“I don’t have the strength to keep up on a hard ride. I’d be a millstone around everybody’s neck. And somebody needed to be here besides Preacher Webb and Macy in case some Comanches or Kiowas decided to pay another visit.”

Rusty watched Geneva and the baby return to their cabin. Evan had an arm around his wife’s shoulders. Rusty ached for all of them. He could imagine the hell Evan had endured in the futile search for his son, the heartbreak he must have suffered in turning back.

Preacher Webb moved up beside Rusty and Tanner. “We prayed mighty hard. Sometimes it takes awhile, but you generally get an answer if you don’t give up hope.”

From someone else Rusty might have taken that as an empty platitude, but he knew Webb believed with all his soul.

Webb walked back to the family house with Clemmie and James. Rusty watched in silence. Clemmie had taken her father’s death hard, but she had never let her back bend. She stood straight and determined.

Knowing it was futile, Rusty climbed onto the fence again and looked northward. Josie reached up and gripped his arm. “I can see in your face what you’re thinkin’. Don’t. You’d never find Andy. One boy alone, out in hundreds of miles of open prairie.”

“A boy who considers himself a man.”

Tanner declared, “He is a man, I tell you. He’s given himself a job that few men would have the guts to try.”

“I ought to be up there with him.”

“You’d never make it past the first Comanche camp. But he will. He’s got enough Indian in him.”

Captain Burmeister returned in a couple of days with his little group of frontier guards. He was painfully frustrated, men and horses weary, dried out, and hungry. “It is hopeless,” he told Rusty. “Of water there is not enough. It will never be a country for white men, not while we live.”

“There is water,” Rusty argued. “Otherwise, the Indians couldn’t stay.”

“But only the Indian knows where it is.”

“Tanner was tellin’ me about runnin’ across some oxcart traders out of New Mexico. Looks like they know how to find water. Someday somebody will start markin’ the water holes and the trails. Once it’s done, that country won’t be a mystery anymore. There won’t be anyplace safe for Comanches to hide.”

“Someday,” Burmeister said. “But it is for now that we must worry. We know so little, and we are so few.”

Rusty had been chewing on an idea for several days. “Captain, could you use another man?”

Burmeister’s gray mustache lifted in a smile. “As in times past, before the fools on both sides carried us into war?”