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Upstairs, Flynn sang:
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    Oh, I'm off for the frontier
    soon as I can go.
    I'll prepare a weapon
    and stomp on Mexico!

Chapter 4
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    RIDERS OF THE NIGHT
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    I had hopes that the morning's excitement would make Mr. Knox forget about my execrable record in arithmetic and geography, they were dashed quickly. After he had conferred with my mother I found myself alone in my bedroom with the problem of how many apples remained in Jeff's possession after Susan had plundered his store and ten pages in my composition book awaiting my reflections upon the annual mean rainfall in Argentina. By that time Mr. Knox had gone, to return at dusk carrying a valise. During supper I endured an oral quiz in long division while Judge Blod, uncharacteristically silent, busied himself with biscuits and gravy. Flynn did not show himself, but remained in his room, snoring rippingly and occasionally singing in his sleep about bloody banners, sacred ground, and Mr. Lincoln's antecedents.
    I lay awake for some time after retiring, partly because of Joe Snake and thoughts of Quantrill's gold and partly because my schoolmaster occupied the room next to mine. A shaft of milky moonlight fell upon my half-completed geography assignment on the writing table, throwing a shadow that resembled Mr. Knox, rampant on a field of fleurs-de-lis.
    If I slept at all, I had awakened by the time a harness ring jingled directly beneath my window. Notwithstanding Mother's lectures about the harmful properties of night air, I was in the habit of sleeping with the window partially open, and the noise carried. I might have put it down to my imagination, which was strongest when I lay alone in the dark on the edge of sleep, and drifted off, had not a horse then stamped and blown in the chill spring night. Hard on that I heard voices.
    "I see you're still carrying Bloody Bill's flask, Flynn."
    "Hell, Beacher, you know old Flynn'd suck the sap out of a old piss-elm iffen it was that or water."
    "Where's the swag, Flynn?"
    Two of the voices were unfamiliar to me. The first had a medium quality, not harsh like Flynn's, almost pleasant. The second was a nasal whine and employed some kind of backwoods dialect that made the words nearly incomprehensible. But it was the third speaker who brought me out of bed as suddenly as if something had scurried across me in the dark; for I recognized the rattling whisper of Joe Snake.
    The window overlooked the backyard. Through it, I saw Jotham Flynn standing bowlegged under the cottonwood with his back toward me, holding aloft the lamp from his room. In its light he was surrounded by four men on horseback. Their hats hid their faces, but the Indian's huge frame was obvious astride a buckskin that was too small for him so that his boots nearly touched the ground. One of the others sat a pretty strawberry roan, which shied when a third man aboard a shaggy, ill-kept bay directed a glittering stream of tobacco juice at the roan's left forefoot.
    "Bull's-eye!" he said, in the nasal whine, which I have already described.
    The man on the roan cursed. "Spit on your own transportation, Pike." His was the pleasant voice.
    The fourth man straddled a big blaze-face which stood in my mother's flowerbed, munching on the irises she had been laboring over for three years in a place where everyone said irises could not live. He was almost Joe Snake's size but did not look as freakish because of his choice of mounts. I saw pistols in belts and holsters and saddle rifles and, in the tobacco-spitter's hands, a bullwhip doubled over with a butt as big around as my wrist. He kept smacking his left palm with it when he wasn't despoiling the yard with his evil juice.
    "Where's the swag, Flynn?" Joe Snake repeated.
    Flynn laughed, coughed, and tipped up the flask he was never without. I recall wondering if the jug in his room had a bottom. "I had it, you think I'd still be here looking at your ugly face, you dumb redskin?"
    The bullwhip cracked. The flask sprang