Once Eli was settled, Two Spuds mounted the pinto and set off at a walk. At this speed, the six miles to the main house was going to be a long ride in the cold. He tied his bandanna over his face, but it didn’t help much. He kept looking back, checking to see if the man on the pony drag was alive or dead. There was no way to tell. He had tucked a bottle of whiskey inside his belt in case Eli wanted a jolt to keep him warm. Eli wasn’t capable of drinking, so Spuds took two long pulls and felt the warmth going down. A light snow was falling, the wind was blowing, powdery snow rose like steam a hundred feet in the air. His eyes watered from the cold. He tucked his jaw into the collar of Jenny’s coat and rode with plenty of slack in the reins, letting the pinto pick its way along the ruts of the road. Now and then he felt a hard tug as the travois bucked into a rut, but he had done a good job with the rope and the buffalo robe. His cargo was secure.

Juanita Barrios woke from a dream of the dead. In her dream, the spirits of the dead rose with the smoke of the kitchen fires in the little houses in her village in Chihuahua. The spirits of her father, her mother, her brothers drifted in the smoky air over the village, the restless dead refusing to lie still so that on the nights when the dreams came, she slept in snatches, trying to steal a little sleep from the spirits.

The grandfather clock in the parlor of the great house tolled once, echoing along the polished wooden floor of the hallway. One o’clock. She had fallen asleep in the rocking chair in the parlor, her index finger marking her place in the Paint family Bible. She read the Bible to improve her English, but she was often sidetracked by the pages of family history left by generations of Paint women who had recorded all the births and deaths and marriages since the Welshman Ezekiel Paint arrived in Boston before the Revolutionary War. She could imagine the women, seated as she was sitting, by the fire on a winter evening, with cups of cocoa or tea at their elbows, neatly jotting the name of a newborn or the death of a distant uncle as the wind howled outside: “John Milton Paint, b. March 1, 1903, d. March 7, 1903.” Eli’s baby son, followed in death a month later by the boy’s mother, Livvy, her death recorded in a young girl’s hand. One of the older daughters surely, Tavie or Velma or Marguerite.