“All that way afoot?”

James nodded. “Before the war lots of cattle were driven to Missouri and Illinois and down to New Orleans. I heard of a bunch that was walked all the way to New York City.”

“That’d take time.”

“Time we’ve got a-plenty of. Money we don’t. You can’t do much farmin’ in the winter. You could be out puttin’ your brand on unclaimed cattle same as me and Evan.”

Rusty found the proposition interesting to contemplate. “It’d be somethin’ to do.”

James said, “In fact, I don’t see no reason we couldn’t throw our gathers into one good-sized bunch. By summer we’d be back from Missouri with our pockets jinglin’ and the goose hangin’ high. Who knows? I might even buy the Dawkins farm off of them Yankee tax collectors.”

Rusty found himself warming to the idea, though he knew it was a long shot. “It’s a far piece to Missouri. We’d better not be spendin’ it ‘til we get it in our pockets.”

James grinned. “Half the fun is in thinkin’ about what you’re goin’ to do with it. You can spend it a thousand times before you get it. When you have it, you can’t spend it but once.”

Scully kept looking over his shoulder into the darkness. “I tell you, I been hearin’ somethin’.”

“You hear your own cowardly heart beatin’,” Pete declared. “Ain’t nothin’ behind us but a whippoorwill and an owl or two. We killed both of them nigger guards. Ain’t nobody goin’ to miss us ‘til daylight.”

“Then what are we pushin’ these horses so hard for? I can feel mine givin’ out under me already.”

Pete said, “We’ll get fresh ones from the old man. Then we’ll head north up into the Nations. Won’t nobody find us.”

“There’s lots of Indians up there. Some of them are apt to remember when we borrowed horses from them.”

“Them Indians don’t know one white man from another. We could tell them we’re Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. They wouldn’t know the difference.”

Scully argued, “As many times as we’ve run from Indians, I ain’t none too keen about goin’ up there amongst them.”

“We’ll stay where the peaceful ones are, the Cherokees and the Choctaws and such. We won’t have no truck with the Comanches.” Pete brightened as a new idea struck him. “Who knows? We might even set ourselves up as horse traders. Instead of borrowin’ Indian horses out of the Nations and sellin’ them in Texas, we could take Texas horses up into the Nations.”

“Evenin’ up the score?”

“Sure. We’d be the Indians’ friends. And in return, they’d protect us if anybody came snoopin’ around.”

Scully was unconvinced. “Sounds good, but there’s still many a mile between us and the Nations. How do you know your old man will give us anything? Last time, he was fixin’ to shoot us both. If we’d stayed five more minutes, he would’ve.”

“He’s about done. You notice how he’s shrunk up lately? Losin’ Mama, losin’ the war, has took the guts out of him. We won’t ask for nothin’. We’ll just take what we want. He can’t do nothin’ about it, the shape he’s in.”