AROUND TWO IN THE AFTERNOON, EMALINE AND Red drifted off to sleep under their tarp. Jake fiddled with the Dodge awhile, checking the oil and the radiator and the battery, pumping up the tires. He was restless as a coyote, prowling around the campground, looking for something to do. Finally, he decided to walk the two miles down into Dubois for a look-see. Apart from the Wind River Range in the distance, there wasn’t a whole lot. Dubois was a pretty little mountain town with a scattering of log houses, the Yellowstone Texaco service station, the Rustic Pine Tavern and the Branding Iron, a long, low-slung log house run by Les Wright and Tom Hewlett. It had a forty-foot log bar at the back and a dance wing that was open only on Saturday nights. When Jake strolled in, Hugh Cheney was sitting at a booth, nursing a whiskey and staring out at the road, wondering how things could have gone so sour. Big Hugh was having a bad week in a bad year. He considered himself a better-than-average grifter, a fellow whose nose for a mark had made him a wanted man in seven states and the territory of Alaska. There his attempt to run a con on the widow of a millionaire rube ran afoul of a team of sled dogs, a gallon of rotgut whiskey, an Eskimo woman who called herself Roxanne and a number-16 bear trap. Hugh Cheney didn’t talk about Alaska unless somebody happened to ask why he was missing three fingers and had a list to the left when he walked. He had escaped on a freighter making the Anchorage-to-Seattle run, kissed the ground when he reached Seattle, bought a jalopy and headed for Nevada, a state where he had always found easy pickings and a noticeable lack of sled dogs, bear traps, and Eskimo women.

In Carson City, Cheney teamed up with Maisie, a born grifter so slick she had run a con on Big Hugh himself. She convinced him that she was a helpless sixteen-year-old waif trying to put together enough money to get home to her sweet mother in Sacramento. It turned out that she was really twenty-eight, she was wanted in almost as many states as he was, and she had ditched at least two husbands along the way. A month with Maisie and he was a lovesick fool. Maybe that was what accounted for the losing streak he’d been on since they left Nevada. A grifter needs a cool head and the heat he felt for Maisie was affecting his judgment.