“I stayed there, as close as I could be without choking on the smoke, and I watched it burn. All the hippos I’d spent my life breeding—gone. Dead.” He fell silent.

“What about the hop?” Hero asked after a moment.

“Ah, well, of course,” Houndstooth answered, his voice still thick. “She started nudging at my ankles around dawn, as the flames died down. She was hungry enough that she started trying to suckle on the toe of my boot. She raised up well enough, didn’t she?”

“She sure did,” Hero answered. “Jesus, Winslow. A hundred hippos.” They whistled long and low. “That must’ve been a helluva ranch you built.”

“It was,” he replied. “It really was.” He laughed mirthlessly. “But after it burned? I had nothing left but bad debt. I had to sell the parcel to Travers to get out from under it.” Houndstooth spat into the water. “And look at me now. What do I have to my name? A bedroll and a grey hat and Ruby. The last of her line. And her getting older every day.”

Hero put their hand near the edge of their bedroll. Their pinky finger brushed against Houndstooth’s. He didn’t pull his hand away.

“A few weeks from now, that won’t be all you’ll have,” Hero murmured.

“No?” Houndstooth said, linking his pinky finger with Hero’s.

“No,” they replied. “In a few weeks, you’ll also have revenge.”

Chapter 5

“THEY DON’T HAVE HOPPERS in California, asshole. They don’t have hippos in California.”

“Well, Alberto,” Cal Hotchkiss said to the balding off-duty ranger, shifting his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, “that’s your opinion.”

The four men around the table were not looking at each other. They watched the cards in their hands as though nude women were painted on the fronts of the cards, instead of the backs. They were not wreathed in smoke—the riverboat casinos did not allow smoking in private suites—but three of them chewed on unlit cigars. Cal Hotchkiss preferred his toothpick.

“It’s not an opinion,” the tall black man in the black hat chimed in. “There’s no hippos in California. No rivers. No marshes. Means no hippos.”

The men accepted cards from the dealer, who kept his eyes downcast as he slid them across the felted top of the table. They slid the cards into their hands, muttering to each other about the Sacramento River and whether it featured marshes; none of them knew, and Cal declined to educate them. Alberto sniffed. He leaned toward the window, holding onto his grey felt hat, and spat a thick stream of tobacco into the water. A moment later, a soft splash sounded.

“You know what they do have in California?” The man in the black hat took a sip from the mint julep that rested on the felt in front of him. “Adelia Reyes.”