It was his place to decide when to start hunting a campsite, he thought, a little shy on patience. He had done a pretty good job as outrider all the way from Tennessee. Their coming into Texas was no excuse for Annie to start thinking she had to take charge just because she was a year or so older. “There’s a-plenty of daylight left,” he said.

“Just don’t you be crowdin’ our luck.”

James turned back and pulled up beside Frank Lewis’s wagon. Frank was tall and rangy like all the Lewis men, like James himself. Being some ten years older, he was starting to show the lines and furrows that came from mature responsibilities, work, and worry. Not that Frank ever acted like he worried much. As far back as James could remember, Frank had always liked to tell stories and laugh and slap his knee. He, almost alone among the Lewis men, seemed always to have a book somewhere within reach. He had a boxful of them in the wagon. Just about anything in the world interested him. He could tell you the histories of foreign kings and queens. He could tell you what made the lightning flash and the thunder roll. At least, he claimed to know from the books he had read. That didn’t keep him from being a good farmer and a middling hand with a hunting rifle, though not as good as Michael had been.

Michael! Like Annie, James always seemed to be holding men up to compare them with Michael, and they never measured quite so tall. Not even close kin.

One thing about Michael, though, he had never smiled much, not like the next oldest brother, Andrew. Cousin Frank, now, he could be provoked to a smile over the least little thing, a toadfrog hopping across the road, or the way a mule cocked its ear over crooked. Some people back home had mistakenly thought he never took anything seriously. But Frank was serious about his family, his wife Hope, his two small boys who rode horseback behind the wagons, pushing along three extra horses and a pair of milk cows. Hope would be needing those milk cows, because anybody with half an eye could see that she was showing. In three months, maybe four, there would be another little Lewis. Frank had been anxious about their getting to the Austin colony in Texas and putting their cabin up before that event took place. A wagon was no place to birth a baby.

Hope Lewis sat beside her husband on the wagon seat. She wore a respectable cloth bonnet and a plain gray homespun cotton dress, practical for traveling like this because it did not show the dirt too much, and there was no way to keep clean on a long trail. James asked her, “You gettin’ tired, Hope?”

“I’m doin’ fine,” she said. She had never been one to indulge in complaint or to tell her husband or James what they ought to do next. She accepted what life sent her and acted as if it was exactly what she had ordered. But James saw fatigue in her eyes. He knew Annie was right, though he would not admit that to her until some snowy day in July. He had better be finding them a stopping place pretty soon.