Though only Alamo was in the pen, several other horses stood around outside the gate, waiting for their morning feed. Purdy caught one while Rusty struggled to lift his saddle to Alamo’s back. The weight bore heavily on his weak leg. Webb helped him finish saddling, then gave him a boost onto the horse’s back. Rusty grunted involuntarily. The leg ached from the exertion.

“The Lord ride with you,” Webb said.

“He’d do better to ride with James, and slow him down.”

Geneva was there as Rusty rode Alamo out the gate. She reached up to squeeze his hand. Her voice seemed about to break. “James is not the only one at risk in this. You are, too. Be careful, Rusty.”

On an impulse too strong to resist, he leaned down and put his arms around her. Urgently he kissed her on the lips, holding the kiss until he felt his lungs would burst.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

Striking a trot, then a lope, Purdy pointed the way across country rather than follow the winding wagon road.

Purdy worried, “If James gets there before us, I don’t know what we can do.”

Rusty confessed, “I don’t know what we’ll do if we get there first. But we’ll do somethin’ even if it’s wrong.”

Nothing would be without risk. If he arrested James, he would not only alienate the Monahan family but would put James in jeopardy of being dragged out of jail and lynched by the Dawkins faction. At the least, such a move would result in James’s being taken by the conscription officers and forced into Confederate service. Rusty could simply warn Dawkins, but that would probably result in getting James waylaid and killed.

Mike Shannon had once told him to have confidence in himself, that he would know the right thing to do when the time came.

He wished Daddy Mike could whisper in his ear now.

The Dawkins farm was quiet. The thin moon shed but little light on it, and the eastern horizon showed no hint of sunup. He saw the dim glow of a lamp in the window of a small log structure, evidently a bunkhouse, and another in the larger house, where he assumed Dawkins lived. A milk-pen calf bawled for its mother. Rusty figured a hired hand was milking, for a lighted lantern was suspended from the rafter of a low shed nearby.

He said, “I wish we could get to Dawkins without stirrin’ up everybody on the place.” It had been on his mind that he might arrest the man and sneak him away before James arrived. It would be difficult to do without the colonel raising unholy hell and rousing everybody within hearing.

Purdy suggested, “We can circle around his house and slip in through the back door.”

A lot of small houses in this part of the country had no back door, but Dawkins’s was of a size that would surely have a second way in and out. Rusty hoped it would not be barred. Hardly anyone had locks on doors, though most had provisions for barring the way in event of an Indian raid. A normal lock would pose little difficulty for a determined Comanche.