He picked up one of the drawings, showing a fierce battle between men in big hats and men with long black hair. There were green-and-gray mountains in the background, and the sky was forested with huge arrows. The arrows were all tipped with black, carefully and deliberately drawn with black crayon.

“What would you say this was?” asked Neil, showing it to Susan.

She looked at it carefully. “It seems pretty obvious. A fight between cowboys and Indians.”

“Who’s winning?”

“The cowboys?”

“Why do you say that?”

Susan looked again. “Well, there’s one cowboy in the middle there and he seems to be standing up shooting his pistol and looking very happy about it.”

“That’s true,” said Neil, “but look at the other cowboys. Most of them seem pretty upset And a whole lot of them are lying there with arrows sticking out of them. It’s the same in this next picture, and this one. It seems like the Indians are definitely getting the best of this fight.”

Susan skimmed through nine or ten more drawings, and then nodded. “I think you’re right,” she said. “But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it just means that all the kids in the class read about the same battle, or went to see the same movie. Can you remember a movie that Toby might have seen on television or something, with this kind of a battle in it?”

She ran her hand through her loosely tied blond hair. “They had a movie about Custer about a month ago.”

“Then maybe that is what this is all about,” said Neil. “This grinning cowboy standing here could be General Custer, and maybe this is the Little Big Horn.”

“There’s no river, though, is there?” Susan pointed out. “The Little Big Horn didn’t take place up in the mountains, and all these drawings have mountains. I’d say this looks like someplace up in the Sonoma or the Vaca Mountains, wouldn’t you?”

“Could be,” admitted Neil.

He took a last shuffle through the drawings and was about to slide them back into their envelope when something caught his attention. He peered closer at Ben Nichelini’s drawing, and right at the back of a crowd of blood-splattered white men, he saw what looked distinctly like a childish rendering of a man in a white duster coat, with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat. There was a large arrow sticking out of the man’s back.

He went across to the parlor window and opened it. He called: “Toby—c’mere a minute, will you?”

Susan asked, “What is it? Have you seen something?”

“I’m just guessing,” Neil told her. “Wait and see what Toby says.”

Toby came running in through the kitchen, still clutching his bulldozer. “What is it, sir?”

Neil held up the drawings. “You know what these are, Toby?”