Sisson's world didn't seem so simple. It wasn't right and wrong but the belief that there was right and wrong that drove events. Years after he had left the army he had wondered about the rightness of driving the Sioux, the Apaches, and the Paiutes to ground. He had never considered the question while he was doing it, because his job was to do it, not to think about it. They paid him to track and find Indians and only that. He was employed by the United States Army, but he was no soldier. Once he had done his job, he stepped aside and let others do theirs.

Sisson did not fear prison. A return to it would be an inconvenience but not a tragedy. What he feared was rope. Arizona was not a death penalty state, though it had a deserved reputation for quick and fierce justice, full of retribution but not remorse. The lawmen they had killed were Mormons. Most of the law in Graham County and much of adjoining Greenlee and Gila Counties were Mormons. And Mormons were clannish. They had survived and prospered by banding closely together and fiercely protecting one another. After their prophet, Joseph Smith, had been killed by a mob in Illinois, they came together under the protection of Brigham Young and his thug, Porter Rockwell, and made their way across the continent to the more desolate places in the West and set up camp there. Young understood that flight was only a temporary refuge from persecution and that, eventually, it offered no refuge at all, only more persecution. So the Mormons fought, and their neighbors learned the high cost of opposing them. Rockwell was thought of as something of an avenging angel, prepared to shed the blood of the unrighteous to protect the righteous.

And so Sisson had no illusions. If the posses, made up mostly of Mormons and Wootans, caught them, the posses would kill them. And so the pattern that the Mormons had followed became theirs. They would flee as long as they were able, because to resist could lead only to death. But that was just the first part of the pattern. Once they fled, they set in motion an inevitable stand that would be made somewhere at some time. Just as the Mormons knew they would never entirely escape persecution, Sisson and the Power brothers knew they would never escape the Mormons. The pursuit would be relentless.

He did not understand, completely, why they were headed to Mexico, though Mexico had always meant refuge for the hunted north of the border. Under normal conditions. But the Mormons would not be stopped at the border the way a usual posse would be. Mormons had colonies in Mexico and were more familiar with the country and welcome than the Power brothers would be. The legal posses would turn back at the border. The Mormons and Wootans would not.