“Is he dead?” Mister Reardon still holds the hammer.

The man’s glass eyes stare up at the sun. A fool can see he’s dead, but still I kneel there with my hands pressed to his head.

“The son of a bitch did that to himself,” Mister Reardon says.

I can’t catch my breath. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want anything to do with this, but I can’t even make myself get up. I’ve seen plenty of men have the life squeezed out of them back home, but it was never like this. Bloody, brutal, murderous.

“He shouldn’t have come here, is all,” he says. “This would never have happened if he hadn’t of come here.”

I take my hands from the man’s mutilated head. The bright red blood has gone dark and sticky between my fingers. I wipe my palms against the stiff grass, but the blood still sits in the folds and creases of my skin.

Mister Reardon prowls around the dead man. “I’m not getting strung up for the likes of him.”

You killed a man, I want to say, but I can’t make the words come. The shakes have grabbed hold of me something fierce.

He drops the hammer and grabs the dead man by his armpits, dragging him back toward the leafless bushes. I watch as he stashes the body under some shrubs and covers it with rotting leaves. When he’s done, he steps up close to me and leans in, his whiskey breath making me wince.

“You take his forge and horses and get out of here. It’s the only way.”

I shake my head. He’s drunk. And crazy. Somebody’ll find that body, for sure, and it’ll look like I’m the one who killed him if I take his things and go. I’ve already stuck my neck out too far. I should have stayed back in the shop and let them punch it out between the two of them.

Mister Reardon gathers what supplies lie around the traveling forge, tossing them into the wagon. Cooking pans, a stool, even his own blood-smeared hammer.

“You…” My tongue is thick in my mouth. “You’ve got to turn yourself in.”

He pins me with iron eyes. There’s no emotion in them, only survival. “It’s your hands covered in his blood.” His temples pulse with his heartbeat.

My lungs squeeze like I’m choking all over again. “I didn’t kill him,” I say.

He clamps his hand on my shoulder and squeezes his meaty fingers until they dig into me and he sees me flinch. “There’s no telling who the law might find guilty.”

I ball my fists at my sides. They still stick with blood. I must be the biggest eejit that ever lived. I glare at the blacksmith, wanting nothing to do with riding off with a murdered man’s forge and horses.

“Come nightfall, I’ll dump the body in the river,” he says. “And I’ll tell people the bastard’s moved on.”

When I don’t move to hitch up the horses, he does it himself and then hands me the reins. “You want something in life, you got to take it, Henry,” he says, like he’s giving me his kindly, fatherly advice.