ere black bison shapes
under a sky spangled with stars.

The moonlight helped Auguste guide his horse up the steep road out of
the village. Davis led, followed by Auguste, the two corporals bringing
up the rear. After weeks of imprisonment, Auguste reveled in the cool
night air blowing in his face.

They passed the trading post. The road was wider here, and the three
soldiers bunched around him. Raoul was surely in there getting drunk,
laughing as he looked forward to seeing Auguste swinging at a rope's
end.

They trotted along the ridge leading to Victoire. Auguste's heart
started to beat harder as he approached the place that had been his
home.

The remains of the mansion sprawled on its hilltop like the skeleton of
some huge animal, blackened timbers rearing up in the moonlight. People
had died bloody, horrible deaths there. Was the place haunted now?
Accursed?

A longing came over him to climb that hill again, to sweep away that
ruin and rebuild. Put up a fine new house like the ones he'd seen in the
East.

_I could do so much with this land, but I'm running away from it again.
Leaving it to Raoul again._

Then they were past Victoire, but the yearning for it clung to him like
a lover's scent.

"By morning you'll be far out of your uncle's reach," said Davis, riding
beside him.

Auguste's heart swelled in his chest with the thought that he was more
nearly a free man than he had been in weeks.

"If I'm not guilty, why must I run away?"

"Surely you realize that your uncle and his cronies were planning to
take you straight from the courtroom to the nearest tall tree if the
court didn't sentence you to death. The foreman brought Judge Cooper a
note stating their verdict. The judge wrote back, telling them he would
say they hadn't reached a verdict, and he wanted them to remain in
seclusion overnight while we spirited you out of town. They were willing
to put up with the inconvenience. After all, who'd want to find a man
not guilty and then see him taken out and hanged?"

Auguste's heart felt like a cup that was overflowing. The jury had
understood him; they had believed him.

"I never even got a chance to thank Mr. Ford."

"Main thanks he'd want is knowing that you got away safely."

As they rode on, Auguste's happiness faded. The town that had been his
home for six years had exonerated him. But he still had to run away from
it at night, for the second time in his life. He hated to do this.

This