“I’ll tell him.”

The sergeant motioned for the men to move out.

Tanner said, “I’m only sorry that we’ll miss seein’ the big explosion.”

“What explosion?”

“The lieutenant when he finds that we slipped out of his hands. He’s liable to swell up like a toad and bust wide open.”

Rusty watched the departing riders, then cast a glance back over his shoulder toward the river. He felt uncomfortably exposed out here in the open. A prickly feeling ran along his spine.

“I’ve got a notion somebody’s watchin’ us. We’d best be travelin’, too.”

“You lead, and I’ll foller.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

Len Tanner was unusually quiet. Most of the time the lanky ranger had much more to say than Rusty thought necessary. He would ramble aimlessly, sometimes stopping in the middle of a sentence and jumping to a totally unrelated subject. That he was quiet now indicated he felt as conflicted as Rusty about their sudden leave-taking.

After one of the long silences Rusty asked, “Wonderin’ if you did the right thing, comin’ with me?”

“I’m always wonderin’ if I’ve done the right thing. I’ve been known once or twice to make a mistake.”

“I can’t imagine when that was.”

“What’ll we do when we get to that farm of yours?”

“We’ll plow and plant, and keep our eyes peeled for conscript officers.”

“You still got the Monahan family livin’ on your place?”

“Been a long time since I heard from them, but they’re still there as far as I know . . . Mother Clemmie and Geneva, and the two younger girls. And Clemmie’s old daddy, Vince Purdy.”

“It’s a damned shame what Caleb Dawkins done to Lon Monahan and his boy Billy. . . takin’ them out and hangin’ them like horse thieves, and for no reason except they didn’t want Texas to leave the Union. There was lots of people agreed with them.”

“And some of them died for it.”

The memory was still bitter as quinine. Rusty tried to keep it pushed back into the darkest corner of his mind, but sometimes it intruded, ugly and mean. Farmer Lon Monahan had been too vocal for his own good, persisting in voicing unpopular political opinions at a time when Confederate zealots like Colonel Caleb Dawkins made such expressions potentially lethal. Rusty had helped cut the bodies of Lon and his son Billy from the tree where they had been lynched. An older Monahan son, James, had fled to the West, beyond reach of Dawkins and his night-riding patriots.

Too late to save the Monahans, the extreme fanaticism had diminished as the war’s casualty lists had grown and its hardships had spread disillusionment to the outermost reaches of the Confederacy.

Tanner smiled. “That Geneva’s a pretty little slip of a girl. If you hadn’t already put a claim on her, I’d do it myself. How long since you heard from her?”

“Got a letter a year or so ago. There was probably more that never reached me. No tellin’ what went with our mail.”