Now, that may seem like an unusual thought for a young turnip-and-potato-growing lad who longed to ride horses and draw maps to have, but there you have it. War as camouflage, and a means of harnessing the energy of widespread psychic disorder. Perhaps young Todd was drawing a bigger map than he realized.

In any case, all these diversions and perversions streamed through his mind on the edge of that overly exuberant rivulet because of what he could not escape in his field glasses. Because of who or, rather, what he saw, relaxed and waiting for him as if his arrival had been long anticipated.

He was looking at a still young man of around thirty, not much older. He was not an Indian-it was hard to say his breeding-and he was mounted on a donkey, but a donkey that was twenty hands high. The man wore some kind of military costume, but unlike any Todd had seen before. It was not a Civil War uniform. Nor was it was some old Mexican uniform from the war of 1845. When he looked more closely, he saw that the emblem on the man’s chest depicted a wheelbarrow with flames rising from it. On the man’s head was a kind of hat made from the pelt of a skunk. Then, to Todd’s astonishment, the hat stirred and the young cavalryman realized that the skunk was still alive! The man was wearing a live skunk-like a hat. And a very ceremonious headdress it appeared, too. The acid in Todd’s stomach roared like the creek.

In the Man Beyond’s rifle sheath was a firearm that appeared to be made of glass and in his belt, like a saber, hung a weird-shaped hunting horn, while on the pommel of his saddle perched a powerful pure white gyrfalcon.