Sisson didn't want to take on another Wootan in a fight. He hadn't wanted the first one, and he figured they were lucky to have come out of it as little wounded as they were. It hadn't been his fight, but he'd been pulled into it simply by location and the turning of events. Not that it mattered too much. But this time it would be his fight. People had been killed, and he was on the side that had done most of the killing. He wasn't just the hired man anymore, he was one of the Power boys now. And he guessed that was all right. When you signed on, you stayed on. It didn't do anyone any good to pretend that their fights weren't your fights. They were, or, at the least, they were going to seem that way. It didn't matter which way you stepped or which hand you shook. In the end, you were dead. The only questions were when and how. And those didn't matter a whole hell of a lot.

They continued down the foothills, and the tree line continued to thin until they were sprinting long yards from one tree to another, fanning out as the trees spread and grew shorter and scrubbier. They went down an arroyo and back up the other side. On the east side was the beginning of the plain, and the few trees along the banks of the arroyo quickly gave way to the rock and grass of the plain. The Chiricahuas were so far away, you couldn't make them out in the looming dark.

Two or three nights. That's what it would take to cross the plain of the Sulphur Springs Valley. That was if they were lucky, if they didn't get chased back again and have to start over from some other, more southerly point. You could walk it in two nights if you kept up a good pace and walked in a straight line. They could do neither. Sisson was too busted up in the legs to move as fast as they needed to. And you couldn't walk a straight line, anyway. You needed to work with the land, following ridges, arroyos, and rocks that offered cover. If there were hills a couple of miles off your line of flight, you went to them, because hills meant safety. And it was harder to track men who moved in random directions. Hell, anyone could track three men moving in a straight line. So there were no straight lines.