Tommy dropped over the side, wandered into the woods.

“I ain’t gonna let nothing happen to you,” Sunset said. “They’ll hang me and you both, they bother you. I still got five rounds in this gun.”

“Hanging you with me don’t make me feel no better, Miss Sunset. Dead is dead.”

“All right. Let me off here. I can walk the rest of the way.”

Uncle Riley shook his head. “That might look worse, someone see you get off the wagon, they might get me before you can make sure word gets around good. ’Sides, you can hardly sit up.”

Sunset lifted her head, saw the pine trees on either side of them had been chopped off evenly at the tops by the storm. It was like the Grim Reaper of Trees had taken their heads with his scythe.

Rolling into the lumber camp, Sunset saw sweaty men working and mud-splattered mules jangling their harnesses, dragging logs toward the mill. And there were long log wagons coming from deep in the woods drawn by rows of great plodding oxen.

The great round saw in the mill screeched as it chewed trees, and there was the sound of the planing saw as it shaped lumber. The air was full of the sweet sap smell of fresh sawed East Texas pine. Out of a long chute connected to the mill houses came puffs of gnawed wood that floated down on top of a mound of sawdust made dark by time and weather.

All about were broken limbs and trees twisted up by the storm. A log wagon was turned over and men were busy righting it. A dead ox lay nearby, half covered in fallen logs.

“Wonder if they even stopped working when the tornado come,” Sunset said.

“They did, wasn’t long,” Uncle Riley said. “Not here at Camp Rupture. Hell, someone will gut and skin that ox there and eat him by nightfall. A man fell down, they might skin and eat him.”