagging sense that he’d set something in motion that would have consequences. He wrote his letters — to the Bureau, asking for more funds, to his sister, declining an invitation to spend Christmas with her family in Boston — then picked up a parcel of books from the post office and dropped off his dirty clothes with the Chinaman’s brother, who ran a laundry next to the feed store. That night he stayed up late with the Spanish friar’s book, trying to imagine how it must have felt to walk through the high desert, utterly alone.

The next morning he was woken by a noise outside the window. He raised the dust-smeared sash to see a ragged group of People, among them Joe Pine, being marched toward the sheriff’s office. He pulled on his pants and rushed down, joining a considerable crowd, all jostling to get as near as possible to the door.

“What’s going on here?”

“Kidnapping. Sheriff’s pulled in them Indians to ask about it.”

“Who’s been kidnapped?”

“Little boy from round Ludlow way.”

“Kairo, so as I heard.”

Deighton shouldered his way through, brushing aside a deputy who tried to bar his way. In the office Joe and his friends were lined up in front of Sheriff Calhoun, who was marching about in front of them, barking out questions like a drill sergeant. Waghorn was in the room, as well as a man he recognized as Danville Craw, the owner of the Bar-T Ranch, which bordered BIA land out near Kairo.

“Professor.”

“Mr. Waghorn. Sheriff.”

“We’re kind of busy here, Deighton.”

“Professor’s the one first saw the kid. Three nights ago, weren’t it?”

“That’s right. I was at Kairo, a little after sunset. I saw a small boy walking along with an Indian man. Lord knows where they were headed. You say he’d been kidnapped?”

Sheriff Calhoun wiped his bald head with a handkerchief. With his bull neck and a drinker’s complexion, he made a sharp contrast to the Indian agent and the rancher, both of whom had a lean, scavenging look. “Well,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what’s gone on, but that’s how it looks. Mr. Craw here saw them on his land last night.”

“I rode after them, but they must have hid themselves. It was rough country, out near Paiute Holes. A lot of boulders and such. Anyways, I lost them.”

“Isn’t the Bar-T west of Kairo?”

“That’s right.”

“When I saw them, they were headed east.”

“Must have doubled back.”

“Are these men suspects?”

“We ain’t got round to questioning them yet. Mr. Craw found them camped out in the same spot just after. None of them could say what they were doing on his land, so he and his boys brought them in.”

Joe and his companions were all stolidly looking at the floor. The others didn’t look familiar. Deighton thought they might be from one of the bands that worked the cattle ranches on the other side of the Colorado.

“Can I speak to them?”

“Professor knows their lingo.”

“I’m not sure. This is police business.”

Deighton was fairly sure he knew what they were doing at Paiute Holes. Segunda had once named it as a site on the Mule Deer song. In the days before disease and dispossession, the songs used to function both as hunting routes and as a way of organizing esoteric clan knowledge. The songs were narratives, and when one of the People died, it was traditional to chant them in their entirety, starting at dusk and ending at dawn, sending the soul of the departed on its way to the Land of the Dead via the places that meant most to them when they were alive. This system fascinated Deighton; so much of it had collapsed. The elders died without transmitting their songs; family groups were scattered. Joe and his friends had probably walked out there to sing for a dead clansman. It would have been a matter of indifference to them that it was Craw’s land, the idea that anyone could actually own land being more or less meaningless in their culture. But there was no way they would or could explain any of that to Calhoun, particularly with Waghorn present.

“Ellis,” said the sheriff. “They’re your boys. You think they had anything to do with this?”

“I couldn’t say, Dale. Joey, why don’t you explain to the sheriff what you were up to skulking around Mr. Craw’s watering hole.”

“We got lost,” said Joe. “Thought we was still on government land.”

Craw spat on the floor. “Bullshit!”

“And what about this kid? Which of you’s going to tell me what you all was doing with a white child?”

No one volunteered.

“Who is the child?” asked Deighton. “When was he reported missing?”

Calhoun sat down heavily in his chair, which creaked under his weight. “Well, we ain’t actually had a report yet. I’ve sent a wire to Victorville, and one of my deputies is over in the valley, asking around.”

“You mean no one’s even made a complaint?”

Craw turned on him furiously. “God damn it, Professor! This ain’t no time for splitting hairs. Some brave’s dragging a poor mite round the desert with him. Who knows what he’s about to do—”

“Do? What do you mean ‘do’?”

Craw jutted his chin at the Indians. “Weren’t so long ago they used to eat our livers. Lord only knows what purposes they got in their black hearts.”

“Look, Professor,” interrupted Calhoun. “I hold you partly responsible for this mess. You saw that child and you didn’t do nothing about it. Authorities wouldn’t even have known if it weren’t for Ellis here, who saw fit to mention it after Mr. Craw brought in them boys.”

“I don’t understand why you’re making such a deal out of this.”

Craw looked genuinely astounded. “My sweet Lord, will you listen to him? Some poor little Christian child’s going to be eaten alive unless we make a so-called deal out of this.”

Calhoun looked at him sourly. “Chances are it’s one of the boys from Kairo. Professor, you were the one saw him. You sure you didn’t recognize him?”

Deighton thought for a moment. And then he committed his great sin.

“Well, there was one man who seemed to be missing from his place.”

“What man?”

“His name is Willie Prince.”

“I know him,” said Waghorn. “Arrogant son of a bitch.”

“Looks like we ought to take a drive out to Kairo. Professor, you’ll take us.”

As they left the office, the crowd pressed forward, trying to find out news. The mood was ugly. As Calhoun confirmed that they were holding the Indians in custody “pending inquiries,” someone at the back yelled out that they ought to string the red bastards up from a tree.

The journey out to the oasis seemed interminable. The car complained as it climbed the grade up into the high desert, past an area of new claims marked by half-finished cabins and piles of building lumber. Deighton took the turn toward Kairo at speed, juddering down the frozen track toward the distant mountain range, which on that day looked dull and lifeless, a jagged iron-gray strip on the horizon. A grit-laden wind was whipping out of the north, stinging his cheeks and making him glad of his driving goggles. Mercifully neither of his passengers wanted to talk. They sat, hunched down into their jackets, hats pulled down low over their eyes. Waghorn had his hands jammed into his pockets, Calhoun’s on the carbine laid across his lap, like a musician waiting his turn to play.

When they saw the camp up ahead, Waghorn and Calhoun shifted impatiently in their seats. Deighton squinted ahead.

“Doesn’t seem to be anyone there.”

Calhoun grunted and lit a cigarette. They pulled up in a cloud of dust and stepped down, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands to bring back the circulation. Calhoun and Waghorn strode around, pulling open covers and peering into wickiups. The embers of the fires were still warm. A few dogs were nosing about in the trash; as the men walked about, they came forward inquisitively, hoping for food. Waghorn aimed a kick at one, which trotted a little farther off. “Now we know they’re up to something,” he said.

“Where do you think they’re headed, Ellis?” asked Calhoun.

“Into the Saddlebacks, I reckon. Any number of caves up there. They’ll be easy enough to track. You think they’ve got the boy with them?”

Calhoun stuck his head through the doorway of another wickiup and rapidly withdrew it. “I think we got someone. Jesus, it stinks like shit in there.” Deighton crouched down and looked through the opening. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The stench was overpowering. Excrement, vomit and something else, something familiar to him from the war: the smell of a body in extremis. An elderly man lay on the ground, swathed in blankets. His breathing was labored, rattling in his chest like a bead in an empty box. By his side sat Segunda Hipa. He spoke to her in the People’s Language.

“Segunda. Are you sick?”

The old woman’s eyes were wide with terror.

“It’s all right. Nothing’s going to happen. Why did they leave you behind?”

She named the man she was sitting with. “He’s dying. It’s not proper to leave him alone.”

“Segunda, where is Eliza? Where is Salt-Face Woman?”

“Gone, where you can’t find her.”

“Is she with Willie Prince?”

Segunda said nothing.

“What’s going on?” asked Waghorn, trying to see past Deighton into the gloom.

“Just a moment.”

The old man groaned. Segunda took a rag and wiped his face.

“Segunda, tell me about the boy. I know you know something.”

“Why did you bring them here?”

Waghorn pushed past Deighton into the gloom, his foot crunching through something on the packed-earth floor, probably a basket.

“Come here, old woman. You need to talk to us.”

With one hand pressing a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, he took hold of Segunda’s arm with the other. When she didn’t immediately get up, he tightened his grip, dragging her toward the doorway. She began to wail, a high-pitched ululation that cut through the fetid air.

Deighton was appalled. “For God’s sake, leave her alone!”

“Get out of my way.”

Deighton tried to break Waghorn’s grip on Segunda’s arm and all three of them ended up outside in the dust, Segunda in a heap on the ground, the two men swearing and scrabbling to pick themselves up.

“Christ, Deighton, I said get out of my way. And now, you flea-ridden old cunt, you’re going to tell me what’s going on here. Where’s the kid?”

Deighton pleaded with Calhoun. “Sheriff, do something, or I will.”

“Ellis—” said Calhoun. “Lay off her, Ellis. This isn’t helping none.”

Waghorn let go. Segunda sat in the dust and lowered her face into her shawl. Deighton stepped toward the Indian agent, his fists clenched. “Professor,” warned Calhoun, “you better back up there.” Deighton glanced over and saw the carbine in the sheriff’s hands, the barrel leveled at his stomach. Part of him, the detached, externalized part, wondered how the situation had gotten so out of hand. He took a pace back. Waghorn’s hand was on his own gun, a long-barreled revolver holstered under his battered leather coat. The three men looked warily at one another.

“What kind of fool are you?” Deighton asked Waghorn. “She didn’t want to talk. Now she never will. The others obviously heard what happened to Joe and his friends and ran away. I can’t say as I blame them.”

“Oh, can’t you?” Waghorn wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Calhoun lowered the carbine and squatted effortfully down on his haunches, the breath whistling out of him like a deflating bladder.

“Come on, old woman. Don’t pay him no mind. No one’s going to harm you. Why don’t you tell me what’s happened here? We’re just trying to find a child who’s gone missing. Little boy.”

Segunda said nothing, staring fixedly at the earth in front of her. Waghorn kicked the ground in exasperation.

“Tell us, or your scrawny ass is going to find itself sitting in jail right alongside them others.”

The old woman sat in stubborn silence. Deighton felt sick.

“Please, let’s just go. She can’t help us.”

“Well,” said Calhoun, raising himself to his feet. “If she can, she’s choosing not to.”

“Dale, you ain’t just going to let her get away with this?”

“Ellis, I don’t know how you get anything done at all with these people. You’re worse’n a rabid dog.” He looked at his watch. “Too late to make it back into town now and besides, I don’t think my butt’ll stand any more of riding about in that damn bone clanker. I told Mellish and Frankie Lobo to ride over to the Bar-T if there’s news. We’ll stay the night there and work this thing out in the morning.”

Waghorn and Calhoun started walking back to the car. Deighton crouched down next to Segunda.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

She didn’t speak. He made an ineffectual attempt to brush the dust off her shawl, then held out his hand, offering to help her stand up. She ignored it, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the patch of dirt in front of her. Finally he walked away. As they drove off, the dogs trotted after them, their tongues lolling out. They looked as if they were laughing.

At Craw’s ranch, Deighton refused dinner and went straight to the bunkhouse, where he lay awake for some hours, his face to the wall. Much later he heard others come in. A man climbed into the bunk above him. He pretended to be asleep.

At dawn, two deputies and an Indian policeman from the large reservation near Victorville arrived in the town’s official car, a four-door Studebaker. Sometime in the night, Union Pacific employees working at a depot thirty miles north of the Bar-T had sighted an Indian running through the desert, carrying a young white boy. They said he seemed to be heading for a range of mountains known as the Saddlebacks. When Deighton heard this, he wondered how a couple of men standing outside in the middle of the night could see so far into the distance.

“Did they by any chance say anything about a light?”

“What kind of light?”

“From the boy. Did they say the boy was giving off light?”

Everyone looked at him like he was insane.

There was more news. A family of homesteaders down near the mineral pool at Palm Springs had lost a boy two months previously. Ten years old, he’d last been seen climbing rocks in the vicinity of an old mine working. For most of the men gathered round Danville Craw’s scarred pine table, that clinched it. There was a missing boy and a kidnapper. The only question was how to proceed with the manhunt. Once again, Deighton spoke up.

“There’s no way the boy I saw was ten years old. He couldn’t have been more than six, seven, at most.”

“Professor,” said Calhoun carefully, “thanking you for your concern, but I reckon it’s time you got back to your books. I’ll handle it from here on in.”

“You’re sending riders up into the Saddlebacks?”

“I imagine that’s how it’ll pan out.”

“I want to go with you.”

“What?”

“You heard. I want you to deputize me.”

“With respect, Professor, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

Craw, drinking coffee with his feet up on the table, laughed scornfully. Deighton turned on him. “I know the language. I’m certainly a damn sight better at dealing with Indians than that fool Ellis Waghorn. And I have the Ford. I think I’d be very useful.”

Calhoun shook his head. “You reckon on tracking him in your automobile? That Indian ain’t sticking to no roads. He’s somewhere out in the Saddlebacks, climbing for all he’s worth. Your flivver ain’t gonna be worth shit once we get past the rail depot.”

“I can ride.”

“You got a horse?”

“I’ll borrow one from Mr. Craw here.”

“Hell you will.”

“Then I’ll buy one. I’ll give you a fair price.”

Calhoun thought for a moment. “Well, we do need every man we can get. But what about your health, if you don’t mind my asking? If you can’t keep up, we ain’t gonna be able to wait on you.”

“Let me worry about my health.”

“All right, then. I’ll swear you in.”

“Thank you, Sheriff Calhoun.”

“One thing, Professor, before I do. I’ve seen how you rub people up the wrong way. You come along on this and you’re under my authority. I know about how you was a college man and an officer in the war and heaven knows y’all got the scars to prove it. But you ain’t no officer now. You’re just a deputy. So you do as I say and keep your mouth shut, ’specially around Ellis Waghorn. I won’t stand for no more incidents like yesterday.”

The speech made Deighton furious, but he nodded assent.

“OK. Raise your right hand. Do you swear to keep and preserve the peace in the county of San Bernardino, and to quiet and suppress all affrays, riots and insurrections, for which purpose, and for the service of process in civil and criminal cases, and in apprehending and securing any person for felony or breach of the peace you may be called upon at such time as needed?”

“I do.”

“By the authority vested in me, I appoint you a temporary deputy of this county. Get the man a horse, Danville.”

Deighton walked with Craw to a corral near the bunkhouse. The place was a mess, crates stacked up in teetering piles against a tumbledown shed, bits of tack hanging higgledy-piggledy from the hitch rail. In the pen, five half-wild mustangs stepped and kicked, shying away as the men drew near. Craw unpromisingly described them as “green broke.” Privately Deighton thought that was an overstatement.

“Don’t you have any properly trained horses?”

“Well, listen to him. Yes, sir, I do. Trouble is my men took them. You want to try out one of these or have you changed your mind?”

A few hands drifted over to the rail to watch. Deighton pointed at a bay that seemed marginally more docile than the others. Craw ducked under the fence and slipped a hackamore over its head, then walked it around with a lead rope as it stamped and shied. Deighton stuck with his choice. It was impossible to say whether it was considered good or bad by the authorities leaning on the rail. The horse skipped from side to side as he mounted, turning its head and eyeing him angrily. He trotted it a couple of times around the corral without incident, then tied it to the rail. Deighton had learned to ride English-style back east. This was different; even the tack was strange, the big square-skirted saddle with the high pommel, the unfamiliar bridle. Craw looked appraisingly at him and started to talk money. Once they’d agreed on a price, an exorbitant amount that Deighton secretly knew he had no means of paying, he joined the other posse members getting ready, filling a canteen, retrieving his bedroll from the car, packing a leather bag with some tinned beans and franks, a razor, a bar of soap, Friar Garcés’s book. All about him, men were cinching saddles, slipping carbines into scabbards. He saw Ellis Waghorn watching him, his lip curled. For a moment Deighton imagined him being hit by a howitzer blast, leaping high in the air.

They rode out an hour later. As the sun rose higher, they followed the line of barbed-wire fence that demarcated the Bar-T from the BIA reservation. A fine cloud of white limestone dust rose up over the horses, settling on the riders like sieved flour. Ahead of them the desert stretched away in the direction of the Saddlebacks, a serrated ocher ridge rising abruptly from the white plain. As they headed away from Craw’s land, they climbed up through fields of rounded boulders, dipping down again into wide sandy washes, a rhythm that began to vary only as they neared a formation of dunes. Around noon they sighted a line of telegraph poles. Half an hour later they hit the railroad track and followed it until they came to the adobe buildings and big metal water tank of the railroad depot.

As Calhoun and Waghorn pored over maps and planned their route, Deighton lined up to refill his canteen from a big clay olla. When it came to his turn, he drank from the tin dipper and laved a little water over his head. The tracker, Francisco Lobo, was smoking and looking out at the mountains. He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, with a hooked nose and a smooth round face that made it hard to tell his age. He wore his hair short, with a crumpled pinstripe suit jacket and a straw hat crammed down low over his head, an ensemble that gave him an oddly formal look. Deighton walked over and stood beside him.

“Who do you think it is?”

Lobo looked blank.

“The fugitive. Who is he?”

“Just a man, I guess.”

“I’ve heard of Indian tribes raising up white children, but that was a long time ago. Pioneer days. I don’t understand why he’s got this boy.”

“I ain’t even sure there is a boy.”

Just then Calhoun blew a whistle, shouting at everyone to gather round to get their orders. Some men would ride a handcar to the next station east, where they’d pick up horses and try to cut the fugitive off on the other side of the range. The others were to head for the mountains, trying to pick up the Indian’s tracks. They dispersed to saddle up, then rode out in two lines, each group heading for one of the old mining trails that ran through the mountains. They were barely an hour out from the depot when Lobo held up his hand. The men dismounted and gathered to look at what he’d found. To Deighton it was barely visible, an insignificant oval displacement of sand. Lobo walked on. He found a second print, then a third.

“He was running fast,” the tracker said. “Very fast, heading for the mountains.”

Calhoun shook his head in disbelief. “Look at the length of his stride. It’s what, six, seven feet? That’s incredible.”

Craw was skeptical. “It ain’t real. He’s doing something, disguising his tracks.”

“I don’t see how.”

“I’ve heard of this before,” said Lobo, “but I never saw it for myself. The man’s a true runner. He knows how to run the old way.”

“The old way?”

“Not like ordinary men.”

Lobo shielded his eyes and looked toward the mountains.

“I don’t think we’ll catch him.”

Calhoun was irritated. “I don’t care if he’s an old-running Indian or a young ’un, he can’t keep that pace up forever. Besides, there’s no food up there. He can’t have picked up anything to eat between the Bar-T and here. He’ll be tired and hungry and he’ll slow down. We’ll get him.”

Lobo shook his head. “I don’t know, Sheriff, sir. There’s more to eat in the mountains than you think. And some of the People hide food up there for when they’re hunting. Piñones, jerky. Maybe he knows a place.”

Calhoun didn’t like being contradicted. He spat on the ground, then pulled out a pocket mirror, which he used to signal the second group of riders, some miles to the south. When he saw them change their course, he gave the order to saddle up. They rode on, following the footprints toward the mountain range, making their way across a plain of round rocks scattered with ocotillo and sage. Gradually, the shadows lengthened and the warm evening light softened the landscape, turning the white rocks honey-yellow. By the time the heat had gone out of the air, they were at the foot of the mountains, and hadn’t found any sign of the fugitive for an hour or more. At dusk they were following the only plausible route, a narrow trail up a steep ridge, watching the last orange glow recede from the desert below. As they notched the pass, they saw it led down into a natural shelter formed by two steep walls of rock. Shepherds had built a paddock and a crude stone hut with a horse’s skull nailed over the doorway. The hut was in ruins, and must have last been used many years previously, but there was wood stacked inside and water in an old stone tank. They made camp there. By the time the second posse arrived, they had a fire and coffee on the go. The hobbled horses nosed about for fodder, while the men ate beans and tortillas. Deighton took his plate and sat down next to Lobo. Though no one else was paying much attention, he spoke in a lowered voice, aware that the tracker might not want to speak openly. “Why did you say we’re never going to catch him?”

“Like I said, he’s a true runner.”

“What does that mean?”

“In the old times, there were messengers who could cover two hundred miles in a day. True runners. They knew there’s more than one way to run.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I was a boy, we lived over on the other side of the river. There was a band of men who ran together. Not to get any place. Just for the joy of running. One of them was a young feller name of John Smith, though he had other names. When he was with his friends he ran ordinary, but on his own he ran another way, the old way, least that’s what people used to say. There’s a story about John Smith, how he and his friends are camped by Paiute Holes and he says good-bye and gets up to go to a camp way upriver, place they call Adobe Hanging Like Tears.

His friends watch him run off, running easy like he always does. They’re curious about how he runs when he’s alone, so they decide to follow him. At first they find his footsteps, long footsteps like we just saw. But they keep getting longer and longer, ten feet, twenty feet, until they just disappear. John Smith’s friends run upriver, following the path. After some days they come to Adobe Hanging Like Tears and they say to the people there, did you see John Smith? And the people say yes, he was here on such and such a day, just as the sun was rising. It was the same morning he left Paiute Holes.”

“So this John Smith was a shaman?”

“No, no, he never carried a stick, never had visions. He was just a man.”

“But he had a magic way of traveling.”

“Not magic. He never used magic. He just knew how to run.”

That was the end of Lobo’s story. As Deighton lay by the fire, his head propped uncomfortably on his saddle, many things seemed to collapse into one: the runner disappearing and reappearing instantaneously at his destination, the wandering Spanish friar, Coyote clinging to the reed and weaving his way into the Land of the Dead. Was this where Garcés had journeyed in his lost days? Was this where the running Indian had led them? He fell asleep listening to the horses shifting about in their hobbles, and dreamed of Eliza, instead of the mud and confusion of the Bois de Belleau. The cold was fierce, and he woke up sometime before sunrise with a stiff neck and a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away, however hard he tried to suppress it.

All that day he was in pain. He felt cold right down to his bones, and the sun was high overhead before he stopped shivering. He was unused to riding. The muscles in his back and legs felt sore, but more serious was the pain in his chest. Something about the motion of the horse seemed to aggravate it, and he began to wonder if Calhoun was right. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to keep up after all.

High in the mountains they came upon an abandoned silver mine. The shaft had caved in, leaving a set of iron rails disappearing into a pile of rocks, like a conjurer’s illusion. By this stoppered mouth a crude stone arrastra stood by a pile of tailings. Someone had camped there the previous night. Amid the ashes of a fire were lizard bones. Lobo knelt down beside them. Calhoun prodded them with the toe of his boot.

“Well, Frankie, that puts paid to your theory that our boy had food up here. Can’t have been much of a meal, that chuckwalla. You ever eat one of them things?”

Lobo said he never did. His people were from the river. Only desert people ate lizards. They followed the mining track until it emerged at the head of an escarpment overlooking a vast empty basin that stretched away at least thirty miles, before the next range rose up to block its way. He’d never been in that country before, and was awed, as he often was in the desert, by the sheer absence of human markers, of any kind of recognizable scale. He didn’t doubt it now. This was the silent space, the land of Garcés’s missing days. The sun was setting, turning the whole expanse red, darkening to a sinister black at the base of its only feature, a cinder cone that rose up out of the flat gravel like a pimple. Calhoun took out a pair of field glasses and spent several long minutes scanning the scene.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said at length. “There he is.”

They passed the binoculars from hand to hand. There wasn’t a hint of moisture in the air. Visibility was perfect. Deighton took a while to pick it out, a little wisp of dust in the emptiness, a flicker of blue casting a long shadow. It seemed impossible. How far away was it? Ten, maybe fifteen miles? A running man wearing a blue shirt. On his shoulders a bundle of some kind. A child? It was impossible to say.

The mining track ran out and they made their way down a talus slope, picking a path as carefully as they could, the horses placing their feet with the care of tightrope walkers. This was where Deighton’s mount threw him. For two days the nameless bay had been docile; its show of temper in the corral seemed to vanish once they were out in the desert. Deighton was daydreaming, trusting the animal to find the best route down in the gathering darkness, when suddenly it reared up, sending him backward out of his saddle. Instinctively he broke his fall with his hand, twisting his arm beneath him as he landed. The horse kicked out, narrowly missing his head, then skidded some way down the slope, almost falling as the loose gravel slipped under its hooves. There were yells from farther down, as the lead riders saw rocks bouncing down toward them. The panic spread to animals on either side. A burro, laden down with firewood and provisions, slipped its halter and bolted.

Deighton got to his feet, flexing his wrist, expecting to find it broken. It seemed only to be sprained. A few cuts and bruises and a torn pair of pants was the worst of the damage. He was fixed up by one of Craw’s hands, a grizzled oldster named Silas Henry, who grinned at the world through a set of shiny teeth he claimed he’d crafted himself from gold he’d mined at Skidoo, before the panic wiped him out.

They camped at the foot of the slope. It was a sorry, exposed spot. As the heat fled from the land, a bitter wind started to whip across the plain, picking up sparks from the fire which raced through the air like little comets. The burro’s load of mesquite branches burned quickly, and after a hurried meal everyone made ready for bed, jostling for position near the embers of the fire.

In the violet haze of the early morning, as Deighton drank his coffee and ate his scoop of beans, Waghorn passed by and aimed a kick at his boots.

“I didn’t get no sleep because of you. Goddamn coughing.”

Deighton was too tired and sore to talk back. He thought he was running a fever. The handkerchief stuffed into his inside pocket was soaked with blood.

As dawn broke they put on speed, riding fast over the plain until they were slowed down by the lava field, with its fantastical twists and bubblings. They kept stopping to look through field glasses, but there was no sign of the running Indian. “There’s nowhere for him to go,” pronounced Calhoun, as if by saying it he could make it true. They were low on water, and the horses were tiring. No one was looking forward to another climb. Deighton was glad of each break, pain and fatigue overcoming his fear of what lay at the end of the chase, the resolution to the thing he’d set in motion.

The sun was over the mountains when they saw a mirror flashing many miles to the south. They turned the noses of the horses toward the signal. As they rode Deighton could feel his head dropping forward, lights twinkling in his mind. He wasn’t sure if the country he was seeing was real anymore. It seemed tentative, mutable. First he found himself on a salt pan, bright white and perfectly flat. Then in high country, where huge boulders rose up between the draws, their shapes like children’s clay models. An elephant. A gas mask. A skull. They passed through a garden of cholla cacti. A hawk flew overhead. When, at last, they stopped, some of the men dug out a creek bed, looking for water. A few feet down, they struck it, a brown brackish trickle, then a steady flow. The horses drank.

He could taste death in that water. That was when he knew they were close.

Soon there were other men. Handshakes and low voices. The second posse had a city fellow with them, a Hearst journalist out of San Francisco, with a camera and a tripod strapped behind his saddle. It’s a big story, he told them. You got yourselves a crazed Indian. Nothing the readers back east like better than a little taste of the wild frontier.

Deighton had no recollection of lying down or going to sleep. The stars overhead formed an inverted bowl, a crystal dome, over his head. Almost at once he was shaken awake. It was still dark. Around him, men were loading guns, saddling horses, making ready.

“We seen his fire. He can’t be more than five miles away.”

They rode across the dry lake through a gray half-light, neither day nor night, but something in between. He felt delirious, ethereal, as if he were no longer completely inside his body. In the distance he saw the three spires of rock and knew that he had come to the threshold, the opening between this world and the Land of the Dead. Up on the rocks was a glow. It didn’t look like firelight, but something else, something spectral and strange.

Oh Lord, he prayed. If you exist, make something happen. I have brought this about, out of jealousy. Lord, save me from the guilt of what is about to happen here.

They sat and they waited. The sun rose high in the sky, but the chill stayed in the air. Deighton watched the sky, and thought he saw things written in it. Secret trails. Wisdom. He wondered who was up on the rocks with Willie Prince. Not a child. How could he have taken a child up there? But Eliza? Please Lord, he prayed again. Let her not be with him.

The gunfire sounded like boys throwing firecrackers.

The posse had gotten tired of waiting. They moved forward in a crouching run. The figure up on the rocks fired shot after shot. As Deighton watched, Danville Craw went down, clutching his leg. After that they crawled, taking cover as they climbed. It was an unruly, ill-disciplined advance. None of them would survive a minute in the face of those German guns. Do you need me to cut the wire? he asked. No one answered. Unless someone cut a route, they were going to get tangled up in the wire. Up in the sky a pale eye looked down on him. God’s German eye.

That was not where he was. Why had he thought so? That was not where he was at all.

Waghorn was screaming, a continual high-pitched wail.

Deighton stood up. He opened his arms wide to show he was unarmed. He shouted out a greeting.

“Garcés! Fray Garcés! En nombre de Dios!” He repeated it as he walked forward. “Get down, you fool!” yelled Calhoun. Ignoring him, Deighton climbed the path, stepping over Craw, who was lying in the dust, pressing his palms into the bloody wound in his thigh. A bullet ricocheted off the rock at his feet. Then someone tackled him from behind. He sprawled. The ground was ice-cold.

He lay for a long time, straining to catch his breath. He felt as if he were drowning, his lungs filling with sludge, each inhalation coming in a little whistling rasp. He did not know where he was, why he was there. After a while he realized the firing had ceased. From up on the rocks came a ragged cheer.

As slowly as an old man, he stood and trudged his way upward, stopping every few moments to rest. The others had all gone on. Up ahead, at the base of the tallest spire, he saw a sudden flash of magnesium light. Men were clustered around a corpse, laid out on the ground.

“I shot him!” exulted Waghorn. “I got him! A clean kill!” Silas Henry capered about, grinning his big gold grin.

The Hearst man was taking trophy pictures. Waghorn and Calhoun with their rifles crossed, boots on the corpse’s chest; Craw supporting himself on someone’s shoulder, keeping the weight off his bandaged leg. Deighton looked down at the body, its clawed hands, bare feet. It was impossible to tell who it was. The face was blown clean off.

“Who is it?” he asked.

Francisco Lobo looked at him strangely. “No one I ever saw before.”

“Where’s the boy?”

“There weren’t no boy.”

Around them, tired deputies were slapping one another on the back, passing round a bottle. No one seemed to care they’d chased a man for days across the desert, then murdered him without cause. They were victorious hunters. Once the photographs were done, they started to cut brush and pile it over the corpse. Deighton tried to pull it away. He wasn’t sure who was beneath it, but he knew they ought to carry him down, give him a decent funeral. Two of Craw’s hands dragged him off and laid him on the ground. It’s just an Indian, sneered one. He don’t care.

They stepped back and lit the pyre. Deighton watched the circle of unshaven haggard faces staring avidly into the flames.