To Joe’s left, thirty yards up the road, Billy was leaning out of his saddle to turn the wheel that would raise the wooden gate of the ditch. Roberto, Sophie and Ben were neatly trapped. The flood of water would drown them or drive them back to Al.

“Get out,” Joe told Anna. “I’ll come back for you.”

“I want to go with you.”

“I don’t want you with me and I don’t have time to argue. I want you waiting here until I come back and drive you nice and slowly to the Hill, so you don’t miss your train in the morning.”

Anna clutched the windshield. “No.”

“Okay.”

He slipped the jeep onto the road, turned and stood on the gas. Billy was still leaning from his horse and yanking the gate wheel when he heard the engine approach. Twenty feet away Joe hit his headlights. The cowboy wore a gold sateen shirt and an expression of astonishment. His horse reared up and toppled backwards out of the glare. Joe heard man and mount hit the water of the mother ditch; then the jeep was across the planks and onto the blacktop of the highway, heading north.

A hundred yards up the highway Joe spun around because he had to come back down the highway and along the mother ditch to get to the Hill. Billy was screaming he couldn’t swim. Al had ridden up to the ditch and in the wan moonlight sat patiently on his horse, aiming his gun with both hands. A speckled Colt, Joe remembered. There was no way the cowboy would really shoot, he thought, not at an Army jeep.

As he passed in front of Al, Joe changed his mind, turned off his headlights and slammed on the brakes. The gun flashed, bobbed, flashed again. He floored the accelerator. The third shot was overcorrected, rushed, behind the jeep. The last three sounded like a tin pail being futilely kicked.

For miles they drove without lights and without saying a word, as if the dark and quiet sustained the moment of escape and delayed the saying of good-bye. They were so different, he thought, that any words divided them. It proved how strange the Hill was that they’d met at all. Let the last little triumph roll as long as possible—forever, if possible.

He had to turn the lights on when they hit the switchbacks. As the jeep climbed, Anna acted busy by cleaning bits of corn stalk from the floor. She found two zigzags of carved wood that had shaken loose from under the seat.

“What are these?” she asked, without directly meeting Joe’s eyes. This is how it ends, he thought—without real words, without even looks.

“Roberto’s crazy wands.”

“What are you supposed to do with them?”

“Call down lightning. Water your fields. Bring back the buffalo. Stop the bomb.”

“You can do that?”