They hanged Elijah's father at noon, when the sun was highest. Hours later, Elijah sat on the porch steps, gazing at the body hanging from the great oak tree. His face was vacant. He didn't cry. He didn't budge.
The man's shadow moved slowly across the ground, a weird sort of clock. Nothing was making a noise. No birds. No wind. Just the groaning of the ancient tree under the weight of his father.
Elijah was thirteen. He had seen it all. The bandits arrived before dawn, pulling his father out of the cabin while he cowered in the loft. They hadn't noticed him. He remained silent. Now the heat seemed to shimmer off the parched Texas ground, and the world around him seemed like it was submerged underwater.
In the afternoon, the bandits returned from the creek. They were five of them, mounted on stolen horses. They were led by a man named El Cuchillo—The Knife. He had earned that name. His face was scarred for it.
He got down and marched into the cabin. The others stood outside. A few minutes passed, and then they emerged, each carrying what little the Blackwoods possessed—blankets, tools, a rifle. They drove off the cattle and rode away, disappearing into the heat like specters.
Elijah did not stir.
And then a stranger came. He came on an old mule, dusty to the ground. The last time Elijah had seen him, he was just a distant shape, a speck on the horizon. The next instant, he was there, as if he'd materialized from nowhere.
He didn't glance at the man suspended from the tree. Nodded only at Elijah.
"Gonna get him down?" Elijah asked.
The man spat on the ground, turned his face away, and gazed up at the corpse.
"Ain't much left to help," he said. "But we'll do what's right."
He took out a knife and walked to the tree. The rope snapped with a dull sound. The body hit the ground hard. His father's neck was twisted, his eyes open and bloodshot. The stranger knelt and gently closed them.
They dug the grave together. Neither of them said a word until it was done.
"I knew your daddy," the man said at last. "Back in the good old days. He was a good man. As far as that counts now."
Elijah didn't reply. He gripped his father's pocketwatch in his fist, the chain curled around his fingers.
"You have anywhere you'd like to go? Any family?"
Elijah shook his head.
"Then come on home with me. A boy needs someone to teach him how to live in a world like this."
Elijah gazed at the scar on the man's cheek.
"What happened to your face?" he asked.
The man rubbed the scar as if he'd done it a thousand times before.
"That's a story for another day," he said. "Maybe when we catch El Cuchillo. That'll be the day you get even with your daddy.
They mounted horses. The sun was red and low on the horizon, stretching out long shadows across the land. The man—who went by the name Solomon Reed—reached into his saddlebag, peered into something in a small wooden box, and shut it again.
Then they rode west, the boy and the stranger, dwindling into the distance.