Hendricks's barn became heaven. They stayed in the hayloft, where they built a fortress of hay bales against the chance someone would come up looking for them. But no one did. The hay-bale fortress was a labyrinth, so that they could travel from the sleeping and eating area to visit the slop bucket without being seen. Several times they heard voices raised outside, and Tom, pressing his good eye to the spaces between barn boards, saw a group of riders who were certainly part of a posse that remained mounted beyond the barn not four rods from where they were concealed. No one but Manuel, Billy Hendricks's foreman, who came in morning and evening to bring them food and water and poultices for Tom's and John's eyes, tried the labyrinth. Each morning, whistling the same five notes to identify himself, he brought them a fresh slop bucket, though he did not take the old one. That he left for the boys to empty themselves under cover of darkness. For a day and a half, they slept, coming awake for only short periods, rarely awake together.

Tom woke in the night from a bad dream in which a posse set fire to the barn. In the daylight he understood that not even Thems would burn a rancher's barn to get at them.

“That whistling he's doing, that ain't the ‘Degüello,’ is it?” Sisson asked, referring to the song Santa Ana played all night outside the Alamo. It meant “massacre.”

When they were awake, they were eating or talking to Manuel, once to Billy himself, though he stayed out of the barn as much as possible, letting Manuel, who was supposed to spend a good deal of time in the barn anyway, tend to the boys and Sisson.

Their food was prepared by Manuel's wife, Rosalinda, who cooked for both the family and the hands. Once Manuel placed a plate of cookies next to the tamales and said with a wink, “From la señora, who does not know you are here.”

“If we were here,” Sisson said, “we would thank her.”

“And if you were here, she would say, ‘De nada.’”

In the afternoon of the third day, heaven became simply an open area amid hay bales in the loft of a cold barn. They could not have a fire, though Manuel brought them small piles of heated bricks in a canvas sling. Mostly, they huddled in their coats and in blankets brought from the house, and they walked, as quietly as possible, from one part of the hay labyrinth to the other. There was little talk, and when there was talk the brothers talked to Sisson, not to each other.

“It's getting cramped in here,” John told Sisson.

“Enjoy this now,” Tom told Sisson. “We need to get out of here soon. We're imposing on Billy Hendricks and putting him in danger as well. We'll be moving on.”

“When?” John asked.

“When the time is right,” Tom told Sisson.