He found himself liking the Texas country more all the time. Listening to stories back home, he had visualized a golden land teeming with wildlife and a soil so rich that you just scratched a spot in the earth, dropped a seed and jumped back to keep from being struck by the fast-growing plant. The reality fell considerably short of that image, but it was good enough. The soil looked fine and dark, and it gave off a pleasant smell when a plow turned the original sod for the first time. Michael and Andrew agreed that the game was no longer as abundant as they had first found it, but James could only compare it to Tennessee. There the land was increasingly crowded with people, and game was being killed off or driven away at a disturbing rate. Texas—this part of it, anyhow—was still years away from reaching that point. West of the Lewis farms, where nobody yet lived, James could always find something to level his rifle sights on. He never failed to bring home meat. That kept Annie from lecturing him at length about his absence from the field.

He took Michael’s eight-year-old son Mordecai with him when Michael could spare the boy. James found the lean young Mordecai keen of eye and short on talk, just the way James liked for boys to be. Mordecai would respond politely if James initiated a conversation, but he seldom spoke first except to draw James’s attention to a deer or something else of interest. Annie could well take lessons from him, James thought. He felt the boy’s eyes following him often, studying him, perhaps making some kind of appraisal but never betraying the nature of it by word or expression. He had a solemn manner much like the one James remembered in Michael back in the old days before Michael and Andrew had come to Texas. By the time Mordecai was grown, James thought, he would be the spitting image of his father. Anybody with half an eye could already see that he was a Lewis. The family features were stamped strong and clean. The only thing different that James could see was that the boy’s complexion was a little darker. Came from the Spanish on his mother’s side, James figured.

Mordecai often spotted game before James did. When James let him take the first shot, there was no need to reload for a second; Mordecai hit whatever he aimed at. Michael had trained him well. Or maybe it was in the blood, a legacy from the Tennessee grandfather whose name the boy bore.

Though Mordecai did not say much, James became aware that he could say it in either of three languages. He had French and Spanish from his mother, English from his father. James was in no position to judge how good the boy’s French and Spanish were, because he had not learned more than a dozen words of Spanish himself, and no French at all. But he noticed that when an occasional Mexican happened to ride by, Mordecai had no trouble talking with him.