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out to the porch and the summer night.
    White and helmeted, Harold the Ghost stole through the darkness. He hurried from house to house, from walls to fences to hedges. The bat on his shoulder, the bag against his back, he made his way to Main Street and the row of buildings there.
    He stopped and listened. But there was no calliope music, no murmur of a crowd.
    From the prairie to the west came a single spot of light growing larger on the road, then the rattle and bang of an old truck. Harold waited at the side of May’s Cafe as it came steadily toward him, not slowing for the town. Bits of stone and gravel shotgunned off the sides; dust rose up behind the light. And Farmer Hull went hammering past in his truck with one headlight and no fenders, intent on his driving, hunched over the wheel. Then Harold the Ghost crossed the road, passed the station and made his way to Batsford’s field.
    He found it empty; the circus was gone.
    There were long, greasy ruts in the grass, like the faint tracings of the Oregon Trail. Everywhere lay ticket stubs and candy wrappers. Crows pecked at chewed-away corncobs and hamburger wrappers, and Harold the Ghost put down his bundle. He sat on the grass in a thin circle of sawdust where the big top had been.
    The moonlight shone down on him, a little white dot in the vast, empty field.
    Across it came the horseman, the old Indian, his feathers fluttering and the fringes of his buckskin tapping on the horse’s hide. He came up beside Harold.
    â€œWhat was it?” he asked. “What sort of fish did you catch?”
    Harold looked up. “A sucker,” he said.
    The old Indian nodded. He looked to the west. “Do you want to ride with me?” he asked.
    Harold passed up his bundle, and the old Indian balanced it on top of his own, on the cream-colored mane of the horse. He held a big red hand toward Harold, and the boy climbed up behind him. Then the horse started forward, across the field and onto the prairie, down the grown-over path of the Oregon Trail.
    They didn’t talk. Harold slumped down until his head was on the old Indian’s shoulder, his hands resting lightly on buckskin-clad hips. The crickets chirped and the horse swayed along. The grass whispered past, and soon Harold was sleeping.
    When he woke again, he was twenty miles from Liberty.

Chapter
    7
    T he old Indian built a fire by a little stream. He made it out of sticks and grass, and the smoke went up in a spiral. From his bundle he got a pot that he filled with water and set by the fire to boil.
    He had taken off his headdress and left it lying across the horse. His hair was gray and very long, tied in double braids. He crouched by the fire and the smoke wrapped around him, thick as woolen blankets. It covered him completely, then drifted on and up.
    â€œHow old are you?” asked Harold.
    â€œVery old.” He looked all around, across the stream and across the prairie. “There’s nothing you can see that was here when I was born.”
    â€œThe grass?” asked Harold.
    â€œIt burns and grows again.”
    â€œThe river, then,” said Harold.
    â€œIt rises from a pond that was dug by cattle herders. Fifty years ago it wasn’t here.”
    â€œThe Oregon Trail,” said Harold. “The ruts the wagons made.”
    â€œI remember when they passed.” The old Indian smiled. He threw a bunch of yellow grass onto the fire, and the smoke came up through the stems. “I saw them from a distance. I thought they were clouds floating on the ground.”
    Harold squinted at him through his round glasses. “That was more than a hundred years ago.”
    â€œIt seems like yesterday,” said the old Indian.
    Harold stood up to see farther. Bands of grass, one after another, rolled for miles around him. There were clouds far to the west, low in the sky, like enormous sheep grazing beyond the horizon. And the faint lines of the Oregon Trail led toward them