“Who wrote that last letter?”

The old man does not answer.

“Did the boy ever write to you himself?”

Burns makes no answer. He drops the half-burned, half-raw slab of meat back on the coals. Places a wad of tobacco in his cheek. After further pause, he says, “We better find some feed for them horses.”

Sam places a hand on the old man’s forearm. Then on his shoulder. “Jack,” he says, “I’m not trying to be cruel. Too much hope—false hope—is cruel. Hope is the crudest thing that Greek lady let out of the box.”

“Sam, I know that. But I don’t like to think about it.”

The twilight condenses around them, thickening to night. A few stars appear, forming incomplete constellations—Scorpio, Cassiopeia, the Bear. The new moon, a sickle of silver, hangs low in the west. The lights of the distant city seem as dim as the dying coals of their campfire. Small bats dart through the gloaming.

“And that city,” the Indian says. “That city…some strange things going on there.”

“Always was. We’ll find the boy and get the hell out.”

“No politics.”

“Politics?” The old man rises, resets the heavy gunbelt on his hip, tugs down his hat brim. “What do we know about politics? We’re tourists. We don’t even talk the same language. What do we care about politics, us ignorant aborigines?” He spits on the fire. “You coming or you gonna sit here all night?”

Sam sheaths his knife, wraps the remainder of the roast dog in a greasy rag and gets up. He stuffs the bundle into a saddlebag, hoists his saddle to his shoulder and grins at Burns. “Grab your saddle.”

“Who’s the boss around here? Ain’t we coming back?”

“Somebody might have seen the fire.”

The old man grunts in assent. He kicks dirt over the hot ashes, covering them, and follows the Indian down through the brush to the horses, which make little effort to get away. Giant saguaro cactus stand from the rocky slope nearby, lifting thorny arms, like supplicant humans, toward the stars. Sam the shaman bridles a docile pinto; Jack Burns saddles his mare, a gray-skinned, rack-ribbed, broom-tailed, towering specter of a horse seventeen hands high. Despite hunger and fatigue and long association the mare tosses her head high when he slips the bridle on; her big feet clang like frying pans as she sashays aside. “Rosie,” he growls, hanging on to her neck, “Rosie, Rosie, you brainless hammerhead, stand still or I’ll chew your goddamn ear off….”

They ride down through starlight toward the shadowy cleft of a canyon, down to where the sycamores grow, and the hackberry, and the elephantine cottonwood—in the desert, the tree of life. A sound of spring-green trembling leaves. The smell of still water. The horses snort with anxious anticipation.

“You’re so smart, Sam, why don’t you conjure up a bale of alfalfa and a bucket of grain for these poor beasts?”

“What do you think I am, a witch doctor? A wizard? A miracle worker? I’m a magician, boss, a professional; I don’t deal in the supernatural. Horses are wiser than you humans—they believe in what they can smell. Nothing else.”