The woman said, very gently, “Your home does not look as if it had concealed so much tragedy. It’s pink. I can see pink blotches of it through the little oaks, when I look from my window … I like the wooden pump.”

“Yes,” he nodded uneasily, “it’s a very fair picture, that house. I don’t know whether to keep it or not.” A shadow switched over the grass at his feet; it was gone; there had never been any shadow in the world. And then it came back, and hung there. Dan looked up at the sky. “Look there!” he cried. “Buzzards! Two of them.”

She placed her hands calmly together, but her shoulders moved with a shuddering squeeze. “They eat carrion, do they not?”

“Yes. I thought all of them were gone, around here: I haven’t seen any for years. We don’t get them in Iowa or Minnesota—too far north. Maybe these came over from the Blue Ridge.”

Now the buzzards were swinging in a high and solemn circle, above Codoris’ farm to the west. The angle of the sun made their blotting shadows rub across the copse, blur and vanish in the sloping field, become a reality close at hand and then only a suggestion, the thinnest taint which ever sat above the meadows and the grain. “Something’s dead, over by Codoris’,” Bale said, “probably a calf.” The motionless birds were fastened by invisible threads twisting in the white-blue sky so far above them. They did not twitch their wings. The threads turned them lazily about.

“This is too perfect an afternoon,” Mrs. Fanning whispered. “I don’t like them. I wish they’d go away.”

A revolver shot banged; Dan lifted nervously on his haunches. The woman did not cry out, but her body jerked as if something had struck her. She exclaimed, “I didn’t know he was awake—” Tyler Fanning was standing erect at the edge of the copse; he lowered a revolver in his hand, then raised it again. The buzzards had broken their invisible tether and were planing down above the field.

With his left hand, Ty drew the black hat more firmly over his forehead; he squared his shoulders. The navy revolver banged again. Behind him the sedate mares were quivering, ears erect, hind-legs braced. Demon wailed, “Eeyo, Becky! Eeyo, Bright! Hol’ on…” He tumbled down to grasp at their bridles. The buzzards kissed a grove across the Emmetsburg road, then cut sharply higher and drifted off into the west.

Dan stood up. Ty came toward them slowly, blowing the smoke out of his gun and plucking caps off the cylinder.

“Ty,” the woman said. Her voice was sagging, the voice of a much older woman. “We didn’t know you were awake.”

“Didn’t you see me get up and haul my side-arm out of the rig?” He nodded at Bale. “Hello, Dan. Where did you drop from?”