In the morning the light down the valley was gone, and there was no dust on the back trail, and no rider on any ridge that Amos could find, though he looked until his eyes watered. That worried him more than if there had been.

They broke camp early and pushed on west along the river. Ahead of them the long wall of the granite hills ran on and on, and in the top of it, far off, there was a notch cut clean as if somebody had taken an axe to the mountain. The old emigrants had steered by it thirty years ago, Amos told Toby, the wagon people headed for Oregon and California, and you could still find their names scratched in the rocks along this river if you knew where to look.

"Split Rock," Toby said. "Pa showed me. You can see it from the station."

He said it easy, and then he didn't say anything for a long while.

Around noon they came to a spring below the hills where the grass was already green, and there was a man camped at it. He had a good bay horse picketed on the grass and a pack horse beside it, and a little fire going with a coffeepot on it, and he stood up when he saw them coming and lifted one hand, friendly, and kept the other one well away from his side, which was polite of him.

"Afternoon," he called. "Coffee's hot, if you're of a mind. I've been talking to my horse for two days and he's heard all my stories."

Amos had been on the other side of a great many campfires in his life. He looked the man over without seeming to. Forty, maybe. Clean-shaven. Good boots, not new. A black hat, plain, with a plain band. He wore a gun, the way most men out here did, and he wore it like a man who had forgotten it was there, which was either a good sign or a very bad one.

"Obliged," Amos said, and got down, and so did Hannah. Toby stayed on the mule.

The man's name, he said, was Pell. He bought cattle for a firm in Omaha and he was headed up to Juniper Flat to look at some yearlings, and wasn't that a coincidence, since he supposed from the look of things that's where they were headed too. He poured coffee for Amos and Hannah in two tin cups, and he had a way of talking that made you want to keep listening, easy and warm, with a lot of little jokes in it. He admired Hannah's mare. He asked after Amos's knee, which Amos had not mentioned. He'd noticed the way he got down.

"And who's the young man?" Pell said, and smiled over at Toby.

"My nephew," said Hannah, before Amos could answer. "We're taking him to his grandmother's."

"Well, that's a long way to go for a grandmother. She must make a fine pie."

"She does," said Hannah.

Amos watched Toby over the rim of his cup. The boy was sitting very still on the mule. He hadn't said a word since they rode in. He was looking at the ground in front of Pharaoh's feet as if there was something written there he had to memorize.

The black hat, Amos thought. The plain band. Any man can change a hatband. Any man can also just be a cattle buyer out of Omaha who likes to talk. He'd seen innocent men look guilty and guilty men look like Sunday school teachers, and he'd been wrong both ways often enough to be careful.

"You folks are welcome to ride along with me," Pell said. "Safer, the four of us. There's been some trouble on this road, I hear. A stage station got robbed down the river a ways, back in March."

"Is that so," Amos said.

"Terrible thing. Terrible." Pell shook his head and looked into the fire. "Man could get hurt out here."

Amos set his cup down. "I'd better see about the mule," he said. "He's been favoring a foot."

He walked over to Pharaoh and bent down and lifted the mule's near front foot, which was perfectly sound, and looked at it with great attention. Toby leaned down from the saddle as if to look too. His face was white as paper.

"Marshal," he whispered. "His hat's different."

"I know it."

"But listen to him."

Back at the fire, Hannah had said something, Amos never did find out what, and Pell tipped his head back and laughed. It wasn't loud. It went on a little longer than the joke deserved, low and pleased with itself, like he was enjoying something nobody else in the world knew about. And there was a catch in it, a rasp, the sound of a gate that wants oil.

Toby's hand closed on Amos's shoulder so hard it hurt.

"That's him," the boy said. "That's the one who held the horses."