Frank asked, “And what might that be?”

Shipman looked at Annie. “That picture Miss Annie drawed of me. I’d sure admire to have it. When I’m old and gray and all hunched over, I can show everybody what I looked like when I was in my prime.”

James doubted that Shipman would ever get old. Somebody was bound to shoot him long before then.

Annie did not smile. “I certainly have no use for it.”

Shipman added, “I don’t reckon you’ve drawed a picture of yourself, Miss Lewis? If so, I’d admire to have that, too.”

The flushed color of Annie’s face told James that Shipman had touched her despite her resistance. She stammered like a girl in school. “N-n-no, I’ve drawn pictures of everybody else, but I wouldn’t know how to draw one of myself.”

“It’d be a mighty pretty picture,” Shipman said. “You’d ought to try.”

Annie blushed and looked away. James saw a flicker of victory in Shipman’s eyes. We may never get rid of him now, he thought.

They traveled past long stretches of forest, skirted numerous canebrakes and sometimes traversed open stretches of prairie land where the spring grass was tall and green and James thought the soil must be deep and black. Much of it would be good farming country, probably fine for cotton like so much of the Louisiana land they had passed through. He wondered at times why Michael and Andrew had gone so much farther to the southwest, passing up all this likely-looking ground where so far as he could tell no one had set a plow in the ground or built a cabin. They traveled all day without seeing a person or any sign that a human had ever passed this way except for occasional traces of old wagon tracks, gullied out by the rains.

He brought himself to ask Shipman why no one had yet settled here. The young smuggler shrugged. “You’ll find some squatters hidden back in yonder if you look real good. They had just as soon you wouldn’t, though. The Mexican government says where it wants people to live. They ain’t opened this up because it’s a long ways from where the soldiers are at, and they don’t trust people too far out of their sight, not even their own people. They’ve tried to hold the settlers in colonies like Austin’s and DeWitt’s and DeLeon’s. Easier to keep watch on them that way.”

“Looks like they don’t want us anywhere.”

“I been expectin’ this to come. It’s hard to take people as different as Americans and Mexicans and mix them up together. They don’t talk alike, and they don’t think alike. Americans are used to goin’ where they damn well please and doin’ what suits their fancy. The Mexicans have been ruled hard by first one and then another. They’re used to havin’ to take orders whether they like them or not. My guess is that this is liable to blow up into a fight if the government don’t ease off on that new law.”