“I’ll feel the same way come night.”

“Then wait for the night. The children are hungry.”

Their oldest, three-going-on-four, played in the dogrun with a pup Michael had brought him. The boy was named Ben, after Andrew and Michael’s Uncle Benjamin back in Tennessee. In the kitchen was the youngest, a girl, Rose to Andrew, Rosa to Petra. She sat in the high chair Andrew had first built for Ben and munched on a piece of flat bread, freshly baked on the hearth. Her eyes lighted at sight of her father, and she gave him a wet kiss, well flavored with the bread. Andrew felt fortunate that both children were healthy; that this isolated life could be hard on the little ones was painfully evidenced by a small grave above Michael and Marie’s cabin.

Petra said, “I saw Michael and Mordecai. Why did they not come to the house?”

Andrew explained their mission. Petra smiled at the news that Marie would be coming over in the evening. Though the two women lived hardly two miles apart, they had not seen one another in a week or more. Each had her own work to do, work enough to last from daylight until well after dark. Life in frontier Texas granted women even less leisure than the men.

The field labor had made Andrew hungrier than he realized. He ate a considerable helping of pork and finished the meal by using some of the flat bread to swab up cane molasses he had traded from a farmer down near San Felipe.

The black dog sat in the doorway, forbidden to enter the cabin, though the pup was allowed. The dog had perfected a silent but plaintive form of begging. It usually worked better with Petra than with Andrew, who knew the dog had already made a good meal from a cottontail rabbit it had caught in the field.

The dog started barking and left its post at the door. Andrew glanced questioningly at Petra. It was too early for Michael to have returned, but travelers on the dim road between San Felipe and San Antonio de Bexar often stopped at Andrew and Petra’s cabin. Andrew pushed back from the table and walked out on the dog-run, ready to invite a visitor to come in to the table.

He stopped short, the invitation stuck in his throat. An old animosity flared. He tried to suppress it and be civil to the two black-bearded men who sat on horseback in front of the cabin. He forced a semblance of a greeting. “Howdy, Finis. Howdy, Luke.”

One-armed Finis Blackwood seemed fatter every time Andrew saw him. It was no surprise, because his greatest exertion was in rushing to the dinner table. He said, “Good day to you, Andrew. See you been busy plowin’.”

Luke echoed, “Been plowin’.” Luke, broad and muscular, had always been a little slow in his thinking. Mostly he did whatever his older brother told him to, and took as gospel anything Finis said. For whatever he had been shorted in brains, Luke made up in meanness. Finis sicced him onto his enemies the way he would sic a dog. There had been a time Andrew would have met them with a rifle, but that was futile. When the Blackwoods looked for trouble, they never came in the open, as now. They sneaked in from behind when nobody was looking. That had been their style when they and the Lewises had grown up as reluctant neighbors back in Tennessee. It was still their way.