The girl didn't want any. Ingersoll studied her and she smiled and revealed a row of small, even teeth.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Dixie Clay."
"You okay, Dixie Clay?"
She didn't answer.
"She's fine," the younger man said.
"Let's skedaddle," Ham said to Ingersoll. He touched the brim of his derby with his rifle barrel and turned for the door.
Ingersoll watched the girl. For a moment she seemed to lean in his direction, her eyes intensified at him, until the young man stepped in front of her.
"Thank you for your kindness," he said.
"I'll be back," Ingersoll said. "To check on that baby."
He was quiet as they walked their horses side by side, though Ham kept trying to provoke him.
"I read water poured through the Mounds Landing crevasse harder than Niagara. Did you know that?"
"No."
"True. Three-quarters-mile crevasse, and near three hundred levee workers swept clean away right then and there. Unless newspapers lie."
"Some do."
"Could be our saboteurs made that breach," Ham said.
Ingersoll didn't answer. He kept seeing the girl's eyes and how tightly she held the baby to her chest.
It was growing dark and Ham said this looked like a good spot to camp, didn't it, pretty dry. They dismounted and Ham sat on his roll and tugged at his boots, which slurped free. He peeled down his socks and sat looking at his toes, wrinkled and mushroomed.
Ingersoll took off his hat and set it on the ground beside him. How empty it seemed. Ham produced two cans of beans and his opener as Ingersoll turned the pegs, played a lick, tuned it again.
Then he put it down and looked up into the night. "I'm tired of never seeing no stars," he said.
"Just be glad it ain't raining. You gone play?"
"Not right now."
Ham set the cans of beans in the fire to warm and they'd just begun to bubble at the top when he sat alert and laid his hand on his.30-.30. Ingersoll had heard it too, dried mud crunching, and they rolled away from the fire on their bellies, aiming into the dark.
"Don't shoot. I got the baby."
"Oh for Christ sake." Ham spat into the dark.
Dixie Clay stepped forward into the firelight. She was clutching the baby, and she was bleeding across the forehead some.
"We nearly blew your fool head off," Ham said, pushing to his feet. "And for making me spill my mescal, you'd a deserved it."
Dixie Clay looked at Ingersoll, rising himself.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"They following you?"
"No. I don't think so."
"They will," Ham said.
"The baby," she said, "the baby wasn't safe there. With them."
Ingersoll looked at Ham, who didn't meet his eyes and sat down before the fire. He commenced to scraping mud from his boot with a stick.
Ingersoll waited for her to say more, but she didn't. "They eat your baby?" he asked at last.
She lowered her head.
"Girl? I asked you a question. If you don't answer I'm gone send you right back to 'em."
"Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. They eat her. She was dead already and they said we had to or they'd starve."
"But they won't eat this one," Ham said. "They got food now. We gave 'em some."
She hugged the baby higher on her chest. It was still wrapped in Ingersoll's shirt.
"Well?" Ham demanded.
She was looking at Ingersoll. "Something's wrong with them. Something went wrong."
Ham resumed scraping mud from his boot heel.
"Sit down," Ingersoll said to the girl, and pointed to his roll. She sank onto it, still holding the baby. It gave an enormous yawn. Its color was better.
He opened his pack and offered her an apple.
"No, thank you."
But he tossed it anyway and she caught it with one hand without disturbing the baby.
"Eat it, girl. Otherwise you and this little one both gonna die and all for nothing."
She took a bite and chewed and looked at the baby in her arms and looked back up. "What's gonna happen to us?"
Ingersoll wondered the same thing.
When Ingersoll woke the next morning, Ham had already put coffee on and was pissing into a mud puddle fifty yards off. Ingersoll looked across the ashen coals where he'd laid out his bedding for the girl. She'd slept with the baby nestled against her, and in the dawn light he saw where some of her blood had crusted on the baby's cheek. For the first time he wondered what its name was.
Ingersoll rose quietly and stretched and filled their tin cups with coffee and went to where Ham was loading the saddlebag.
"Obliged," Ham said.
They stood together facing the lip of sun pushing itself over the flat brown world, glazing the mud puddles like copper ingots.
Ham sipped his coffee and studied his partner. "What the hell are you about to do?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do."
"I can't leave 'em."
"Yes you can."
"No I can't, Ham."
"You've connected 'em and saved that damn baby's life. At some point you just have to do your job. Our job."
Ingersoll stood silent, watching the sunrise.
"Shit," Ham said. He flung his coffee into the mud.
"Just tell 'em I'm dead. When you get back."
Ham sighed. "That won't even be no lie," he said. "It's what you call a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the looters don't get you, or the saboteurs, ole Coolidge will. You done seen too much."
"Just do what you have to."
"I will, Ing. Got damn it."
They shook hands and looked for a long moment into one another's eyes. Ingersoll couldn't see a thing in Ham's and wondered what Ham saw in his own. For the first time it occurred to Ingersoll that if Ham killed him now he'd merely be doing his job. But instead Ham nodded and turned away and Ingersoll turned too with his coffee and went to nudge the coals.
The girl's face had relaxed from its fear and he watched her sleep. She was pretty under the dirt and the blood, freckles on her upturned nose and brown hair that she could probably fix nice if she wanted. The baby was sleeping too, its mouth slack around her nipple, a trace of watery milk on its tongue. He stood and turned to gaze across the cracked leather earth to where Ham was cinching the girth on his horse.
"Last chance," Ham called. He kicked the flap of his boot sole down and swung into the saddle, grinning. "Russian girls can smoke cigarette with they virginias. They let you do 'em up the chute if you pay 'em five more dollars."
"Naw," Ingersoll said, grinning too, and raised his hand, and Ham raised his back and then turned and rode away, the sorrel kicking up arcs of mud behind him.
When Dixie Clay woke he doctored her head a little while she licked her thumb and rubbed some of the dirt and dried blood from the baby's cheeks. He told her about Ham leaving and then turned his attention to heating another can of beans so she could nurse. He sang as he stirred, a tune of nonsense, swimming with bowlegged women, the words not making sense but neither were his feelings.
They were aback his horse, the girl before him on the saddle, holding the baby, and they were headed west. The sun was out and the earth drier, trees on the horizon. Dixie Clay said she was two months shy of eighteen. One of them back there had been her husband.
"Which one?"
"The one with the different-colored eyes."
"What was his name?"
She paused. "I'll say it just this one more time. But don't never ask me again, okay?"
"Okay."
"Jesse Swan Holliver." She brushed away a mosquito from the baby's forehead. Then she turned her head to look up at him. "I'm better off now."
A little while later, facing forward in the saddle, she said it again. "I'm better off now."
He rode on, thinking, as she slept within the cage his arms made. He remembered killing the looters in the house in Leland. Killing the baby's mother. She'd had a gold-plated.45-caliber pistol and she was fixing to shoot him. Instead he shot her. Now in his imagination he shot her again. He shot her and then the man she'd been with and the one before him and the saboteurs in Marked Tree and the Krauts on the Flemish Coast and all the way back through his life of murder and mandolining. He probably should have shot Dixie Clay's husband and the other two, and might come to regret not doing so. But it was not yet noon and already he'd carried them fifteen miles farther west from the river and closer to land where you could see some stars. Even the horse seemed spry, its head high and pace quickening despite the heavier load.