James Monahan stopped and waited for Rusty to come up even with him. “You know that mule?”

“My old daddy brought him home from the Mexican War. A deserter named Lancer stole him awhile back. Me and him are fixin’ to talk about that.”

James frowned. “It won’t be much of a conversation. Lancer is buried where we had our last camp.” He pointed northwestward. “He was a hard man to get along with. Every time somethin’ didn’t suit him, he threatened to go fetch the rangers. One of the boys got a bellyful of it.”

Rusty said, “I’m goin’ to want my mule.”

James did not reply. Rusty took that as a sign James was not sure he and Tanner would ever leave this place.

He had seen ranger camps and army camps. This looked like neither. It was a haphazard scattering of canvas tents and rude brush shelters strung along the banks of a creek. Haifa dozen campfires sent up their smoke, and the smell of roasting meat made him aware that he was hungry.

Hell of a thing, Rusty thought, thinking about my stomach when I ought to be thinking about my hide.

Tanner remarked to James, “It don’t look like you-all’s cup has run over with prosperity.”

“At least we ain’t takin’ orders from Richmond, or Austin either. We’re still free men.”

Free seemed a questionable description. The brush men were free in the sense that they were neither in the army nor in jail. But their situation hardly met Rusty’s definition of freedom. Hostile Indians roamed to the north and west. To the east, the Confederate government considered them traitors. The only relatively open course was to the south, toward a distant foreign border. Those willing to flee to Mexico had done so much earlier in the war. In a sense, those who remained here were confined to a huge prison without walls. They were refugees, hiding, moving periodically lest they be discovered and overrun.

Almost immediately Rusty and Tanner were surrounded by more than a dozen men. He knew his rifle would be useless. At best he might shoot one man before the rest swarmed over him. Tanner’s expression said he was still willing to fight if Rusty gave him the sign. Rusty shook his head.

Somebody demanded, “James, where’d you find these rangers?”

Rusty did not know the speaker’s name, but he remembered the face from among the men who used to loaf around the dramshops at the Fort Belknap settlement. He looked about, hoping to see other familiar faces. Surely some of the men he remembered deserting from the rangers would be among this group.

Clyde Oldham pointed to his brother and said Rusty had shot him . . . shot him down in cold blood. Someone grabbed Rusty’s rifle, jerking it from his hand before he could react. Tanner tried to hang on to his, but two men dragged him from his saddle, landing on top of him as he hit the ground. They took his rifle and his pistol.