Tom took a last long look around through the glasses. A full 360 degrees of nothing. He walked down the hill after his brother and the hired man, standing full up this time because it wasn't hide and cover time anymore. Now it was saddle and run time.

John couldn't tell if they were running from someone or toward someone. It wasn't a full-out run, but they were pushing the horses pretty hard, and his had a hard, awkward gait, running on only three shoes. Once they were out of the hills and into the flat of the valley again, they were running pretty much exposed.

If they were seen, they would have to go at a flat-out run, and he worried now that the horses had been run enough and that they wouldn't have much left when it came to a chase. There was no danger apparent in front of them. But the same small convolutions of landscape that gave them temporary cover, that allowed them to come in and out of both sight and fire lines, gave the same to those who hunted them.

The truck had scared him. He didn't like being pursued by a truck full of men with rifles. The truck was too fast, too big, too unrelenting. Still, a man on horseback had advantages in this country, where a sudden cut bank of an arroyo or an outcropping of rock could stop a truck and break it beyond repair. The danger, the greatest danger, he thought, came from men who were on horseback, just as they were. They could go where the trucks couldn't, and they didn't make as much noise or raise as much dust while they did it.

But maybe he worried too much because he was the dumb one. Tom saw things that he didn't, and Tom understood things that he didn't. Or so Tom said. John guessed he had to take Tom's word for it. John had the suspicion that Tom just thought he was smarter than all the dangers that confronted him. He always thought he had a way around things and that when the bad really happened, he could just outthink it. John wasn't so sure. Sometimes he thought that thinking was seriously overrated, especially by those who thought they were good at it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1901

Back in Cliff, New Mexico, after working odd jobs in Texas and New Mexico, Jeff found a faltering cattle ranch looking for an infusion of cash. He bought a half interest in the ranch. Within four months he understood that the ranch was failing because the owner, his new partner, was a drunk and, worse, an ignoramus. Jeff was no teetotaler, but he despised those who were weak enough to have their lives overtaken by a bottle.