Jake seemed largely uninterested in the proceedings, which was his way.

"Call, you're some friend," he said. "I ain't been home a whole day and you already got me stealing horses."

But he loped off after the herd and was soon out of sight. Pea Eye yawned as he watched him go.

"I swear," he said. "Jake's just like he used to be."

An hour later they found the main horse herd in a narrow valley several miles to the north. Call estimated it to be over a hundred horses strong. The situation had its difficulty, the main one being that the horses were barely a mile from the Flores headquarters, and on the wrong side of it at that. It would be necessary to bring them back past the hacienda, or else take them north to the river, a considerably longer route. If Pedro Flores and his men chose to pursue, they would have a fine chance of catching them out in the open, in broad daylight, several miles from help. It would be himself and Pea and the boy against a small army of vaqueros.

On the other hand, he didn't relish leaving the horses, now that he had found them. He was tempted just to move them right past the hacienda and hope everyone there had gone to bed drunk.

"Well, we're here," he said. "Let's take 'em."

"It's a bunch," Pea said. "We won't have to come back for a while."

"We won't never come back," Call said. "We'll sell some and take the rest with us to Montana."

Life was finally starting, Newt thought. Here he was below the border, about to run off a huge horse herd, and in a few days or weeks he would be going up the trail to a place he had barely even heard of. Most of the cowpokes who went north from Lonesome Dove just went to Kansas and thought that was far-but Montana must be twice as far. He couldn't imagine what such a place would look like. Jake had said it had buffalo and mountains, two things he had never seen, and snow, the hardest thing of all to imagine. He had seen ridges and hills, and so had a notion about mountains, and he had seen pictures of buffalo in the papers that the stage drivers sometimes left Mr. Gus.

Snow, however, was an entirely mysterious thing. Once or twice in his lifetime there had been freezes in Lonesome Dove-he had seen thin ice on the water bucket that sat on the porch. But ice wasn't snow, which was supposed to stack up on the ground so high that people had to wade through it. He had seen pictures of people sledding over it, but still couldn't imagine what it would actually feel like to be in snow.

"I guess we'll just go for home," Call said. "If we wake 'em up we wake 'em up."

He looked at the boy. "You take the left point," he said. "Pea will be on the right, and I'll be behind. If trouble comes, it'll come from behind, and I'll notice it first. If they get after us hot and heavy we can always drop off thirty or forty horses and hope that satisfies them."

They circled the herd and quietly started it moving to the northwest, waving a rope now and then to get the horses in motion but saying as little as possible. Newt could not help feeling a little odd about it all, since he had somehow had it in his mind that they were coming to Mexico to buy horses, not steal them. It was puzzling that such a muddy little river like the Rio Grande should make such a difference in terms of what was lawful and what not. On the Texas side, horse stealing was a hanging crime, and many of those hung for it were Mexican cowboys who came across the river to do pretty much what they themselves were doing. The Captain was known for his sternness where horsethieves were concerned, and yet, here they were, running off a whole herd. Evidently if you crossed the river to do it, it stopped being a crime and became a game.

Newt didn't really feel that what they were doing was wrong-if it had been wrong, the Captain wouldn't have done it. But the thought hit him that under Mexican law what they were doing might be a hanging offense. It put a different slant on the game. In imagining what it would be like to go to Mexico, he had always supposed the main danger would come in the form of bullets, but he was no longer so sure. On the ride down he hadn't been worried, because he had a whole company around him.

But once they started back, instead of having a whole company around him, he seemed to have no one. Pea was far across the valley, and the Captain was half a mile to the rear. If a bunch of hostile vaqueros sprang up, he might not even be able to find the other two men. Even if he wasn't captured immediately, he could easily get lost. Lonesome Dove might be hard to locate, particularly if he was being chased.

If caught, he knew he could expect no mercy. The only thing in his favor was that there didn't seem to be any trees around to hang him from. Mr. Gus had once told a story about a horsethief who had to be hung from the rafter of a barn because there were no trees, but so far as Newt could tell there were no barns in Mexico either. The only thing he knew clearly was that he was scared. He rode for several miles, feeling very apprehensive. The thought of hanging-a new thought-wouldn't leave his mind. It became so powerful at one point that he Squeezed his throat with one hand, to get a little notion of how it felt not to breathe. It didn't feel so bad when it was just his hand, but he knew a rope would feel a lot worse.

But the miles passed and no vaqueros appeared. The horses strung out under the moonlight in a long line, trotting easily. They were well past the hacienda, and the night seemed so peaceful that Newt began to relax a little. After all, the Captain and Pea and the others had done such things many times. It was just a night's work, and one that would soon be over.

Newt wasn't tired, and as he became less scared he began to imagine how gratifying it would be to ride into Lonesome Dove with such a large herd of horses. Everyone who saw them ride in would realize that he was now a man-even Lorena might see it if she happened to look out her window at the right time. He and the Captain and Pea were doing an exceptional thing. Deets would be proud of him, and even Bolivar would take notice.

All went peaceful and steady, and the thin moon hung brightly in the west. It seemed to Newt that it must be one of the longest nights of the year. He kept looking to the east, hoping to see a little redness on the horizon, but the horizon was still black.

He was thinking about the morning, and how nice it would be to cross the river and bring the horses through the town, when the peaceful night suddenly went off like a bomb. They were on the long chaparral plain not far south of the river and were easing the horses around a particularly dense thicket of chaparral, prickly pear and low mesquite when it happened. Newt had dropped off the point a little distance, to allow the horses room to skirt the thicket, when he heard shots from behind him. Before he had time to look around, or even touch his own gun, the horse herd exploded into a dead run and began to spread out. He saw what looked like half the herd charging right at him from the rear; some of the horses nearest him veered and went crashing into the chaparral. Then he heard Pea's gun sound from the other side of the thicket, and at that point lost all capacity for sorting out what was happening. When the race started, most of the herd was behind him, and the horses ahead of him were at least going in the same direction he was. But in a few seconds, once the whole mass of animals was moving at a dead run over the uncertain terrain, he suddenly noticed a stream of animals coming directly toward him from the right. The new bunch had simply cut around the chaparral thicket from the north and collided with the first herd. Before Newt even had time to consider what was happening, he was engulfed in a mass of animals, a few of which went down when the two herds ran together. Then, over the confused neighing of what seemed like hundreds of horses he began to hear yells and curses-Mexican curses. To his shock he saw a rider engulfed in the mass like himself, and the rider was not the Captain or Pea Eye. He realized then that two horse herds had run together, theirs headed for Texas, the other coming from Texas, both trying to skirt the same thicket, though from opposite directions.