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wagon!”
    He still hammers on the heads and backs of the helpless oxen. Seams of blood begin to seep through their chalky, dusty hides.
    “Milt!” Jim cries. “Unhitch the teams! Let’s help John get his wagon up!”
    Snyder shouts back, “I don’t need nothin’ from you or your teams!”
    “Calm down, Johnny.”
    “You’re the one got us into this mess!”
    “You can’t accuse me. I’ve been gone.”
    “I do accuse you!”
    “I won’t hear this!”
    Snyder has climbed up onto the wagon tongue, brandishing his whip. Uncle Billy Graves is loping down the hill in long, sand-sliding hops, with Mary right behind him. Margaret Reed steps toward her husband, hearing in his voice a sound that frightens her. She moves toward the sound, as if her upheld hand might silence it.
    “James, James,” she says.
    But Snyder and Reed both are deaf to the voices around them. Jim knows they have been saying this for weeks, laying at his feet all the blame for their delays. It eats at him. It’s a sign of weakness, this blaming. When things go wrong, they dare not blame themselves. Late at night he has been thinking, Have I not done my best? God knows, I’ve given it my all at every turn…. Exhausted, yet he cannot sleep, worrying till dawn then arising to another day of sand and heat, as hour by hour his hold on the future turns literally to dust, crumbling around him, disappearing with the wind. Two wagons lost, eighteen cattle gone, his wife and children walking, all losing weight, their faces thinning in a way that can break a father’s heart, yet still watching him with the child’s faith that he will bring them through. And now to come back, after a morning’s fruitless search for game, to find John Snyder beating on the head of one of his last oxen, as if he wants to beat the poor starving creature into the earth. Isn’t this precisely what has brought them all to such a place? This senseless show?
    Snyder stands above him on the wagon tongue as if to get a better angle on the heads and bodies of the animals.
    “Maybe you’re the one deserves a whipping, Mr. Reed!”
    “Dammit, man, we’ll settle this on top!”
    “I think we ought to settle it right now!”
    Jim is like another ox that has failed John Snyder. With the whip end for a club, he lands a slashing blow across the forehead, tearing loose a flap of skin.
    Jim staggers back, dazed, gropes at the wound and feels blood oozing toward his eyes. When Snyder leaps to the ground, swinging wildly, Jim ducks, and this time the whipstock catches Margaret, who has rushed in to intervene. She is pitched into the sand.
    He hears his wife cry out. He hears his daughters calling, “mama!”
    His right hand slides toward the Bowie knife he carries at his waist. Half blinded by the blood, he can’t see much, but he knows another blow is coming. He draws his knife. Crouching, with the Bowie held wide, he lunges toward the sound, just as Snyder makes a move. The broad blade, strong enough and sharp enough to whittle oak into an axle tree, cuts in below the collarbone with such force that two ribs are severed and the lung is split.
    Snyder’s yell fills the little desert valley with his pain and his anger. When Jim pulls the knife free, Snyder keeps coming. Two more ferocious blows rip the scalp and drive Reed to his knees.
    Milt Elliott and Uncle Billy are now close enough to get hands on Snyder, who will not be restrained. He pulls his powerful right arm free and raises it yet again, then lets it drop. As he turns to Uncle Billy his face goes blank. Beneath the dusty pallor, his ruddy skin turns whiter than white. He looks at Mary. His knees give way, and the old man catches him, eases him down into the sand. The shirtfront is red and wet.
    “I am finished, Uncle Billy,” he gasps. “I am done.”
    “No, sir,” Uncle Billy says. “No, sir, that ain’t true at all.”
    Jim pushes a sleeve against his brow, to slow the blood and clear his eyes, looking down in