He wiped his sleeve across his face to take up the cold sweat that stung his eyes. “You sure pulled our bacon out of the fire that time.”

“Bacon? We got no bacon.” Andy’s puzzled look showed that he did not understand. Many expressions went over his head. He had only lately begun hearing the English language again after years of exposure only to Comanche.

Rusty said, “We’ve still got a ways to go before we can take an easy breath. We’d better ride into the night as far as these horses can travel.”

Andy looked back over his shoulder toward the broad prairie and everything he was leaving behind. He appeared about to weep.

Gently Rusty said, “I know it’s hard. Go ahead and cry. Ain’t nobody around to hear you but me.”

Andy squared his shoulders. “I would hear.”

The Red River was behind them, but caution prevailed upon Rusty to stop occasionally and survey their back trail. The boy asked, “You think they follow so far?”

Rusty saw no sign of pursuit, yet experience had taught him not to place too much trust in appearances.

“Depends on how bad they want you.”

Another long look to the north showed him nothing to arouse anxiety, at least no more than he had carried in the pit of his stomach during the days since he and Andy had hurriedly left the Comanche encampment. They had been two solitary figures on the open plains. The Llano Estacado was a haven to the horseback tribes but remained a forbidding mystery to white Americans, a blank space on their maps. It was a vast country of few landmarks and few tracks. It could swallow up a stranger, lose him in its immensity, and doom him to slow starvation. But for several years it had been the only home Andy Pickard could remember. He kept looking behind him.

“Back there . . . I belong.”

Rusty understood the boy’s painful dilemma. “Them Comanches would kill you in a minute.”

The thin voice quavered. “Most are friends.”

“It don’t take but one enemy to kill you.” Rusty had been through this argument several times during their flight. He knew the boy remained strongly tempted to turn about and take his chances. Perhaps at his age he did not fully comprehend the finality of death.

Rusty had seen much of death in his thirty-something years on the Texas frontier. Comanches had killed his own parents and had taken him when he was but three or four years old. From that point his experience had diverged from Andy’s, however. Texan fighters had recovered Rusty a few days after his capture. He had been raised by a childless pioneer couple and given their name, Shannon, because he knew no name of his own.

Years later he had followed his foster father’s example and attached himself to a frontier company of rangers patrolling the outer line of settlements, guarding against Comanche and Kiowa incursion. He had remained a ranger volunteer during the four years of civil war. That service had exempted him from joining the Confederate Army and fighting against the United States flag old Daddy Mike Shannon had defended with his blood in conflict against Mexico.