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probably written by family members. He threw the letters and the photographs on the ground and searched the general’s body for the ammunition that went with the Merwin Hulbert. Then he slung the Mauser on his shoulder and put the bowie knife and the spyglass and the Merwin Hulbert and the ammunition and the bandoliers in the saddlebags and walked back to the hearse.
    The hail had turned to rain, and the sun had slipped into a layer of cold white clouds that resembled a mythic lake. He slid the wood box and the bag of Mexican coins in the saddlebags, and tied the bags onto his saddle, and set fire to the fuel he had stuffed under the hearse.
    As he rode away, he heard bullets popping like strings of Chinese firecrackers in the flames and wondered if the woman was watching him from a window. When he turned in the saddle, the windows in the house were as glossy and impenetrable as obsidian. Maybe in the morning he would find his son’s encampment. Or maybe he would be found by Beckman. Or maybe neither of those events would happen and he would ride all the way to Texas by himself, left to the mercy of his thoughts, a hapless and cynical pilgrim who could neither correct the past nor live with its consequences.
    T HREE DAYS LATER , at dawn, he and his horse were camped on a ridge overlooking a bowl-like desert glistening with moisture from the monsoon that had swept across the countryside during the night. Hackberry peered through his spyglass at a single column of smoke rising from a campfire at the foot of a mesa where a group of eight or nine men had picketed their horses and slept under their slickers and were now boiling coffee and cooking strips of meat on the ends of sticks. As the blueness went out of the morning and the mesa grew pink around the edges, he could make out the face of each man in the group. He recognized none, but he knew their kind. They were exported from Texas on passenger cars and put to work in the Johnson County War. They ran “wets” across the border and ran them home when they were no longer needed. They were “regulators” or sometimes “range detectives.” In Ludlow, Colorado, they fired machine guns from an armored vehicle into striking miners and asphyxiated women and children in a root cellar for John D. Rockefeller. A professionally charitable person might say their real enemy was modernity. The West had shut down and the party was over. Regardless, the best of them would cut you from your liver to your lights for a bottle of busthead or a roll in the hay with a black girl.
    Through the glass Hackberry could see one man who was unlike the others. He was hatless, his hair silvery blond and as long as Bill Cody’s, his features delicate and aquiline, his skin the color of a plant that had been systemically denied light. While the others ate, he seemed to study the outlines of the buttes and mesas and canyons that surrounded the ancient lake bed on which he had camped.
    Beckman, Hackberry thought.
    His identification of the Austrian arms merchant had nothing to do with a rational process. There were those among us who were made different in the womb, and you knew it the moment you looked into their eyes. They showed no remorse and had no last words before their horse was whipped out from under them beneath a cottonwood tree. They would challenge a mere boy into a saloon duel and gun him down for no other purpose than personal amusement. Their upbringing had nothing to do with the men they became. They loved evil for evil’s sake, and any animal or woman or man or child who ventured into their ken was grist for the mill.
    Hackberry heard a skitter in the rocks farther up the ridge. “Who’s up there?” he said.
    There was no sound except the wind. He set down the spyglass and walked up the incline to a cluster of boulders below a cave. “You deaf?” he said. He picked up a handful of sharp-edged rocks and began flinging them into the cave, hard, one after another.
    “That