It was perhaps the unexpectedness of this moment of doom evaporating that left me stunned; I confess I gaped for a few seconds, hard put to appreciate what had happened. When I looked up, a shadow was emerging from the deepening shadows, a short man, plainly dressed, neatly shaven with a finely trimmed moustache and hair combed back under a slouch hat.

"I guess you an' me better have a little palaver, amigo." he said softly. I was surprised at the pitch of his voice. He was only about five and a half feet tall, and on closer inspection I saw his moustache was only recently possible; he could not have been over seventeen. But the gleam in his eye told me he was not someone to be trifled with, and would make a good man at your back should the need ever arise. As it just had, indeed, I thought, gradually coming to my sense of the present.

He was putting a new cartridge into his well-worn but obviously serviceable rifle when he spoke again.

"I would hate to think that I had chosen the wrong target in this little dust-up. You want to tell me why three men were trying to kill you?"

I pointed out the rapidly cooling form of Lefrenier Chouvin lying in a pool of his own blood a dozen yards away, and told him about me, the judge, and Celeste, and Sophie, in a brief form.

"Well, I feel much better, then," he said, smiling. "Seeing as how you and I are within the general boundaries of civilized territory, Mister Huntington, I would suggest you and I seek our refreshment elsewhere."

So we arranged the corpses of my three erstwhile hunters under some underbrush, where they would not attract undue attention. And as I dragged Lefrenier Chouvin's boots into the thickets, with the rest of him dragging behind, I could not but think of Sophie's battered face, and the fiery look that dwelt there.

"Perhaps we would be better situate sharing some talk in a tavern in town," my rescuer suggested. As we mounted our horses, he leaned over, as though he had decided something, and extended his hand.

"I'm Chris Carson," he said. "Saddler and harness maker, in a soon to be abandoned apprenticeship over by Boone Lick. You can call me Kit -- most of my friends do."

So we left Yoacham's log cabin, the great oak spreading outside it, and three dead men in the underbrush, and made our way back towards Saint Louis, the roaring din of inequity on the busy banks of the deep Mississippi and the wide Missouri.