“When we finally got to the bottom of the hill, I looked back and saw something whose equivalent I hope never to see in my life again. You see, that baling wire hadn't held. One side of it had broke off and let that rubber hose come free. That free end of the hose had kept spinning around and had just beat that poor gal to death. It was a terrible thing. Just terrible.”

“Is that true?” John asked. Then Tom gave in and laughed and gave his brother a hard shove on the shoulder.

“That is the God's own truth,” the Old Man said. “And if I ever catch one of you little fart-sniffers building hisself a bicycle, I'm going to beat the crap out of you, just to save some poor girl's life.”

Sisson supposed that somehow the Old Man had pretty much brought on his own death, but he was going to miss him. And Sisson saw that his life was going to be harder now, following Tom rather than the Old Man.

It was a slow trek. The night was deeply dark, with only the thinnest sliver of moon for light. The country was level, flat as a frying pan, in fact. But it was full of small dangers: rocks, snakes out hunting at night, and an assortment of rabbit and squirrel holes for a horse to snap its leg in. But the worst danger was the miles of barbed-wire fences marking the boundaries of one ranch from another. A rider who was moving fast on a dark night and came up too sudden on a barbed-wire fence was going to be lucky if all he lost was his horse.

So they picked their way as quickly as they could but slow enough to avoid the most obvious of the dangers. Sisson rode lead still, being the only one with two eyes. There was no evidence that they were being followed or tracked, though they certainly were. It wouldn't do to show themselves any more than they absolutely had to. If the old woman on the edge of town knew about them, probably most of the three surrounding counties knew about them as well.