Rusty wondered why Gaskin had come to the funeral unless he hoped to pick up something useful when nobody was looking. Gaskin had disliked Isaac York, and York never had a good word for him. That was one point on which York and Rusty had long been in full agreement. Rusty said, “Maybe you ought to go back where you came from, Fowler.”

Gaskin turned on Rusty. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m stayin’ where I’m at. But it don’t set right with me, knowin’ I got a nigger for a neighbor.”

“You always did. He’s been there longer than you have.”

“But he never owned the land. He was just what the Lord intended for a nigger to be. A white man’s property.”

Gaskin gave Shanty a contemptuous look and stalked away toward a lank mule he had tied nearby.

Rusty moved to Tom Blessing’s side. “What Fowler Gaskin thinks don’t amount to a damn.”

“But look around you. Even some people who don’t like him agree with him on this.”

“They’ll get used to it. With the war over, there’s a new day comin’.”

Blessing’s mouth drooped at the corners. “The war is over, but I’m afraid the fightin’s not.”

Steals the Ponies was troubled. Two Comanche warriors returning from a clandestine visit to relatives on the reservation had brought interesting news that raised many questions but offered few answers.

He interrogated them at length, distrusting their report. Much of the word that circulated among people on the reservation proved after a time to be false. The whites were worse tricksters than the coyote.

“How do you know the white men’s war is finished? Who told you?”

“My cousin,” said Wolf Eyes. “He heard it from a shaman.”

“Shamans are always seeing things that are not there. It is what they do.”

“But this one went to the long-knife post at Fort Sill. He was told by those who heard it from the soldiers. The teibos of the North defeated those of the South.”

Despite his distrust of whites, Steals the Ponies found the report plausible. But even if true, its meaning was uncertain and therefore troubling.

Wolf Eyes said the war’s end had aroused consternation among the many peoples who lived on the reservation and in the territory beyond. Some, like those near-whites known as Cherokees, had been divided in their loyalties, many fighting alongside men of the north, others allying with the South. What the Cherokees did was always a source of puzzlement to Steals the Ponies. They walked along the white man’s road in the way they lived and thought. He did not consider them to be of the same race as the Comanche.