“Where did you hear about the day of the dark stars?” he asked Neil. “I lay my life I didn’t believe I’d ever hear that phrase again.”

“I don’t know,” said Neil, reluctant to tell the old man about Toby until he knew what the “day of the dark stars” was, and why the mention of it seemed to be so unnerving. “I guess I just kind of picked it up.”

Billy Ritchie looked at Neil as if he knew that he was only telling him half of the truth, but then he piloted his wheel chair across the room, and silently poured himself another large shot of bourbon. As he screwed the cap back on the bottle, he looked up at Neil, and said: “The first and last time I heard of the day of the dark stars was from a trapper I met when I was a young man up in the Modoc Forest. This man was old and he was thin as a polecat, and he had scars on every spare inch of his body from fighting Indians and animals. We spent two nights and two days together, and then we went our separate ways.”

“But what did he tell you?” asked Neil.

Billy Ritchie’s eyes were rheumy and distant. “He told me all about the old days in Modoc country, just so that I could pass his stories on, so they wouldn’t be lost. What he said was that once the Indians knew they couldn’t hold back the white man any longer, they kind of bowed their heads and accepted their fate after a fashion, because they always knew that their gods would give them revenge. It was a Wappo belief, for instance, that for every Indian who died from cholera or smallpox, or was shot down by scalp hunters, a white man would die in return. They said that it might not happen in a month, in a year, or even in twenty years, but that one day the stars would go dark because they would call down the most powerful and evil Indian demons there ever were, the demons they didn’t even dare to call down in their own lifetimes, like Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and that the demons would slaughter a man for a man, a woman for a woman, a child for a child.”

Billy Ritchie took another swig from his glass, and then he said, “The way I heard it, Nashuna was the demon of darkness, and Pa-la-kai was the demon of blood, and Ossadagowah was a kind of a beast-thing that nobody could even describe, a kind of a wild demon that scared everyone witless.”

“You sound as though you believe it,” said Neil, carefully.