With eyes all but shut, goaded by desperation, he fought the blast and lurched forward, seldom confident whether he was going uphill or down. All he knew was the cold, the wind and the rutted clay.

At best he would get out of this bruised and half-frozen. At worst … Oh, my darling Edith … At worst he might—

No earthly use dwelling on that. One step after the other. Keep to the ruts. Keep moving.

Impossible to reckon time. Doubts grew in his mind: suppose the wind had shifted course? Suppose he was going the wrong way—back away from the wagon?

The storm bucked and pitched like the devil’s own broncho. Well I have ridden those. I shall ride this one too. He grinned into the bared teeth of the savage animal.

He flinched from the ice-stones; batted his arms across his chest and struggled on. Feeling drowsy now. Clung to a dreamlike sort of half-wakefulness in which a part of his mind knew the other part was drifting. Necessary, the first part told the second part, to fight for sentience.

He plowed into a knee-high pile of snow wedged against a scrub plant and it was a moment before he realized that was wrong: must have lost the road. Felt behind him with a toe and backed up and prodded the earth with his hand until he knew the ruts were there. Which way now—left or right?

It was a sign of the dangerous deterioration of his mind that it took quite a while to remember that the wind needed to be at the right shoulder.

Exhaustion and frostbite. With senses slowly disintegrating he recognized the dangers. He felt the ache in his legs as they began to turn numb; he stamped his feet hard as he walked. Tucked the rifle under his arm and whacked his hands together with powerful beating strokes.

Don’t worry, my darling Edith. I shan’t stop fighting back. Nothing will keep me from our lovely nuptial appointment.

Must feel like this to be blind.

He groped ahead of him, hand splayed …

Abruptly his hand banged into something hard; he stubbed his finger.

He felt at it. Flat vertical surface. Wall? Ridiculous. Couldn’t be a building in the middle of the road.

Maybe this wasn’t the road.

Or maybe it wasn’t the same road.

Had there been a fork in the road? Had he taken the wrong turn? Walked into a farmer’s yard?

He slid his hand across the surface and found its boundaries.

The wagon tailboard.

It wasn’t moving.

He heard, or felt, something; he bent down and dimly saw the huddled lump beneath the dubious shelter of the wagon bed: four men; ferociously flapping blankets and ponchos. He caught the dim glimmer of a pair of yellow eyes. O’Donnell or Finnegan? Whichever—there was the threat of death in those bleak eyes.

They saw him at the same moment he saw them. A hand reached for his ankle—pulled him down. Tumbling, he nearly lost his grip on the rifle. There were hands against him in earnest—pawing at his face, scrambling for the weapon. He could smell their rank breath. It was Finnegan’s burly arm that slammed the side of his head and encircled his neck.

It was all a terrifying confusion then.

They were pulling him to them—tugging him under the wagon—it was hard to sort out, in his mind, what was transpiring; Finnegan had a headlock on him and O’Donnell was slithering around, trying for purchase, and he saw Dutch Reuter just beyond them—Dutch was wide-eyed, watching with his mouth agape, not moving, not taking any action, not making any choice or decision but simply watching to see how it was going to come out …

Finnegan roared, louder than the storm. There was a red haze; there was a drumming thunder in his ears where Finnegan’s heavy arm was ready to crush his skull …

“By thunder you haven’t whipped me yet!”

He stood up—stood up on his hind legs with such an immense effort that he not only dragged the Irishmen with him but also lifted the back of the wagon on his bent shoulders.

It squeezed Finnegan’s arm against the wagonbed, hard enough to bring a grunt of pain from the man; and then the ranchman swung the rifle, hard, and had the satisfaction of hearing the barrel smack noisily against flesh and bone. There was an outcry—O’Donnell—and then the ranchman was stumbling back, crouched over, weaving for balance, sucking air, trying to find his bearings.

Finnegan hurled himself forward, scrambling, trying to reach him. The ranchman fired a sudden shot into the ground. The bullet sprayed frozen mud in Finnegan’s face; the abrupt explosive noise seemed to stun them all to motionlessness.

In that broken interval of time the ranchman slapped the rifle’s forestock into his palm, yanked the hammer back and laid his aim hard and steady against the Irishman’s face not two feet away.

“Hold!”

Finnegan stared at him. The rage of murder in his eyes slowly cooled.

The frigid air sawed in and out of the ranchman’s lungs. He coughed hard.

Finnegan held—silent and still.

The wind seemed to have dropped; everything had gone quiet; and the ranchman said resolutely, “Very well then. You’ve had your chance. It didn’t work. Now get back!”

When Finnegan began to crawl back under the wagon the ranchman let the hammer down slowly but he kept the rifle trained on his adversaries.

He moved forward, shooing Finnegan back, until he had all four men huddled tight against the singletree. He crouched under the tailboard and sat crosslegged, aiming the rifle at them, and sat without a word to await the end of the storm.

Soon enough it passed by—as quickly and as mysteriously as it had begun. By early afternoon it was possible to see miles across the high plain. The sky was lead-grey. A warm soft rush of south wind brought such an emphatic thaw that even the larger hailstones underfoot were transformed to slush within less than an hour after they had fallen; the temperature climbed so rapidly that the ranchman, heated from the exertion of walking behind the wagon, removed his coat and tossed it in the flatbed and made do comfortably in buckskin shirt and fringed waistcoat.

Dutch Reuter, after half an hour’s battering in the lurching wagon bed, asked permission to get out and walk.

“I have your word you won’t jump me?”

“Yah. My word you got. No trouble—my word on that.”

“Then get down and walk. Beside the wagon, where I can see you.”

The two Irishmen shot malign glares at Dutch.

The muzzle of the ranchman’s rifle stirred. “Turn your faces forward, please.”

They glanced at each other, grinned unpleasantly and presented their backs to him.

Dutch said plaintively, “You me can trust.”

“I’m sorry, Dutch, but I’m not sure I can. I don’t think you know yourself whose side you’re on.”

Dutch went alongside the wagon without further complaint.

Walking along behind the procession, the ranchman opened his copy of Anna Karenina and resumed reading where he had left off last night.

He sat with his back braced against the wagon wheel, notebook on his upraised knees, rifle across his lap; at intervals he looked up at the four men beyond the fire. The two Irishmen and the old frontiersman lay close together; Finnegan and O’Donnell were talking in low tones. Dutch Reuter slept off to one side, by himself, thoroughly shamed.

At a guess there were another thirty miles or so left to travel. Barring another storm they could make it that far by tomorrow evening.

The four pairs of boots were piled beside the ranchman. He adjusted the blanket around his shoulders and continued to write in his notebook. After a while the mutter of the two Irishmen’s voices began to annoy him. He said, “Please be quiet now. You may as well get your sleep. You’ll need it for tomorrow.”

“What about you, dude? Need your sleep too, I expect.” Finnegan heaved his head up and leered. “Sleep tight—if you can.”