So Jake began to explain, but halfway through he heard a snore. He looked across the room and saw Benny still facing him, but now with his eyes closed.

Oy opened his eyes—they were bright in the darkness—then winked at Jake. After that, he appeared to go back to sleep.

Jake looked at Benny for a long time, deeply troubled in ways he did not precisely understand…or want to.

At last, he went to sleep himself.

Three

Some dark, dreamless time later, he came back to a semblance of wakefulness because of pressure on his wrist. Something pulling there. Almost painful. Teeth. Oy’s.

“Oy, no, quittit,” he mumbled, but Oy would not stop. He had Jake’s wrist in his jaws and continued to shake it gently from side to side, stopping occasionally to administer a brisk tug. He only quit when Jake finally sat up and stared dopily out into the silver-flooded night.

“Moon,” Oy said. He was sitting on the floor beside Jake, jaws open in an unmistakable grin, eyes bright. They should have been bright; a tiny white stone burned deep down in each one. “Moon!”

“Yeah,” Jake whispered, and then closed his fingers around Oy’s muzzle. “Hush!” He let go and looked over at Benny, who was now facing the wall and snoring deeply. Jake doubted if a howitzer shell would wake him.

“Moon,” Oy said, much more quietly. Now he was looking out the window. “Moon, moon. Moon.”

Four

Jake would have ridden bareback, but he needed Oy with him, and that made bareback difficult, maybe impossible. Luckily, the little border-pony sai Overholser had loaned him was as tame as a tabby-cat, and there was a scuffy old practice saddle in the barn’s tackroom that even a kid could handle with ease.

Jake saddled the horse, then tied his bedroll behind, to the part Calla cowboys called the boat. He could feel the weight of the Ruger inside the roll—and, if he squeezed, the shape of it, as well. The duster with the commodious pocket in the front was hanging on a nail in the tackroom. Jake took it, whipped it into something like a fat belt, and cinched it around his middle. Kids in his school had sometimes worn their outer shirts that way on warm days. Like those of his room, this memory seemed far away, part of a circus parade that had marched through town…and then left.

That life was richer,a voice deep in his mind whispered.

This one is truer,whispered another, even deeper.