“Maybe, in fifty or sixty years.”

“It’s not even a farm yet anyhow, it’s just raw land. If it’s not still vacant there’ll be another for you someplace when you get back.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. Home to Tennessee, maybe, for a year or so till these soldiers have moved on somewhere else.”

“A year!” James felt as if Andrew had struck him in the stomach. A year seemed like a life sentence, especially in view of the fact that he had not been here nearly that long. “Maybe if I just go off for a long trip huntin’’—maybe go west and see what San Antonio de Bexar looks like—”

“Not Bexar. That’s where the soldiers are sent from. No, I think you’d better clear out of Texas for a while. Maybe over around Natchitoches, Louisiana, if you don’t want to go all the way home to Tennessee. You can probably find some kind of work to do. Maybe Old Man Villaret, Marie’s papa—he might have somethin’ for you.”

James slumped in the saddle. “You’re makin’ a lot out of this, Andrew. It was the soldiers started it all.”

“And they’ll finish it if you give them the chance.”

He rode with his brother back to Andrew’s place, resisting all the way, thinking up arguments. By the time they reached the cabin he had just about made up his mind not to go at all. They couldn’t do anything to a man who had acted only in self defense!

He expected Annie to wade into him with a lot of her sisterly scolding, but she only stared at him with sad blue eyes that appeared about to break into tears at any moment. It was Petra, for once, who did the talking. She took both his hands in hers and told him of the terrible day the soldiers had killed her father while her half-grown brothers stood by and could do nothing. The younger Moreno children, like herself, had huddled in terror with their mother inside their cabin.

Andrew had already talked himself out. He could only stand and nod agreement with what Petra said.

She declared gravely, “If they come for you, James, it will be again as with my father. You will die here. And for what? For a pig?”

“It ain’t just the pig,” James argued. “It’s that a man ought to stand his ground and not run like a rabbit.”

“And what then? You stand your ground, and you die on it. The soldiers win. They always win.”

He looked at his sister. “Annie, I didn’t want to bring you here in the first place. But I did it anyway. Now you want me to run off and leave you?”

Annie said, “I want you alive. The rest doesn’t matter.”

Andrew said, “Don’t you be frettin’ yourself over Annie. We’ll take care of her—me and Michael, Petra, and Marie.”

James heard the sound of running horses. Damn them, have they come already? he wondered. He stepped out onto the dog-run. He saw his brother Michael, and someone else. A black-bearded man dismounted from a sweat-lathered sorrel. James had not seen much of the Blackwood family in his months here, but he remembered this one as Isaac.