“Nothing. We're just riding. You're OK. Go ahead and sleep. I'm going up to talk with Sisson a bit.”

“I wasn't sleeping.”

“Right. And I ain't riding, either.”

“I wasn't.”

“All right. You wasn't.”

He came up abreast of Sisson. “How far you think we can get tonight?”

Sisson hesitated. “We can make the Johnson mine, I guess. Plenty of places to crouch down around there.”

“All right. We get up on the high ground there, we can hold them off for a while, maybe scoot out the west side and on down.”

“Maybe,” Sisson said. “We're leaving good tracks here. We ain't going to be hard to find.”

“That's true enough, but I don't think it makes a hell of a lot of difference. We're going this way because it's the only way that makes sense. But it would take a six-year-old about four seconds to figure out that we're going to ride the riverbed south as long as we can.

“But we'll keep going for a while. Right now, I guess this is the safest spot we'll find. We can cut out of the river and head southeast at some point. Go a different direction. I'm thinking we can head for the Dragoons, then over the Chiricahuas, and then on to Mexico. There's people in the valley might lend a hand.”

“All right,” Sisson said. “Still, I'd like to not leave so many tracks. No sense to give them a clear trail.”

“You're the best tracker in the state, I would guess.”

“It won't take a good tracker,” Sisson said. “Just one who can see.”

They stopped under an overhanging mesquite, its exposed roots twisted and gnarled white in the pale moonlight. Sisson took a blanket from his saddle roll and began cutting it with a jackknife. He handed Tom two long pieces of the blanket. “Cut those into long strips, so we can tie these on.” Sisson went on cutting the rest of the blanket into ten-inch squares. When he had cut two dozen, he doubled them, then cut one-inch slits into the four corners. He turned to Tom, who was still sawing at the blanket with his knife.

Sisson reached out, took the piece of blanket from Tom, and started pulling off long strips, tearing down the warp of the cloth. “I know you lost your momma early on, but you had a grandmother and a sister. Didn't you ever watch them work cloth?”

“Didn't need to. I had you.”

Sisson nodded and grunted and began threading the long strips of cloth through the slits in the blanket squares. He handed several to Tom. “This part's easy.”