They talked until midafternoon. Billy Ritchie, as the Old Crow loosened his tongue, began to ramble about his childhood, and the old days in Calistoga and the hot springs country, and the girls he’d known and chased. Neil began to feel claustrophobic in the small, airless house, but he stayed because he wanted to know more about Bloody Fenner, and about the day of the dark stars.

He said to Billy Ritchie, “Do you think that Bloody Fenner could have done anything to irritate the Wappos, or any of the tribes? Something they might have wanted revenge for?”

Billy Ritchie shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I never heard tell of him falling out with the Indians. The way I heard it, they was always the best of friends, and that’s what made him so treacherous to whites.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“Who does? All that happened one hundred and forty years ago, and there wasn’t more than a dozen men in the whole of the Napa Valley who could read or write, so they didn’t keep no diaries. They were dark days, for sure. Mighty dark days.”

Neil took out his handkerchief and wiped sweat from the back of his neck. “Well, tell me this,” he said. “If Bloody Fenner had done something to upset the Indians, way back in the 1830s, how would an Indian medicine man go about taking his revenge?”

“You mean today? Here and now?”

“That’s right.”

Billy Ritchie puffed out his cheeks. “I can only tell you what I know from stories, and from what that trapper told me. A lot of those real mystical Indian rituals, well, they’re so secret that half the Indians don’t know them. But what you have to understand is that a medicine man’s spirit—what the Indians call his manitou—that never dies. It’s reborn, lifetime after lifetime, for seven lifetimes in all, until the medicine man has performed enough magic on earth to earn himself a place up in the stars, alongside of the great spirits.

“The point is, the manitou can only take on flesh if it finds itself a suitable human being to lodge itself in. It can take on plenty of other shapes, sure. The Narragansets, for instance, used to have stories about medicine men who came back to life by using rocks for flesh, or water, or even wood. There’s some pretty hair-rising stories about the stone men of the Narragansets who used to walk at night. But a man made of rock or wood is just as vulnerable as rock or wood, and so the medicine man wouldn’t take on that kind of flesh unless he had nothing else.”