“I’ll stay if I decide I want to. Me and Scully both.”

“I’ll have the law on you.”

Pete thought he sensed a weakness in the colonel’s voice. It was time to play his trump card. “It’s pretty soon goin’ to be Yankee law, and I don’t think you’ll want it pokin’ into what happened over at the Monahan farm. Me and Scully was there, remember?”

Colonel Dawkins tried to stare Pete down, but he was the first to pull his gaze away. He went to the whiskey bottle and refilled his glass. He drank most of it in one huge swallow. “We did the patriotic thing. Those Monahans were traitors.”

“Not the way the Yankee law will see it. You sure won’t want to stand in front of a Yankee judge and jury while me and Scully tell what happened.”

“You can’t testify against me without implicating yourselves.”

“They got a word for it. Coercion, I think it is.”

For the first time Pete could remember, he had his father pinned against the wall. He could see conflicting emotions in the old man’s eyes: resentment, defiance, fear.

He declared, “Like I said, we’re stayin’ if we want to. The way I figure it, this farm is part mine. When you’re gone, it’ll all be mine.”

Defiance won out, but not by a wide margin. The colonel’s eyes crackled with anger. “Stay and be damned. But keep out of my sight.”

“This farm ain’t that big. You’ll be seein’ a lot of me. And every time you see me, remember the way you treated me when I was a boy and couldn’t defend myself. I ain’t a boy no more.”

Dawkins met Pete’s gaze, and this time he held it. “If I didn’t know how good a woman your mother was, I’d wonder if you were truly my son.”

“Take a hard look, because your face is a lot the same as mine. I’m yours, and I’ve decided I can be just as stubborn mean as you are. I worked and sweated like a field hand to make you wealthy, and now I’m claimin’ my share.” Pete jerked his head at Scully. “Come on. I’m takin’ my old room back.”

Later he had Jethro muster three of the hands and led them to the woodpile behind the big house. “You-all throw all that wood over here,” he said, pointing to an open piece of ground. When the wood had been moved, he dug the toe of his shoe into the soft earth. “Grab your shovels and start diggin’.”

Scully stood by with hands on his hips. “You sure you remember just where the colonel buried that bucket of money?”

“I’ll remember it to my dyin’ day.”