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he finished his whiskey. He could scrape along, but a woman with a baby needed more than a few dollars to survive. He’d stay and see them safely off on the supply train to Dodge City, take what money remained in his pocket, drift south to find work, and keep an eye out for the stolen ponies. He knew every one of the stolen horses by sight. With a million square miles of open country, the odds were against finding the men who’d murdered Tom and Timmy. But if he ran across any of the horses, he might have a slim chance of doing that.
    Soon, ranchers would be gathering their herds for the fall works, so it was likely he could hire on somewhere, although the job probably wouldn’t turn into anything permanent.
    John and Tom had both used the Double K brand on their livestock, figuring their spreads were all part of the same family. On his way south, he’d stop by Tom’s ranch, put the Double K brand on his new pony as a reminder of what he’d lost, and say his final good-byes. It was almost too much to think about.
    He hoisted the bundle of cloth Ida needed for Patrick’s diapers and stepped outside into the blazing hot afternoon. In a matter of days, he’d lost almost everything and everyone dear to him. He couldn’t help wondering if in the end he might lose his son too.

3
     
    T he dusty settlement along the bone-dry riverbed had sprung up to supply outfits trailing cattle west, and from the looks of it John Kerney guessed it would melt back into the sunbaked earth long before anyone decided to give it a name. No more than a wide cow track at a bend in a hard-packed trail with a few hastily thrown-up buildings, it already appeared half-abandoned.
    During the past year, Kerney had drifted through half a dozen or more similar outposts already fading from sight and memory. This particular hamlet of civilization sat in the middle of the West Texas brush country, an expanse of land that was hell and gone from nowhere, a vast semiwilderness of caliche hills, sandy pastures with ragged grass carpets, cactus patches that rose up to worry a horse and rider, and wooded creeks with ancient live oaks that offered brief respite from the relentless sun. In some places rugged, twisted mountains touched the sky, but in all of what Kerney had seen it was a thorny scrubland with thickets mostly impenetrable by man and beast.
    It was also, as Kerney discovered on his last job, a land where working cattle was most times downright dangerous and otherwise hard, exhausting work at best.
    He had yet to see all of the brush country, for it stretched roughly between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande, ran on to the Gulf Coast, and took up a considerable amount of land south toward Old Mexico. Some of the hands he’d ridden with said it was roughest between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. But even with their stories of old bulls with horns wider than the spread of a man’s arms and cactus savannas so thick cows and calves refused to be driven through them by men on foot, Kerney had a hard time imagining how it could be any worse than what he’d already experienced. He looked forward to the day when he could get far away from it.
    Until then, he was still stuck square in the middle of a hardpan, drought-stricken swath of brush country, and he’d been eating its dust for two days. So he was glad enough to see the lopsided saloon that leaned southerly, the general store with its wind-whipped, ragged piece of canvas covering an unfinished roof, and the small stable with a corral that held a neglected broomtail pony. He wanted a drink, a meal, some grub to pack in his saddlebag, and a nickel’s worth of feed for his horse. With any luck, the store would have some green coffee beans to carry him through until he reached a real town.
    Kerney badly needed work, and a traveler he’d passed by sometime back had told him that a rancher fixing to move his herd out of the drought was hiring hands in the area. But from his perch on a small rise