Inside it all the Son of the Morning Star fired his nickel-plated revolvers at the Indians, who now had broken through his perimeter and were clubbing his men to death with stone axes, cracking skulls and jawbones apart as if they were clay pots. The Indians swept across the top of the hill, and the Son of the Morning Star fell to one knee, like a medieval knight giving allegiance to a king, an arrow quivering in his rib cage. The squaws thronged up the incline, their throats warbling with birdsong.

In the dream Sue Lynn Big Medicine was in their midst and saw the Shyela and Sioux women bend over the fallen officer and pierce his eyes and ears with bone awls. But it was not enough price to exact from him, she thought, not nearly enough, and with a knife made from rose-colored quartz and elk antler she stooped over the fallen officer and pulled loose his belt and unfastened the top button of his trousers and pulled the cloth back from the whiteness of his stomach.

Her hand slashed downward with the knife. When she had finished, the Son of the Morning Star seemed to stare into her face with his destroyed eyes, seeing her inside his mind, discovering only now the level of enmity in which he was held by his adversaries. Then with the other squaws Sue Lynn forced the bloody burden in her hands down his throat. From the bottom of the slope she thought she heard the screams of a soldier burning to death inside the grass, then realized, her eyes tightly shut now, her temples thundering like a thousand drums, it was her own voice bursting from her chest, breaking against her teeth, keening into a sky that had already filled with carrion birds.

Lucas broke two eggs on top of the corned beef hash, then divided the pan with a spatula and put half his food in a tin plate for me.

"Sue Lynn says the Indians gelded Custer and suffocated him with his own scrotum," he said. "That's not in history books, is it?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"How come she's in a dream like that?"

I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the river.

"I was never big on psychoanalysis."

"Billy Bob, analyzing is a full-time job with you. You see a flea on a possum's belly and you got a take on it."

"I think Sue Lynn killed somebody."

The smile fell away from his lips and he stared at me with his mouth open. Out in the darkness I heard an animal's roar, and this time I knew it was a cougar's.

Chapter 22

Early the next morning Maisey looked through the front window, sipping coffee in a house robe, her face quizzical.

"What are you looking at?" I asked.

"Not much. Xavier Girard throwing pinecones at the chipmunks," she replied.

I walked outside into the coolness of the morning, under the vastness of a purple, rain-scented sky that had not been touched yet by the sun. The sound of the river was loud through the trees, the riffle blackish-green in the shadows, the air sweet with the smell of woodsmoke and wet pine needles.

Xavier stood by the bank, his back to me. He wore a nylon vest and plaid flannel shirt and baggy jeans, and his neck was cuffed with sunburn and his hair freshly cropped. When he turned around, I hardly recognized him. The alcoholic flush and dissipated lines were gone from his face. He grinned with the easy composure of a man who had just been given a new lease on life.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"I took your advice and started hitting some meetings. My sponsor said I needed to come out here and tell you that," he said.

"Well, I appreciate that," I replied, not knowing what else to say.

"I hear you had a talk with Nicki Molinari."

"Yeah, I happened to be in his neighborhood."

"He's quite a guy."

"That's one way to put it," I said, my sense of discomfort starting to grow.

"I guess you don't think much of me. I mean, letting the guy get in the sack with my wife."

"I don't remember much of that afternoon, sir," I said, studying a spot of the riverbank.

"Nicki's free ride is over. I've learned in the program I don't have to take bullshit off greaseballs or anybody else."

"I didn't know AA worked like that."

"It's a great life. Everybody ought to try it," he said.

"You bet," I said, and glanced at my watch. "Well, big day ahead. All the best to you."

I walked back into the house, then looked through the window at his Jeep Cherokee bouncing across the field toward the dirt road.

"Was he drunk?" Maisey asked.

"He says he's out of the saloons."

She waited for me to continue.

"It's no accident a lot of saloons have revolving doors," I said.

The TRUTH was I didn't care what Xavier and Holly Girard or Nicki Molinari did with their lives. The truth was I had even stopped worrying about Doc. The truth was I could not get the sadistic injury done to Temple Carrol by Wyatt Dixon and Terry Witherspoon off my mind, done to her in all probability with the approval of Carl Hinkel.

I put my rucksack and fly vest and fly rod and creel into my truck and picked up Temple at her motel and took her for breakfast at a truck stop in Lolo. Then we drove deeper into the Bitterroot Valley, up a dirt road through meadowland to a canyon with a roaring creek and a chain of deep-water pools at the bottom. A trail followed the creek up a steady incline, winding under cliffs and the ponderosa that grew out of rock, until the creek and a series of falls were far below us. Then the trail leveled out in a box canyon filled with birch trees and we came out on the creek again, and sat on a table rock just above a pool that was so clear you could see the cutthroat and brook trout ginning in the current, ten feet below the surface.

I had known Temple most of her life. She hid her pain, rarely complained, and never accepted defeat. But now she had the same detached cast in her eyes that I had seen in Maisey's after Maisey was gang-raped. I flipped a dry fly at the head of the pool and hooked a small cutthroat, then wet my hand and released it and gave the rod to Temple.

"Cast it over on the other side. There's usually a fat one hanging under the bank," I said.

She was sitting against a birch tree with her knees pulled up before her. The rock was mottled with lichen and the leaves overhead flickered against the sunlight.

"I'll just watch," she said.

"I tried to get Lucas to go back to Deaf Smith. You wouldn't consider that yourself, would you?"

"I'll pass, thanks," she said.

I laid down my fly rod and sat next to her. I put my hand on her shoulder and brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. When she looked into my eyes I could read no meaning in them.

"What are you thinking, Temple?" I asked.

But she didn't answer. She leaned her head back against the tree and watched a bighorn sheep that stood on a ledge high up on the canyon's far wall. Her complexion had the glow and smoothness of a newly opened rose. I rested my hand on top of hers.

"Do you think of me as a victim, Billy Bob?" she asked.

"No, I don't."

"Then you don't need to worry about me."

Her nylon backpack was propped against a huckleberry bush. The flap had fallen open and inside I could see the blue-black finish and pearl-handled butt of her.38 revolver.

"You aim to kill Wyatt Dixon, don't you?" I said.

"You think of me as a friend or you think of me with guilt. But you don't think of me in other ways," she said, ignoring my statement.

"You're not fair," I said, and took my hand from hers.

She rose to her feet and gathered up her backpack by its straps and stepped off the rock onto the trail.

"I'm going to walk back now. It's pretty out here. Don't worry about this stuff. It's not your fault," she said.