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handspan at 400 yards without knowing what you were doing. That was what had stirred up my suspicions at first; it had been followed by improbabilities and too many coincidences.
    The town didn’t have a library or a newspaper. I had to get the information by phone from Denver. It took more than an hour and I was a few minutes late meeting Mallory. He had an old Dodge Power Wagon — four-wheel-drive, winch, jerrycans, and canteens. A real wilderness rig. When I was a kid in the Southwest I’d known uranium prospectors who’d go out in Power Wagons and live out of them for months at a stretch and that was long before the fad for truck-mounted camper outfits.
    We rolled out of town and Mallory put the truck up a steep dirt road through the pines. “Find out anything?” he asked.
    I watched him while I spoke. “Seventeen hunters have died in this county in the past six years. Eleven of them in the vicinity of Goat Peak. Nine killed by 30-’06 bullets. Jacketed.”
    â€œNot surprising. That’s what a lot of hunters carry. And Goat Peak’s where most of the hunters go to set up their base camps.” But he said it in a tight-lipped way.
    I glanced at the carbine he had clipped to the inside of the door panel by his left knee. “What’s that, a .30-30?”
    â€œRight. Saddle gun. For varmints.”
    â€œTell me about Hugh Collins.”
    â€œNice old guy. A gentleman. You’ll see for yourself.”
    I said, “You didn’t like it much in ’Nam, did you?”
    â€œDid anybody?”
    â€œSome did. We had to arrest some of them. The ones who learned to enjoy killing. Got so they’d kill anybody — our side or theirs or just neutral.”
    â€œFragging?”
    â€œThose. And others. Some of them just got bloodthirsty. Psychotic. They couldn’t stop killing — didn’t want to.”
    He said, “We had one of those in my outfit. One of the other guys fragged him — threw a grenade down his blankets while he was asleep. We never found out which guy did it but we figured he probably saved all our lives.” He glanced at me. “It wasn’t me.”
    â€œNo. You never got into that bag, did you?”
    Mallory said, “Too scared. And in the end I supposed I developed a respect for life. No, I never got to liking war.”
    â€œThat wasn’t war,” I said.
    â€œShook you up, did it?”
    â€œIt was a long time before I got pulled back together. I had to have a lot of help.”
    He gave me a quick look and his eyes went back to the steep rutted road. “Shrinks? Psychiatrists?”
    â€œYes. And friends,” I said. I opened up to him because it might inspire him to share confidences. “Mostly it was the interrogations that did it to me. The ones we arrested. The way they could talk about committing grisly murders — and laugh about it. I couldn’t take it after a while. It was too grotesque. Terrifying. The bizarre became the commonplace. One day I just started screaming, so they sent me home.”
    â€œRough,” Mallory remarked.
    I watched his profile. “Charlie Cord liked to frag animals, didn’t he, Sam?”
    â€œYou could put it that way,” he replied, giving nothing away.
    â€œHe didn’t have much respect for life.”
    â€œNot for animal life, at any rate.” He turned the wheel with a powerful twist of his shoulders and we went bucking off the road up into a meadow that carried us across a rolling slope into a canyon. He put the Power Wagon into four-wheel-drive and we whined up the dry gravel bed of the canyon floor. I was pitched heavily around and tried to brace myself in the seat.
    It was past two o’clock when we reached Hugh Collins’ lean-to. It was a spartan camp. A coffee pot and a few utensils were near the dead ashes of the campfire — he’d built his fireplace out of rocks. A cased rifle stood propped