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grain into them, and fastened them over the mouths of the horses. The big roan stomped his hooves in satisfaction. Jamie watched the ferry as it neared the opposite bank… the shouts of the men came faintly to their ears as fully half of the cavalry present boarded the ferry.
    “They’re comin’,” Jamie said.
    Josey was busying himself checking the hooves of the munching horses, lifting first one and then another foot. “From the tracks, t’other side, I’d cal’clate forty, fifty hosses was brought acrost this mornin’,” he said, “and they’re ahead of us. Reckin we need to space a little time ’twixt them and us.”
    Jamie watched the ferry moving toward them. Soldiers were walking the cable. “ ’Pears to me we’re goin’ to be needin’ a little space behint us too,” he said bleakly.
    Josey straightened to look. The ferry was almost to midstream, and as they watched, the current began to catch, pulling the cable in a taut curve. Josey slid the .56 Sharps from the saddle boot.
    “Hold Big Red,” he said as he handed the horse’s reins to Jamie. For a long time he sighted down the barrel … then … BOOM! The heavy rifle reverberated in echo across the river. All activity stopped on the ferry. The men stood motionless, frozen in motion. The cable parted from the pilings with a snap of telegraphic zing of sound. For a moment the ferry in the middle of the river floated motionless, suspended. Slowly it began to swing downstream. Faster and faster, as the current picked up its load of men and horses. Now there was shouting … men dashed first to one end and then the other in confusion. Two horses jumped over the side and swam about in a circle.
    “Godalmighty!” Jamie breathed.
    The confused tangle of shouting men and pitching horses was carried at locomotive speed… farther and farther… until they disappeared around the trees of the river bend.
    “That there,” Josey grinned, “is called a Missouri boat ride.”
    Still they waited, letting the horses finish the grain. Across river they saw a mad dash of blue cavalrymen head south down the river bank.
    From the Osage Josey turned the horses southwest along the banks of the Sac River. Across the Sac was more open prairie, but on their left was the comforting wilderness of the Ozarks. Once, in late afternoon, they sighted a large body of horsemen heading southwest, across the river, and they held their horses until the drumming hoofbeats had died in the distance. North of Stockton they forded the Sac, and nightfall caught them on the banks of Horse Creek, north of Jericho Springs.
    Josey guided the horses up a shallow spring that fed the creek, into a tangled ravine. One mile, two, he traveled, halting only when the ravine narrowed to a thin slash in the side of the mountain. High above them trees whipped in a fierce wind, but here there was a calmness broken only by the gurgling of water over rocks.
    The narrow gorge was choked with brush and scuppernong vines. Elm, oak, hickory, and cedar grew profusely. It was in a sheltered clump of thick cedar that he threw blankets and Jamie, lying in the warm quietness, fell asleep. Josey unsaddled the horses, grained and picketed them near the spring. Then close to Jamie he dug an “outlaw’s oven,” a foot-deep hole in the ground with flat stones edged over the top. Three feet from the fire no light was visible, but the heated stones and flames beneath quickly cooked the pan of side meat and boiled the jerky broth.
    As he worked he attuned his ears to the new sounds of the ravine. Without looking, he knew there was a nest of cardinals in the persimmon bushes across the branch; a flicker grutted from the trunk of an elm and the brush wrens whispered in the undergrowth. Farther back, up the hollow, a screech owl had taken up its precisely timed woman’s wail of anguish. These were the rhythms he placed in his subconscious. The high wind whining above him… the feathery whisper of breeze through the