They rode out of Rawlins in the dark, with the stars still hard and white overhead and the frost on the sage, and nobody in town awake to see them go but a dog, who followed them a quarter mile and thought better of it.

Amos rode his buckskin, Deacon, a horse with a Roman nose and no sense of humor. Hannah Creel had a sorrel mare she'd borrowed from the livery and sat as easy as a cavalry sergeant, which settled one of Amos's worries before the sun was up. Toby rode the mule.

The mule's name was Pharaoh. He had come with the livery mare, the way a bad cousin comes with a wedding, and he had decided in the first mile that he would go where the horses went but not one step faster, and not in a straight line. Toby talked to him the whole way. Amos, riding behind, learned more about Pharaoh's character by noon than he knew about most of his relations.

North of town the country opened up and went on forever, gray-green sage and red earth and not a tree anywhere, and the sky got bigger and bigger until it seemed a man ought to be able to hear it. Antelope watched them from the ridges, white rumps flashing, and ran when they got close, and stopped, and watched again. Toby wanted to know why they did that. Hannah said they were curious. Amos said they were counting.

"Counting what?"

"How many of us there are. Whether we've got a rifle out. Whether we're worth the trouble."

Toby looked at him sideways. "Are we?"

"Not to an antelope," Amos said.

They made a dry camp the first night in a draw out of the wind, and Hannah cooked bacon and biscuits in a skillet over a sagebrush fire and did it better than Amos had seen it done in twenty years of trail cooking. He told her so. She said her late husband had been a brakeman on the Union Pacific and had eaten every one of his meals for eight years in a caboose, and when he came home, by heaven, he wanted a biscuit.

"How long's he been gone?" Amos asked, when Toby had gone to see about the mule.

"Two years in March. Coupling cars in the yard at Laramie. It was nobody's fault, they said." She turned a biscuit. "They always say that."

Amos let it be. There's a kind of quiet that's a door closing and a kind that's just a door, and he'd learned to tell the difference.

The second day they struck the Sweetwater. It was running high and cold with snowmelt, clear enough to see every stone on the bottom, and they followed it upstream through the long afternoon with the granite hills off to the north, round and bare as loaves of bread. That night they camped under the cutbank with the river talking beside them. Toby was quieter. This was his country, Amos realized. The station was not a day's ride upstream from here.

After supper the boy sat by the fire with his knees up and said, without anybody asking, "I was in the loft."

Hannah stopped what she was doing. Amos didn't move at all.

"Pa sent me up to fork down hay for the stage team. It was about suppertime. I heard horses and I looked out the little door, and there were three of them. Two got down and went in. The other one stayed on his horse and held theirs." He picked up a stick and poked the fire with it. "I heard Pa's voice and then I heard them shouting, and then the shot. I didn't come down. I stayed up there in the hay. I should've come down."

"No," Amos said. "You shouldn't have."

"Pa could have—"

"Your pa is alive and you're alive, and that's because you stayed in that loft. You hear me? You did it exactly right. There's grown men wouldn't have had the sense."

The boy looked at him a long time. Then he nodded, once, and something in his shoulders let go.

"The one on the horse," Amos said. "You said he was laughing."

"The whole time. Not loud. Like something was funny that nobody else knew about. His voice was funny too. Scratchy, kind of. Like a gate that wants oil." Toby frowned into the fire. "He had a snakeskin on his hat. Around the band. I could see it from the loft 'cause the sun was on it."

Across the fire, Hannah looked up quick at Amos. He kept his face still.

"That's good, Toby," he said. "That's real good. You go on to sleep now."

When the boy was rolled up in his blankets, Amos took the rifle and went up on the cutbank where he could see back down the river the way they'd come. The moon was coming up behind him. The river shone. A coyote started up somewhere to the south, and another answered, and then they went quiet.

Hannah came up beside him with a cup of coffee and handed it to him without a word, and they stood there together looking back down the valley.

"The man in the saloon doorway," she said finally. "In Rawlins. I saw him too."

"I know you did."

"Was there a snakeskin on his hat?"

"Couldn't say for sure. There was something."

She didn't say anything else. She didn't have to. Amos drank the coffee, and they watched, and a long way off down the river, three or four miles maybe, right about where the trail crossed the last ridge, a small red point of light winked on in the dark, and stayed.

Somebody else had made camp for the night. Somebody who had come the same way they had, and had stopped when they stopped.