“See anything?” Sisson asked Tom, who was glassing the lowlands in front of them.

“I'm still sitting here, ain't I?” Tom said. He paused, reconsidered, then, in a milder tone, said, “Nothing. We either lost them, they never saw us, or they've gone to get more men to come and surround us.”

“What's your thinking?”

“Mostly, I'm trying not to think.”

“Having any luck?”

Tom smiled. “Not much. If they don't know where we are, we're safe up here for a good while. If they do know, they'll come at us from every direction, a lot of them, and then this is just the end.”

Sisson picked up a long strand of grass and stripped the seeds from it. He had no thoughts to share with Tom on this particular dilemma, except that he didn't especially want to die, but that if he had to, he would rather get shot than hanged. He had seen a man hanged. It wasn't a good sight. It wasn't a good death.

“I don't know what you're thinking, but I wish you would stop. The look on your face is terrible to behold.”

“I'm not thinking nothing,” Sisson said.

“You're thinking dying thoughts is what you're doing. I'm trying to think stay-alive thoughts.” He rolled over onto his left side so he was facing Sisson. “Here's my thinking so far. We can stay here a little while, rest ourselves and the horses. John needs lots of sleep. But we can't overstay. We stay too long, we die here. This is a dying place. We can put up a fight, but we can't win. Not in the long run. So we got to get out of here and head for better cover, somewhere they won't surround us.”

“Where's that?”

“The Stronghold, most likely, but before that I want to try to get to Hendricks's place. We can resupply and rest up there, swap out our horses for new ones.”

“John's going to need a new horse if we're to make it very far.”

“Then we get John a new horse. Because we're going to make it all the way to Mexico, goddamn it.”

They let John sleep and took turns catnapping and glassing the valley. They needed sleep nearly as bad as John did, but this wasn't the time for it. For John, any time was the time to sleep.

It was getting on noon when Tom got up, duckwalked over to where John and Sisson slept, and touched their shoulders. “Let's go. It's time.”

“It's time?”

He guessed it was. There was no way to know if this was any better than any other time, except that he was tired of waiting. He needed to move again. “This would be the time,” he said.