The next day they came to the Nueces River and camped there in the early afternoon. It was the vado of San Patricio, the crossing place. Whatever town there might be was several miles away on the other side. Simon watched their fire die down to coals and their food reduced to broken, dried-out tortillas and goat cheese. It was another hundred or so miles to San Antonio. Without the weight of all those coins in silver and gold his fiddle case seemed very light, almost weightless. From time to time doubts came to him; what if the old man died and then his daughter said the paper was not good? Or demanded more money? He told himself, Don’t think about it now. Damon laid out their cooking gear, reflecting to himself that Simon was so guarded about his thoughts but at the same time was so transparent, his lean face abstracted with worry, plucking absentmindedly at his forelock of auburn hair.

At this vado they were very likely to run into people, men crossing over the Nueces with stolen cattle or cotton buyers up from Mexico on their way to San Antonio or, what was least likely, a Union patrol sent to police the area. Here, miles farther northwest, the Nueces was blue as turquoise and beached on this side with pale sand. On its banks were tall trees: sycamore and live oak. The Nueces was a through-way for birds, trees, animal life. The wind picked up from the Gulf, fanning their cookfire flames out flat.

They watched for a while, but since no one came, Simon scrambled down the bank, stripped, and fell backward into the water. Far upriver a bird cried out and was answered. He had not been in swimming water for a long time. It was miraculous. He floundered out deeper, for the feeling of floating, of being free of gravity. He blew water from his mouth, spouting like a whale, and watched the darkening sky reveal star after star. The surface of the river was like silk and trembling with star reflections. It quieted his mind and finally he waded back to shore, water streaming from his naked body as he stood with his arms thrown wide to the evening breeze. Then, at last, he reluctantly pulled on his clothes.

Simon collapsed on his blanket. “Why is the Nueces Strip like some other country or something? Isn’t it part of Texas?”

Damon boiled water for his whistles. “Mexico says it’s part of Mexico. Says the border of Mexico is the Nueces. Texas says it’s theirs, says the border is the Rio Grande. It was some agreement or nonagreement they came to in settling the border after the Mexican War. Neither side will give way. And neither side will police it. Texas got caught up in sending everybody to the east to fight in the war and Mexico got caught up in fighting the French. So it’s dog eat dog and Devil take the hindmost. So it has been in human memory, wild places where the only law is the strength of your good right arm.” He lifted his arm and made a bony fist. “That’s how it is in all of human memory. ‘Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!’”

“So they haven’t come to an agreement yet? The Mexican War was twenty years ago.”

“Oh! Oh! I see! You expect the government and the diplomatic corps to proceed at some foolish breakneck pace! There are substatutes to argy over and rewrite! And meantime the politicians must be paid their stipends and their travel expenses. Become wise, young man, and cynical, and life will be far more understandable.”

The night drifted on. The river sparkled, it was a light-bearing streak through the level country. A black-crowned heron waded with high steps in the dark shallows, intent on fish. An elf owl slid in a long trajectory over its surface. From far out in the brush they heard a water creature call out rum-jug, rum-jug in a low conspiratorial cry.

Damon said, “‘A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!’”

“I wish we had some more coffee,” said Simon.

“I miss Doroteo. A boon companion. He roped that alligator.”

“Yes. I miss him too. And Patrick.”

It was a dreaming time; the long blue Nueces curving through this grassy country with a secret life of its own, and on both sides of it herds of wild horses stood together quietly grazing or sleeping. Wild cattle lifted their heads down in the brush alongside the river to hear the noise of the loping, scenting wolves, who ran with their noses to the ground searching for the smell of something newly born, something wounded, something old, something sick. The river fed the darting Guadalupe bass and its own gallery forest on either side.

In the morning they crossed waist-deep, holding their rucksacks on top of their heads and their boots tied by the laces around their necks.

San Patricio was a village of adobe houses and horse pens. The fencing was made of two uprights with limbs jammed between them. Chickens sat on the top rails being nervous and twitchy. There were trees: mesquites and a few treasured live oaks. A man who sat in front of the little store, switching away flies with a cow’s tail, told them there might be a convoy forming up at Goliad, in the old Spanish mission just outside of town. So they bought that day’s provisions, tortillas and a sheaf of jerky, and kept on walking toward Goliad, nearly running out of food, water, and strength before they got there.

They joined up with a freight convoy at Espíritu Santo mission and got a ride on one of the fifteen wagons. It was a combination of three trains come from harbors on the coast, Corpus and Lavaca and Copano, all heading to San Antonio. Damon and Simon paid two dollars apiece with the agreement that they would lend a hand when needed, eat whatever the teamsters ate, and would sleep wherever they found it convenient.

In the cool of the morning the teamsters apportioned out the freight; they arranged and reloaded barrels of oranges, crates of picture frames, bolts of machine-made cloth from England, sacks of pecans and beans and horse-shoe blanks, nails and smooth wire, staples and ladies’ slippers, cured leather in rolls as big as tree trunks; all of these articles were tagged with their owners’ names in a neat secretarial hand.

A pack of dogs trotted alongside with their tails wagging in half-circles of joy at all the noise and movement, barking to one another in a conversational way in their happiness in being part of a big caravan heading to parts unknown. The weather had turned rainy again as slate-colored clouds with spilling blue fronts rolled toward them out of the Gulf.

The interior of wagon number four was not as crowded as the others and Simon found himself a space between crates of crockery packed in straw. When they started up the river trail there were cries and shouts of farewell from the people of Goliad, sitting on fence rails to watch them pull out. The drivers called their teams by name and the big axles roared as the wheel hubs turned on their bearings, harnesses jingled, and the vehicles started west on the trail to San Antonio.

Before they left the head teamster had handed Simon a letter from Miss Dillon. It had gone to Houston, where many people knew the young red-headed fiddler, and the news there was that he had gone down to the Nueces Strip to play for Old Man Bradford, and so it had been sent along with a singing master who had been hired by the Goliad infant school in hopes that the fiddler might be found there, and so he was.

Simon sat down with it amid all the noise and shouting, his hat down over his face. A volcanic explosion would not have moved him. This letter, with her cherished, familiar handwriting, was full of the sights and sounds of the old city, the names of the bells (La Perla, La Golondrina). Did he have a horse? There was an orange cat that came to her window and she saved scraps for it by dropping them in her napkin at dinner so that the Colonel or Mrs. Webb did not see. She and the cat sat together at the open window to listen to people down on the river talking and laughing, she supposed they were fishing. If she heard the colonel’s steps she had to shoo the cat away and close the window. He had kicked it downstairs once, poxbottle that he is. Little Jo wanted a dog but Mrs. Webb said it was better not and herself in agreement lest he wring the head off some orphan pup. Then, brightly, they had had a gadhar at her home in County Kerry, a sweet dog with a brindled coat and a cold nose that woke her every morning. And then: he must not write in care of the maid anymore. The colonel had taken to going to the post office and asking for any letters to Mercedes Bethancourt to be delivered to himself. And he paid the man to do so. And the man took the money.

I am in a foreign land, she said, and I end this letter with gratitude to have a friend and for your kind concern and must answer your question that I am now eighteen years old and every year a gift.

He lay on his back inside wagon number four with the letter on his chest and his hands folded behind his head. He stared at the wagon sheet above him. Heard the slow sighs of mules as they ate their evening hay, snorted, shook their heads against the increasing wet wind. He thought of her listening at the window; she would be like a lady in a play, he supposed, one of the three plays he had seen in Paducah with outrageously painted actresses leaning at flimsy artificial windows. This was a dangerous image. Possibilities of lies, false representations.