“You'll be OK here,” Tom said. “Just stay low and don't do anything stupid.” They were deep in the mesquite bosque, a thicket of mesquite on the San Pedro River floodplain, thick and nearly impenetrable. No one could sneak up on them.

“We ain't going to do nothing stupid,” John said. “You always think we're going to do something stupid. But we're not stupid, Tom.”

“Not ‘we.’ You. Sisson, see if you can do something about that eye. See if you can get some of that wood out. It don't do much for his countenance.”

Sisson looked up at him, part look, part glare. His big, drooping moustaches gave his whole face a baleful look. It was just his look. “I ain't a doctor. He needs a doctor, and so do you. You don't look a hell of a lot better than he does.”

“We ain't going to be seeing any doctors for a while. We're on our own. And I don't have to look at me, just him. See if you can get that out before his whole eye festers and breaks open.”

“He'll lose the eye.”

“Eye's lost. So's mine. Take it out if you have to. We don't want to stop just because his dead eye is grieving him.”

At the edge of the bosque he stopped and listened. It was moving into early afternoon now, and there wasn't much cover between the bosque and the Carlink ranch. He would have to keep to the sides of the hills where he would be blocked from some view at least. He chose to stay on the east side, figuring that if the posse came back down the canyon after them, they'd be a long while coming down. The larger the group, the slower the travel, and there were damned few who knew the canyons the way the three of them did.

He heard nothing except the rattle and clatter of the horses behind him. He sat the mule because it was the strongest of the three and would be able to keep a pace the unmounted horses, even Sisson's lame one, could maintain. He spurred the mule and exited the cover of the bosque.

Almost immediately, his skin began to crawl. He took out the binoculars and glassed the exit of the canyon and the valley floor to his east. There was nothing. He felt watched, though. He was reasonably sure he wasn't, but the feeling was a powerful and uncomfortable one. He had hunted all his life—glassing the landscape in front of him until he found the prey, then calculating the path toward it so he would not be seen until it was too late for the prey to escape. Now, he guessed, it was his turn. His only advantage was that he understood what they would be doing as they came after him. He could anticipate their movements, and then he could avoid them.