riend.
Otto Wegner and Eli Greenglove turned on you, Hodge Hode is dead, Levi
Pope has joined the Regulators."

_It's true. I have no other friends but Armand. I have no family. What's
happened to me?_

"Damn it, it _is_ plain stupid to talk about fighting the Regulators,
Armand. Kill Cooper and we'd have a countywide war on our hands."

"I believe we could frighten the Regulators into backing down, mon
colonel--if _we_ showed some courage."

_That's a jab at me._

Whiskey and anger almost made Raoul lash out again at Armand, but he
felt a sudden fear that Armand would turn on him and he would be all
alone.

Raoul brooded for a time, then finally spoke.

"Wait till I get the lead mine opened up next spring. We'll go up to
Galena, you and I, and we'll recruit the roughest, meanest miners we can
find. And we'll make it plain to them that they'll have two jobs--to dig
for lead and to fight Regulators. When we've got enough of them down
here, we'll take on Cooper and his crowd in the next election. I'll
spread whiskey and money around and our boys will beat up anybody who
says he won't vote our way. Smith County will belong to us again,
Armand."

He heard hurried footsteps echoing on the split-log floor of the fort's
main room. Someone rapped on his office door. Like a swimmer coming up
from the bottom of a lake after a dive, Raoul rose up out of his
comfortable whiskey haze.

"Who's there?" he growled.

Josiah Hode, a skinny, red-haired youth in dark calico shirt and
workman's trousers, a big hunting knife at his waist, pushed the door
open. Hodge's orphaned son.

_This is what my Andy and Phil would have grown to look like._ The
thought hurt Raoul because Andy and Phil were dead and because he had
never really loved them.

"What is it, Josiah?"

"Someone rode up to Miz Hale's door and banged on it. I snuck right up
to the fence. When they came out I saw it was that Woodrow kid that
lives with her. And she got out her own horse and rode toward town with
him."

"Did you follow them?"

"Long enough to see that they went up to old Mr. de Marion's place."

"_He's_ there!" Raoul said. He felt as if he were out hunting on a
frosty morning and had just sighted a buck with spreading antlers. He
clenched his fist and brought it down on his desk, hard. He opened the
drawer again, took out a small bag of coins and slammed the drawer shut.

He counted out nine Spanish dollars. "Josiah, you divide these between