James was not convinced. “You seem to know a lot about how Mexican soldiers think.”

“Ever since I was fourteen years old I been makin’ my livin’ outguessin’ them.”

The cabin was old and not nearly so well built as one the Mordecai Lewis family once had back in Tennessee. It was a single small cabin without a dog-run to divide it into two sections. The place sure needed some patching up, James thought. “You build this yourself?” he asked Shipman.

“No, I fell into it by inheritance, you might say. It belonged to Old Eli Pleasant. Him and me, we worked out of here a lot of times. When nobody showed up to claim his property after he died, I reckoned Old Eli wouldn’t mind me goin’ on and usin’ it.”

Frank noticed a white locust tree in front of the cabin, flanked on either side by a cactus-like plant known as the Spanish Dagger. He remarked that it was an odd match, somehow.

Shipman grinned crookedly. “You’ll find a good many places in this part of the country have got the same arrangement. Sort of a custom here, you might say.”

James suspected from his manner that there was more to it than that, but Shipman volunteered no additional information. He turned to Annie. “This is my place,” he said. “You-all’ll want to stop here for dinner and rest your stock a while.” He pointed toward a small barn and lean-to shed and a set of horse pens. “There’s corn out there for the mules. I’ll unhitch them for you.”

Annie smiled warmly. “Much obliged.” She waited for Shipman to help her down from the wagon seat. James had seen her get down from it by herself several times a day all the way out from Tennessee. He had never noticed her needing help.

Frank was particularly interested in the place, for he remembered Eli Pleasant much better than James did. While the three of them unhitched the mules and led them to the pen, Shipman and Frank took turns recounting stories about Eli’s exploits. Frank’s two boys walked along and listened, their mouths wide open. The stories made Eli sound nine feet tall. James thought it a wonder that the old man had managed to live as long as he had, because skirting the laws of two countries had been a way of life for him. James deduced that smuggling on this frontier was a crime only in the eyes of the authorities; it was regarded as a welcome service by the common people who lived on both sides of the Sabine.

Frank said, “I’ve heard stories about the outlaws who stay close to the river so they can swim quick if they have to. How could Eli have operated here so long without some of them robbin’, maybe even killin’ him?”

Shipman said, “There’s a kind of unwritten treaty amongst us who live here. We don’t bother one another. We don’t see nothin’ or hear nothin’, and we sure as hell don’t tell nothin’ if the authorities from either side come pokin’ around. Eli lived up to that code and so do I. Anybody breaks it is apt to have trouble catchin’ his breath.”