“On the way to Nashville.”

“With Hood?”

“In front of him. With Forrest.”

“You’re a lucky man. I mean to be in one piece.”

“I suppose.”

“Take another case. I was with Kirby Smith from the summer of sixty-one to a year later when we marched up to Kentucky River toward Lexington. Near Richmond we met a Yankee general named Bull Nelson.” Janroe’s eyes narrowed and he grinned faintly, remembering the time. “He just had recruits, a pick-up army, and I’ll tell you we met them good. Cut clean the hell through them, and the ones we didn’t kill ran like you never saw men run in your life. The cavalry people mopped up after that and we took over four thousand prisoners that one afternoon.”

Janroe paused and the tone of his voice dropped. “But there was one battery of theirs on a ridge behind a stone fence. I was taking some men up there to get them…and the next day I woke up in a Richmond field hospital without an arm.”

He was watching Cable closely. “You see what I mean? We’d licked them. The fight was over and put away. But because of this one battery not knowing enough to give up, or too scared to, I lost a good arm.”

But you’ve got one left and you’re out of the war, so why don’t you forget about it, Cable thought, and almost said it; but instead he nodded, looking at the shelves.

“Maybe Luz told you I was in the army,” Janroe said.

“No, only your name, and that you own part of the store.”

“That’s a start. What else do you want to know?”

“Why you’re here.”

“You just said it. Because I own part of the store.”

“Then how you came to be here.”

“You’ve got a suspicious mind.”

“Look,” Cable said quietly, “John Denaman was a friend of mine. He dies suddenly and you arrive to buy in.”

“That’s right. But you want to know what killed him?”

When Cable said nothing Janroe’s eyes lifted to the almost bare shelves.