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yet know my proposition.”
    â€œDoesn’t matter. The answer is no.”
    â€œThey say you’re the only one who has carried goods between here and El Paso without losing a side of bacon or a grain of corn to the savages.”
    â€œJust lucky, I guess.”
    â€œMy driver has fallen ill from an excess of Pass whiskey. I would say he is more driven than driving.” Armijo might have winked, but since the flesh of this face almost obscured his eyes, Rafe couldn’t be sure. “I’ll pay you two hundred
and fifty dollars to take my lead wagon to Chihuahua—and bring it back, of course.”
    What Rafe had in mind to say was, “I’ll do it when there’s enough frost in hell to kill snap beans.” What he said instead was, “No.”
    Rafe turned and left, although putting his back to Armijo made him uneasy. He had heard the stories. Armijo was the winner in a walk when it came to vindictiveness.
    Night had fallen with a thud by the time Rafe reached the wagon yard behind the hostler’s shop. Horses, mules, burros, and oxen and vehicles of all persuasions had filled the trampled field since he’d tethered his mules that afternoon. As he approached his old Packard wagon, he realized that Absalom was sitting with his back against the front wheel. He passed a bottle to the man sitting with him.
    In the darkness the second man seemed to have misplaced his face. The space between the wide brim of his floppy straw hat and the ragged shirt collar was blank except for the startling round whites of a pair of eyes. Then Rafe walked close enough to see that he was a Negro.
    Absalom stood hastily and dusted the seat of his trousers with his hat. “Is this your wagon, Rafe?”
    â€œIt is.”
    â€œI didn’t think the owner would be back tonight.” He looked toward Mesilla and the sounds of celebration. “Loud, ain’t it?” He grinned. “Those boys do murder sleep.”
    Rafe smiled at the discovery of someone who could quote Shakespeare.
    â€œWe were fixin’ to bed down with our horses.” Absalom nodded to the three animals hobbled nearby. He waved his hand to include his companion. “This is my man, Caesar.”
    The black man stood up. He took off his hat and held it in front of his chest. “Pleased to meet ya, massa, suh.”
    â€œLikewise.”
    Rafe watched the two of them collect their blankets and lay them under another wagon. He thought it odd that Absalom would be sharing a bottle with a slave. Southerners would dine with hogs, drink with their horses, kiss their coon
hounds on the mouth, bed down with cattle, and dance a reel with a hairy, two-hundred-pound fur trapper, but they were fastidious about doing anything that might suggest social contact with a son of Africa.
    Rafe had learned early in his twenty years not to pry into other men’s business. He also knew that the racket from Mesilla would become more contentious and punctuated with gunfire. He pulled his blankets from the wagon’s leather boot and laid them under it. Before he rolled up in them, he took a cloth packet from his pocket. He unwrapped the beeswax inside, pulled off two pieces of it, and stuffed one into each ear.
    The army hadn’t needed to teach Rafe to shoot. Any boy growing up in Comanche country could hit what he aimed at. It hadn’t been able to make him obedient, except when survival demanded it; but a young West Point lieutenant had taught him to read. A captain had lent him tattered copies of Hamlet, Macbeth , and Julius Caesar. He had sat spellbound in the rowdy audience of soldiers while the officers performed Othello, As You Like It , and others.
    He drifted off to dreams with the Bard in his head. “Innocent sleep I sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.”

Chapter 3
    REAR GUARD
    T he coyote hustled, nose to the ground, following a jackrabbit’s scent through the desert darkness. When