Pickard stomped toward the wagon and climbed up onto the seat. “That boy’s a menace. My advice is that you send him back to them wild Indians where he belongs. Or give him to the Yankee army. They’ve probably got a place for the likes of him.” He whipped the mules into a trot.

Tanner gave Badger Boy a look of pity. “Might be better he was back with the Comanches.”

Rusty shook his head. “Don’t say such a thing where he can hear it. You’ll give him more notions like he had last night.”

“He’s still got them. It don’t take a smart man to know what he’s thinkin’ when he stares off to the north and shuts you out like you wasn’t there.”

Rusty turned to Tom Blessing. “You don’t really think the Yankees would take him away and force him to the reservation, and him white?”

“There’s no tellin’. They might. Or they might try to turn him into a bluecoat Indian scout.”

“He’s just a young’un yet.”

“There was many a young’un killed in the war. In any case they won’t bother askin’ me or you what we think. They didn’t ask me my feelin’s when they took my sheriff’s job away; they just slammed the door. We’re a defeated enemy.”

Rusty fixed a worried stare on Badger Boy. “Andy Pickard, I don’t know what we’re goin’ to do with you.”

Badger Boy wondered, too.

Preacher Webb walked up beside Rusty. “That boy doesn’t seem half as disturbed over this as you are.”

“He’s too young yet to know how it can hurt, not havin’ any kin in the world. But I know.”

Rusty walked halfway out to the shed and stood awhile, staring at nothing in particular. When he came back, he appeared to have come to a difficult decision. “Tanner’s right. You’d be better off runnin’ free with your Comanches than penned up with strangers on a reservation. Soon as you’re fit to travel, I’ll take you.”

Webb said, “He won’t be able to ride for a while yet.”

“We’ll wait ‘til he can.”

“You can’t take him all the way back to the Comanches. They’d almost surely kill you.”

“How else can I get him there?”

“You can take him as far as the Monahan farm, and maybe as far as the Red River. He can make the last part of the trip by himself.”

Rusty frowned, studying the proposition. “In the long run this may be the wrong thing to do, but in the short run I can’t see any other way. Bein’ a captive on the reservation would be like dyin’ an inch at a time.”

“Sometimes you have to get through today the best you can and trust tomorrow to the Lord.”

Rusty looked toward his field. The crops were almost all in. “Won’t be much for somebody else to take care of if I’m gone for a while. Len, you’ve got nowhere to go. Wouldn’t you like to winter here?”