They left the fevered coast and the piney woods of East Texas for the interior, in the buckboard piled with supplies and their instrument cases, all their senses standing on end and at the same time astonished by the beauty of it. They had these rivers to cross, Rosillo said: the Brazos, the San Bernard, the Colorado, the Guadalupe, and the San Antonio. Then they would come to the Nueces, and on the far side of that river would be Banquete.

On this first day of September the sun burnt its way through a thick atmosphere of cloud that left the distances hazy. Water collected on their hat brims, the horses shook it from their heads. They rode into the glassy shine of flooded grasslands, abandoning the sounds of rivermen’s calls and the steam whistles of Houston’s docks and the wandering intricate bayous. Every mile they rode southwest they could see the rains following them in wandering columns. They also rode away from the occupying Union Army and the sight of soldiers on street corners, the noise of riots in front of the Freedman’s Bureau offices, away from martial law and into no law at all. This was the notorious Nueces Strip and the entertainment was never-ending.

Doroteo rode on the tailgate looking backward. Rosillo had lent him a weapon; a twenty-gauge shotgun with ready-made cartridges of solid shot.

“Just watching,” he said. “It is best to watch both ways.”

“There,” said Damon. He gestured with his D whistle. “That was the last pine tree.”

There was that day a big wind; it was indeed the last pine tree they saw, dwarfed, with little clenched pine cones the size of thumbs. The wagon moved on the Taylor trail to the southwest, across open land with grass heads in waves of light brown pouring downwind. They rumbled into the timbered valley of the Brazos. This they crossed by putting their baggage and supplies on a ferry while Rosillo drove the wagon and horses across in a foaming, churning fifteen minutes of hair-raising pandemonium.

Then through the river-valley forests on the far side and once again up onto grassland, where groups of feral cattle with great lyre-shaped horns stared at them from a distance. Deer shot up in surprise out of the tall grass and sprang away in all directions like mechanical toys. With the recent rains the cenizo was flowering in clouds of magenta and the yucca sent up its white silky candelabras. This was the interior of south Texas, where all the maps faded away, the murky rivers came from unknown sources, and the world’s authority lay in firepower and the loyalty of those who rode with you.

“And so this is your sign, here,” said Doroteo. “Old man Bradford.”

Simon thought about it. “Could be.” He jumped over the warped boards of the wagon-side and walked to relieve his bones from the jolting. “You reckon?”

Doro lifted a hand. “Ask me anything, I am the expert.”

“As for me,” said Damon, “I have in my rucksack a sign of imminent prosperity in the shape of a coin in gold, ninety-nine percent purity.”

“If you can keep it,” said Doro, and smiled.

All was prairie and grass until they came to the gallery forests of the river valleys. Simon stood in the jolting wagon, and he could see the curving strand of trees from miles away. In one of these river bottoms they became entangled in a canebrake and had a hard time getting out. They seized hold of the spokes and shoved, and beneath them they crushed the cane, water squdged up out of the ground, while over their ankles unseen creatures bolted away on either side.

“Earning our money,” said Damon. He wiped the mud from his face with his shirtsleeve. “I for one was not hired to unstick stuck wagons.”

“Just push,” said Doroteo, and started laughing at the sight of Damon with his Hardee hat and whistles in his pocket, dotted with buttons of sludge, shoving at the spokes.

During the day Rosillo stood several times to search the horizon and once he saw skylighted to the west the silhouettes of four men on horseback, ambling slowly, dark against the late and misty light. He pulled up. Simon got the Dance revolver out of his rucksack and made sure he had five loads and a cap on every nipple, sat down behind their baggage, and tracked them with the barrel. So did Doroteo. They all watched until the men rode on, Rosillo observing them with a deep interest. At night the red-bearded man went out to picket his team and they could hear him talking to them. Then suddenly he was standing at the fire, turning the skillet to warm his bread, silent as if he had materialized out of the dark.

Often Simon saw bands of wild horses running away from their wagon noise. He pulled the Kentucky hat down over his face against the sun and kept the fiddle case at his feet, Doro never let the shotgun out of his hands, and Damon tried to call up birds with high notes on a whistle. After five days in this country, with crossings of the San Bernard, the Colorado, the Guadalupe, and the San Antonio Rivers, they came at last to the Nueces.

The banks of that river were thick with short, wiry mesquite and the bouquet stems of the guajillo trees that shot up out of the ground in long rods, every branch bristling with little thorns. The country here was completely flat. The road led them straight into the dark water. Simon crossed holding his fiddle case over his head, wading against the current. It seemed to him the river was about to swallow him. He fell once at the far bank, stepping on a writhing object underwater. Above them caracara eagles sailed searching for the dead, for the remains of kills, for whatever bloated and wet might be floating downriver.

Doroteo carried the shotgun high over his head in one hand with the other arm clutching his guitar case to himself like a big hard baby. Damon fought clear of the glutinous water and cried out, “What do people drink around here? This? This shit?”

“Makes the hair grow on your chest,” said Doroteo.

“Hog hair,” said Simon. “Oink.”

“Stop laughing at me. I am your elder.” Damon squished up the bank.

Rosillo pulled up the weary horses and let them drink. They plunged in their soft noses and sucked up water in a long gulping run of their throats.

“Not far,” he said. “Drink it and be glad.”

And so at last, early one morning, they came to Banquete, where a light wind scoured them of their smell of scuffed leather and woodsmoke, the look of tired men and tired horses, where voices came out of the evening, singing a song of celebration: Los pajarillos cantan y la luna ya se metió.

Solomon Bradford rose to shake their hands. Simon watched him cross the warped board floor of the adobe house with one hand out, looking vaguely in their direction. His eyes were glazed with casts.

“The fiddler!” he cried in a hoarse voice. “A fiddler graces our festivities!”

Doroteo said in a whisper, “Simon, be patient, he is not of right mind from his old age. Um besito mas quesito.”

Simon nodded and dropped his rucksack on the floor. They had been on the road now for an eternity it seemed, from Los Palmitos to Galveston to Houston, and then to the dry country here below the Nueces. He had a two-day beard that sparkled with sweat and his dusty old checkered shirt was open to the waist. The first consideration on Simon’s mind was where they were to stay, he and Doroteo and Damon, and so he asked immediately.

“All the way from Houston!” the old man said. It was a jolly welcoming bellow.

“Yes, sir,” said Simon. “So we’ve had a long journey and if you’ll show us where we can bed down I would be grateful.”

Doroteo stood at the door, watching both inside and out. He carried the shotgun in the bend of his elbow. People came up to him and greeted him gravely, offered a hand. Doroteo’s gaze was restless and seeking, never still.

“They said you were the best.” Solomon Bradford shook Simon’s hand at last. “My wife, Estela, will be very happy, very happy you have made it.”

“Well, sir, that’s very kind, but we need to know where we can put our gear.” Simon rolled his weary shoulders and held his hat in one hand, then stood straight to appear a man of address despite his two-day beard, smelling of horses and cookfires.

“I hope you’ve got stamina, young man, because there’s going to be dancing and carrying-on for several days here!” Solomon Bradford roared out his sentences in a loud voice.

“Glad to hear it, but it’s coming on evening and we’d like to find where we can bed down.”

“You’ll be wanting some refreshment! And so where are you going from here?”

“San Antonio.”

“Be damned. That’s a wild town.”

This was going nowhere. Simon needed rest and food and then he could think of how to deal with the senile Mr. Bradford. At last he turned to the door and said,

“Mr. Bradford, they are calling us to come unload and so we have to go for now.”

“Make yourself to home, make yourself to home!”