Frank kept telling James, “You’d ought to strike up a friendship with that girl Juanita. She ain’t a bit hard on the eyes. If I wasn’t a married man—”

James was not ready to start thinking in serious terms about a woman, and when he did she would be American.

“She seems friendly enough,” he conceded. “But it’s probably just because I’m Andrew’s brother. How are a man and a woman supposed to get to know one another if they don’t even speak the same language?”

Frank smiled. “Some languages are the same anywhere you go.” He was an incurable romantic. From the time he had been twelve years old, Frank had been something of a ladies’ man. He still could be, if Hope didn’t keep a watchful eye on him.

James could not feel really comfortable among these strangers. Their darker skins and their foreign language reminded him not only of the unpleasantness with Sergeant Díaz but of the fact that James had come into a land alien to him. He would not have expressed it—indeed, he did not quite even understand it—but he felt a little bothered as he observed the warm affection, the earnest caring, the laughter between his brother Andrew and these Morenos. He saw that Andrew had established strong family ties here, ties James could not help feeling properly belonged to blood kin, the Lewises. He even felt a degree of loss because these people had shared in Andrew’s life the last five or so years, and probably Michael’s as well. All James had had of Andrew or Michael in almost a decade had been boyhood memories and infrequent letters that found their way to Tennessee.

He was confused about his feelings toward Elizandro Zaragosa, too. On the one hand he was grateful that the man had helped smooth the way for their remaining in Texas, and he recognized that a strong bond existed between Andrew and Zaragosa. Even so, Zaragosa still seemed foreign to him, unfamiliar, like this land. Much as James wanted to accept him as a friend, he held something back. It was the darker skin, the strange language, the culture so different from anything he had known. He remembered what Sly Shipman had said about the difficulty of Mexicans and Americans understanding one another, much less living in total harmony, for their heritages were a world apart.

Andrew appeared to have bridged the gap between those heritages and to feel at home among the Mexicans. James wondered if he ever could. Right now it seemed unlikely. He would ask Michael, when he reached the Colorado River. In the old days, Michael had always seemed to know whatever James had needed to find out. Michael the quiet one, Michael the solitary man of the woods, Michael the man James wanted desperately to become.

As they moved down the trail toward San Felipe, Andrew rode much of the time beside Zaragosa. James would pull in beside them, only to find more often than not that they were talking in Spanish. That language seemed to come easier to Andrew than English came to Zaragosa. Though James understood the problem, it left him feeling shut out. He would pull back beside Annie’s wagon. She would want to know what Andrew and Zaragosa were talking about. Rather than admit he did not know, James would tell her something innocuous and drift on back to Frank and Hope’s wagon. He could always depend on conversation with Frank, even though it was usually one-sided.