Damn it all, maybe Andrew was right. Maybe he shouldn’t have come to Texas.

He headed the horse into the heavy woods. “Come on, Walker. If you ever had to win a race in your life, this one is it!”

X

PAIN SHOT through his body like a lance with each stride the horse made, but James held to the saddle and urged Walker to keep moving, dodging his way through the timber. The soft mat of old leaves left little or no track, though it produced a rustling noise beneath the hoofs. In a while he stopped, partly for momentary relief from the pain, partly to listen. He heard no sound of pursuit. Somehow he had shaken loose from the soldiers. But James knew he had meandered in the woods. He had not spent much time on this side of the river, so he did not know his way.

He let the horse move in a walk. That eased the jolting, afforded the horse a chance to recover its wind, and gave James a better chance to hear if the soldiers approached him again. He did not know which direction was safest for him to travel. If the soldiers had gone around him, he faced the hazard that he might run into them again no matter what direction he followed.

The persistence of the pain and the slow but steady trickle of blood forced him finally to dismount and lie down for a bit after kicking together a bed of old leaves. They felt almost as soft as a cornshuck mattress. When he pressed his hand to his side, the sharp pain almost took his breath away. He remembered that once, when he was twelve or thirteen, he had fallen from a horse and cracked a rib, possibly the same one the musketball had struck. His mother had wrapped his rib cage tightly with cloth. That had given him some ease. But he had no cloth here, unless he were to tear up his homespun shirt or empty the bag of food Petra had given him. He was reluctant to do either.

He thought of the rawhide rope he had used to drag logs to the cabin site. He pushed carefully to his feet and took it from the saddle. He found the process awkward because he had to keep circling the coiled rope around his body, shifting it from one hand to the other. Invariably he lost its tautness, and it slipped down to his waist in a tangle. He gave up and lay down again for a little while, until another idea came. He tied one end of the rope to a tree, backed off to the end of it and began turning slowly in circles, keeping the rope tight, winding it around and around his body like a windlass as he moved closer to the tree. The overlapping coils prevented slippage. He tucked the end of the rope under them, wincing at the pressure on the cracked rib.