“I grew up in Weed. So run your redneck shuck on somebody else, Billy Bob.”

Lesson? Don’t mess with short women who have law degrees from Stanford.

THAT NIGHT THE SKY was black and bursting with stars above the valley where we lived, then clouds quaking with thunder moved across the moon and snow began to fall on the mountaintops, sticking on the ponderosa and fir trees that grew high up on the slopes. In my sleep I dreamed of small-arms fire in the dark, the running of booted feet, the smell of wet mesquite, scrub oak, burned gunpowder, and ponded water that had gone stagnant. In the dream I raised my revolver and fired at a man silhouetted against the sky, saw his arms reach out horizontally, then clutch the wound that burst like a rose from the top buttonhole on his shirt.

Fay Harback had asked if I missed my career as a Texas Ranger. The truth was I had never left it. It returned to me at least every third night, in the form of my best friend’s accidental death down in Old Mexico.

L. Q. Navarro had long ago forgiven me, as the priests at my church had. But absolution by both the living and the dead did not reach into my nocturnal hours. I woke at 3 A.M. and sat alone in the coldness of the living room, looking out at the moonlight that had broken through the clouds and at the caked snow steaming on the backs of my horses in the pasture.

Just before dawn I fell asleep in the chair and did not wake until I heard Temple making breakfast in the kitchen.

Chapter 2

JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE’S dreams did not involve past events from his own life, guilt, erotic need, or even people or places he knew. His dreams were filled with birds and wild animals on alluvial moonscape, rivers and pink mesas he had never seen, herds of mustangs racing across a darkening plain forked by lightning. Sometimes the people in his dreams carried obsolete flintlocks, drove bison over cliffs, and sat by meat fires among cottonwoods whose leaves flickered like thousands of green butterflies.