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horror. “My God!” he cries. “My God, I didn’t mean to do this!”
    He hurls the culprit knife out into the blue curve of the river and drops to his knees. Margaret is behind him, her hair loose, streaked with blood and chalk, looking for some way to help, calling to Virginia and Patty to bring cloth, rags, anything. The daughters can’t move. They have watched it all. They stand and watch their father kneel beside the dying teamster.
    More emigrants come stumbling down the slope. They press in close, though no one is certain what to do. Snyder is wheezing. Jim tears open the shirt and with his kerchief tries to cover the hole and stanch the wound. Blood from his forehead drips into the blood trickling from one corner of Snyder’s mouth. It is too much for Mary Graves.
    “Murderer!” she screams. “Get away from him! Make him get away!”
    He bends very close and says, “Forgive me, Johnny.”
    Snyder’s lips part. He whispers, “I’m to blame,” words heard only by Reed, who shakes his head and shakes his head as if pestered by a cloud of flies.
    “No, no, no,” he mutters. “No, no, no, no, no.”
    He watches the lips for whatever might come next, while others who have clambered down the hill push in behind a man who says, “What was that? Did Johnny speak?”
    Again the lips move, but nothing more comes. The eyes spring wide, as if large with revelation, then squeeze shut against the tearing wound and stay shut as the last bloody breath bubbles out of him and the head lolls.
    Above Jim the voice of Patrick Breen, the Irish farmer, is like a preacher’s dire pulpit warning. “You’ve killed him.”
    “He struck me first.”
    “You ran him through,” says Uncle Billy Graves. “I saw you do it, man.”
    With haggard eyes Graves looks around the circle and mimes the death blow. “That’s what he did. Jim Reed pulled out his Bowie knife and ran Johnny through.”
    Jim brushes back the blood and tears and sweat from around his brows and eyelids. Through a blinking blur he sees a dozen faces watching him, filled with fear, suspicion, hatred, ready to condemn. He starts to protest, to defend himself, but his throat is so thick he cannot speak.
    Uncle Billy hunkers next to the young man who would have been his son-in-law and takes the shoulders. Another man takes the feet. Jim reaches for the midsection, but Patrick Breen edges him aside and joins the two men as they lift the remains of John Snyder and begin to climb. As others fall in behind, they form a slow procession up the sandy slope and over the hill, leaving Jim and his family alone by the silent river.

Wounds
    A FTER THE TEAMS are untangled, Milt Elliott pulls the Palace Car around and parks it. He raises their small camping tent, and Margaret collapses there, stretched out under canvas, unable to speak. Snyder’s whip handle caught her on the shoulder but didn’t break the skin. The blood in her hair is Jim’s. The girls sit with her, while he falls to the sand and leans back, propped against a wagon wheel.
    Woozy, near nausea, he places his hands upon his thighs to steady them. He shuts his eyes, hoping to God this will be the last death. They come in threes, it is said, and this is the third. How can one company have such a string of hard luck? You lay your plans, you try to guard against every hazard you have heard about, then you stand there and watch the fates have their way with you. How could he have stabbed a man like Snyder, a man he has relied on all these weeks when others began to lose their will? Could he have backed away from the whipstock? No, Reed thinks. No, I had no choice. He gave me no choice. I wish to God he had …
    He sees again his harnessed oxen squirming to evade a manic beating. He hears Patty’s voice say, “papa.”
    He opens his eyes and she is standing next to him, offering the canteen. He takes it and drinks. He would like to drink it all.
    “How’s your mother?”
    “She fell asleep.”
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