“They’re friends of mine. I’m askin’ safe passage.”

Clem glanced regretfully over his shoulder at the men behind him. “Since it’s you, Shipman—” He backed his horse a step or two, then turned him. He waved his arm over his head. The riders took a long swing around the wagons and proceeded northward.

Frank let out a long-held breath. “I’ll declare, Sly, you get better-lookin’ every time we see you.”

“I got to thinkin’ about it,” Shipman said. “I was afraid you might happen upon some of these old boys.”

James said stubbornly, “We was fixin’ to take care of things by ourselves, without help.”

“And just what was you fixin’ to do?”

“I was fixin’ to shoot that tall one and let them know our intentions was to not give an inch.”

Shipman frowned. “Have you always been so damned mule-headed, or is this an ailment that’s just lately come over you?”

V

JAMES THOUGHT Annie might mellow again to Sly Shipman in response to his rescuing them from the Louisiana renegades, but she remained cooly civil. When she took offense, she was not lightly moved to forgiveness. James also remained suspicious. He rode beside Shipman, who knew the trail and picked an easier way for the wagons than James had been able to do. James suspected he had ridden it often, mostly in the dark.

James weighed the proprieties and decided to ignore them. He said, “Those robbers backed off real quick when they heard your name. Who’d you kill to make them so afraid of you?”

Shipman seemed surprised at the question. “Who says I killed anybody?”

“Stands to reason. Otherwise they’d've just gone ahead and tried to take us over, and you with us.”

“I told you there’s an understanding kind of, among all us that lives in the strip between Natchitoches and the river. We leave one another alone. Everybody in the strip knows me by name, even if they don’t know my face, same way they always knowed old Eli. Nobody ever messed around with Eli more’n once, and that protection shed off onto me. The locust tree and them Spanish Daggers you asked about—Eli put them there. They was always a symbol in the strip. They meant you was to be left the hell alone.”

James was almost disappointed. “You never killed anybody?”

Shipman’s face seemed to darken. “I never killed anybody the world wasn’t better off without.”

As he had promised, the wagons reached the burned cabin about the middle of the afternoon. A rock chimney stood like a grave marker amid blackened coals and a remnant of gray ashes not yet washed away by the rains. The charred trunk of a tree stood beside the ruins. Frank said such a scene deserved a good story. “Who done this, robbers? Indians?”

Shipman grunted. “Nothin’ so adventuresome as all that. Couple fellers I know got liquored up on Kentucky squeezin’s they bought from a wagon peddler in Natchitoches. One of them knocked a candle over and was too drunk to find it. Said he seen two of them, but the one he kept reachin’ for wasn’t real. Him and his partner got out with nothin’ much except their britches, and them scorched pretty bad.”