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providing food where others had failed.
    But now, there was no game to be killed at any distance. Something strange was happening on the prairie. The Buffalo were disappearing, as were the antelope. The stinking gringos were devastating the land, stripping it of everything that moved. He hated gringos .
    Juan scraped the last birdlike leg-bone of meat with his teeth, sucking it out of his mouth with a long popping sound, and tossed the remains onto the fire. He did not realize how bad off he had been or how much he had needed food until the gray fuzz of his peripheral vision began to disappear. His thinking cleared, but the reality of his situation left little to celebrate. Juan considered his chance of survival at little better than fifty-fifty. If his horse could make it. The poor beast was skin and bone. It could not last much longer.
    “Well, if you die on me, caballo , he said, startling himself and spooking the horse with the first words he’d said aloud for days, “I will eat you for sure. But try to hang on, eh? There will be good grass and plenty of water tomorrow.”
    The small stream wandering off in the shallow gulch to his left must empty into the Brazos. All of the land in this area sloped toward a river of some kind. He gathered himself and stood, clothes hanging loose on his whip-thin body. He tightened his gun belt another notch. If he lost any more weight, he’d be unable to keep his pants up.
    Gunfire! Juan stiffened for an instant and ducked. That was no popping rat . He’d been hearing it all along, too numb with hunger to track.
    Juan’s well developed survival instincts took over. He kicked dirt over the burning buffalo chip, grabbed his bony horse’s rein and ran half stumbling into a shallow watercourse near his camp. He flopped down in the sand, heart pounding in his ears. The firing had come from beyond the gully where it steepened and disappeared from sight. Had he been seen? It didn’t seem so. Whatever was going on was someone else’s trouble.
    Rising cautiously to his knees, he whispered, “Maybe we should get out of here, caballo . Someone is having a bad day.”
    All of Juan’s instincts told him to run, but something else compelled him to investigate. He had always been curious, about men, their motivations, the sky, almost everything. His mother had instilled in him a sense of wonder of life and nature that had served him well over the years. Now, it told him to see what benefit there might be had from this battle.
    Juan slithered forward on his belly, brushing salty smelling grass from his path until he reached the lip of a canyon and peered over the edge. The panorama of the Brazos River extended from right to left as far as he could see. A large group of men on horses were scattering toward the river, apparently from the fire of a lone man behind a boulder almost directly below. Clouds of gunsmoke hung over the scene. Several bodies lay on the prairie.
    The lone man was a huge, very tall gringo , the others looked to be a mixed group of Comanche Indians and ... Mexicanos? What were Mexicanos doing way up here? Could they be his old companeros ? No. They would not dress themselves like that. If nothing else, his friends had pride. Comancheros?
    Half the riders wore cavalry pants, ragged shirts or vests while the others were naked but for breechclouts. Most wore Mexican sombreros. A few displayed feathers on sweatbands or their hats and had painted their faces. Combined, there might be one decent outfit among them. It looked to Juan as if the men had been raiding, helping themselves to anything that would fit, regardless of how stupid it made them look. Stupid looking men, yes. But the horses, they were not stupid looking, especially that black stallion.
    Juan fixed his eyes on the horse ridden by the leader of the band. He whistled softly to himself. It was the most beautiful animal he had ever seen. Coal black and shining in the sun like a diamond, the horse held its smallish