Face reddening, Mike shook his finger at Rusty. “Don’t you ever let me hear talk like that comin’ out of your mouth. I was born American. I’ve fought under the United States flag. I’ll not stand idle while anybody talks against it. . . not you, not anybody.” He swung up onto the horse. “Not anybody, ’y God!”

Watching Mike ride off eastward on the wagon road, Rusty felt chastened by the harshness of his foster father’s voice. He should be getting used to it, he thought. Always one to speak his mind and opinions with his fists, Mike had been increasingly argumentative since the secession talk became serious. Moreover, he had taken to drinking considerably more since they had buried Mother Dora at the edge of the oak grove west of the cabin. Nobody had ever quite decided what her ailment was. She had simply faded before their eyes, becoming grayer and thinner, losing strength until one day Mike and Rusty had come home from the field and found her dying.

In a voice so low he could barely hear it, she had asked Rusty to look after his father. He had promised he would, but he feared he had done poorly at living up to the promise. Mike Shannon was too old to take orders from Rusty and too headstrong to accept advice. He had come home from the settlement more than once with his face bruised, his knuckles skinned and swollen.

Some of it was patriotism, Rusty reasoned, but some was simply a result of grief and restlessness, a combination too much for Mike to bear with grace.

Rusty was wrestling with his own feelings about the secession question. On one hand, he could see his father’s side of it. The fiercely partisan Mike had drummed patriotism and duty into him from the time Rusty was old enough to understand the words. On the other, he could understand why Tom Blessing had joined so many in disillusionment with the federal government. It had long promised to protect settlers but had not delivered. The troops it sent to the frontier were limited in number and too often foot soldiers, incapable of anything more than holding a defensive position. Cavalrymen were so few that they were unable to keep Indians from stealing army horses out of the military’s own corrals.

Yet the same Washington officials responsible for such unwise decisions felt obliged to exert increasing control over the daily lives of the faraway folk they served so poorly.

Some people were saying the whole problem was over slavery, but Rusty did not accept that. Tom Blessing owned no slaves, yet he staunchly defended secession on the grounds that the federals were becoming dictatorial. The only slave Rusty knew in these parts was Isaac York’s man Shanty. Whatever York’s faults, and he had many, he treated Shanty more like a friend and partner than a piece of property.