The water from the spring made a pool inside the cave, not a deep one, but pureand cold. The cleanest water Paulie would ever find in his life, he knew that.He dipped his hand into the water, lifted it to his mouth, drank. It tastedsweet and clear. It tasted like cold winter light. He crawled farther into thecave, looking for a place where he could lie down and dream and remember thetaste of this water straight from the stone heart of the earth.
His hand brushed against something that wasn't rock, and it moved.
Paulie knelt there, hardly daring to breathe. No sound. No alarm. No movement ofany kind. And he could see, just a little bit, just faint dark grays against theblack of the background, and there wasn't any motion, none at all. He reachedout and touched it again, and it moved again, and then tipped over and thuddedsoftly and now when he handled it he realized it was a shoe, or not really ashoe but a moccasin, the leather dry and brittle, so it broke a little under hishand. Something clattered out of the moccasin when he lifted it up and when hecast around to find whatever it was, he realized it was a lot of things, smallhard things, bones from somebody's feet. There was a dead body here. Someone hadcrawled into this cave and died.
And then suddenly in the darkness he could see, only he wasn't seeing anythingthat actually lay there. He was seeing an Indian, a youngish man, broadcheekbones, nearly naked, unarmed, fleeing from men on horseback, men on foot,running up the stream after him, calling and shouting and now and thendischarging a musket. One of the musket balls took him, right in the back, right