“Lord knows I’ve tried. He’s got no notion about consequences. Do it now and think about it later, that’s his style.”

More than once since he had been living with Rusty Andy had taken a horse, a blanket, and very little else and disappeared without offering any explanation. After several weeks he would return thinner, browner, and silent about where he had been. Threats of punishment had no effect.

The responsibility weighed heavily on Rusty’s shoulders like a hundred-pound sack of feed. Sometimes he wondered if he had assumed a load he was not equipped to carry. He observed, “At least Andy makes friends of most of the boys after he’s whipped them.”

“I’ve been afraid he’d get hisself killed before you could finish raisin’ him. He’d be sixteen, maybe seventeen now wouldn’t he?”

“The best we can guess.”

“Ever talk about goin’ back to the Comanches?”

“Not anymore, but now and then he gets moody. He stares off to the north, and I can guess what’s in his mind.” At times Andy would be sitting in a room with Rusty or riding alongside him on horseback but seem to be miles and years away.

The blacksmith said, “He sure needs a woman’s influence. You got any prospects?”

Rusty sidestepped the question. “Do you hear somethin’?”

Shouts arose from down toward the mercantile store.

The blacksmith turned his right ear in that direction. “Sounds like a fight. I’d bet you a dollar that Indian of yours is in the middle of it.”

Rusty said, “I’ve got no extra dollar to throw away.” He set out down the dirt street in a brisk trot, ignoring pain from the old arrow wound in his leg. He muttered, “Damn it, I can’t turn my back for five minutes . . .”

There was hardly a young man living in or around the settlement who had not made his peace with Andy, often after a stern comparison of knuckles. But now and then a new one turned up.

The first face he saw was that of Fowler Gaskin, longtime neighbor, perpetual thorn in the side of Daddy Mike and Now of Rusty. Old Fowler called himself a farmer, though he farmed just enough to stave off starvation. Rail-thin and sallow-faced, he was perpetually hungry-looking. For miles around, neighbors dreaded his visits because he seldom left without taking something with him whether it was offered or not. Nothing he bor-rowed ever seemed to find its way home unless the owner went and fetched it. Half the time it was not to be found, even then. Gaskin would have broken it, sold it, or traded it for something else.

Gaskin was shouting, “Git him, Euclid! Git up and show him. We don’t let no damned halfway Indian come to town and act like he’s as good as a white man.” Tobacco juice streamed from Fowler’s lips and glistened in his gray-speckled beard.