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strips to tie the bundles of branches into something that approximated a raft. Then on one knee he lugged himself back up to the game trail to find out what his deadfall had snared.
    He didn’t expect much of anything and he was ready to go around following that owl half the night, but he ran into a little luck. The deadfall had killed a small porcupine.
    You used a lot of care with porcupine. He rolled it over onto its back after he got the rock off it, and jabbed a broken twig into its throat and laid it out along the bank with its head downhill. He worked the twig in and out until he had severed all the main arteries.
    While the blood drained he spent twenty minutes honing the steel edge of Wilstach’s U.S.A. belt buckle against the flat side of a rock until he had a blade on it. He slit the porc’s belly from chin to tail and peeled the flesh back, removed the innards and used the buckle-knife to separate the meat from the pincushion hide. He only got three or four quill pricks in his hands.
    There hadn’t been any sign of pursuit along the riverbanks but it would be stupid to build a fire and invite investigation; he wasn’t more than ten or twelve miles south of Hardyville. He ate the meat raw.

4
    The current carried him along at a good clip and only occasionally he used the oar he’d built like a broom by lashing a bunch of stiff rushes to the end of a broken willow limb. When the sun started to get hot he soaked Wilstach’s bandanna in the river and tied it down over his head. Every little while he took it off and wetted it down again. No point getting sunstroke. He remembered the white officers of the Tenth and their tired jokes about the Buffalo soldiers’ suntans.
    He had worked it out in his head. It was about 375 river miles to Yuma and the current held a steady twelve or fifteen-knot speed down the Colorado. Taking an average that meant he would be about thirty hours on the river. He’d lost some blood and there was still the vestige of shock; he couldn’t expect to spend fifteen hours a day steering the raft so he gave himself three days.
    He was already thirty-six hours behind them when he started, and the steamboat would pick up another day on him—maybe two days—but still they’d only be three or four days ahead of him out of Yuma and they had the weight of that ton-and-a-half of gold to slow them down. They’d have to use pack mules or wagons.
    He didn’t have a plan worked out. That would come.
    In the middle of the day he let the raft drift onto the sandbank in a bend by the western shore and he rested a while and ate the last of the porcupine meat that he was going to eat; there was some left but it would go rancid by nightfall and he kept it with him only to use as bait for fishing. He made hooks out of the metal eyelets of the buttons from Wilstach’s shirt-tunic and he said, “John B., you’re helping me catch up to that son of a bitch all the time.” Slender strips of Wilstach’s clothes made his fishing line and he tied Wilstach’s brass buttons just above the hooks to attract the eyes of the fish. He imbedded the hooks in porcupine meat and let the lines trail the raft and by sundown he had six little fish aboard.
    He had come far enough to risk a fire; he built one Indian-style and rubbed willow sticks over arrowweed tinder to start it going. He disliked fish anyway but raw fish was too much to contemplate; he cooked them in their skins and cut them open afterward and ate them from the inside out, spitting out the bones, hungry enough not to mind the taste.
    The leg was mending all right. He still hadn’t put his weight on it and he didn’t intend to until he had to. Things were coming along, he thought. He’d need a gun and a horse but he still had the two gold eagles in his boots and that was enough to buy a gun and some cartridges, and with that he could commandeer the rest.
    â€œI know it, John