That was why Miguel was so angry with him now.

"What are you doing, Adam?" he asked in a low voice as the boy snapped photographs of their grisly discovery as though he were on holiday. As soon as Adam dropped the camera from his eye, however, the cowboy understood. The boy's face was nearly white with strain, and the muscles in his jawline bunched and unbunched with such fierceness that he could have been chewing on bitterroot.

"Evidence," was all he would say.

"Okay," Miguel said, a little humbled. It had not occurred to him to bother with such a thing.

They came to the burned-out shell of a coffee shop. A charred sign atop a pile of blackened bricks that might once have been yellow read OLD… GNOLIA… and Miguel wondered why it had burned when so much of the town center remained intact. Perhaps on the day of the Wave a gas burner had been on and caught fire. But why had it not spread? Was it raining here, then? He shrugged off the idle speculation. Every town they had passed through was the same. Some areas were destroyed. Some looked as though they had merely been abandoned. Modern ghost towns.

Adam's camera continued to click and beep.

To Miguel the wide, dusty streets of Palestine evoked images of the 1930s, the Depression. The scattered, sun-faded hulks of late-model cars ruined the illusion, but the overall sense of the place was one of weariness and abandonment.

Except for the bodies of the lynched settlers, of course. They lent the scene a dark and immediate energy.

Even in the thirties, though, with the Klan active in the South, one would never have witnessed something as gruesome as this. A single corpse strung up from a lamppost, maybe, but not almost two dozen of them. Miguel, bored during the long transit from Australia to Texas, had often attended the history lectures provided aboard the USS Wasp. From what he understood, the purpose of lynching one person was to terrorize the rest into submission. This had nothing to do with submission.

This was about extermination.

Aronson dismounted and tied up his horse outside the cafe. One hand fingered the pistol at his hip while with the other he rubbed at the rough golden-red beard he had lately grown. His eyes were haunted, and Miguel could swear his face had a distinctly green tinge.

"Adam, over here," Aronson called. "Bring that camera. Sofia, please stay back."

Miguel's daughter favored her father with a questioning glance, but he shook his head. A warning gesture.

"Mister Aronson is right, Sofia. You do not need to see any more. Adam neither. Give the camera to us."

"I may want you both to scout around town," he said quietly. "Keep an eye out for anyone headed our way. Understood?"

Sofia and Adam nodded.

He took both of his weapons as he dismounted and tied Flossie to the roof rack of a red station wagon.

A cold wind whipped up dust devils and small twisters of rubbish along the street, stinging his eyes with grit. A traffic light, one of the kind that hung from thick black cables across an intersection, swayed in the breeze, and somewhere a crow shrieked at the gathering gray clouds. Packs of feral dogs could be heard barking in the distance.

"I was wondering why there were only men hanging from those ropes," said Aronson. "Now I know. Brother Adam, Miguel is correct. You need not see this wickedness. Nor Sofia either."

Adam hesitated, drawn by the power of whatever lay within the tumble of charred bricks and roofing iron, but Miguel stepped in front of him.

"Do as your elder says, boy. He is trying to spare you."

Adam bristled and attempted one look over Miguel's shoulder, but he deflated quickly. Sofia looked as though she wanted to climb down off her horse, but she knew her father well enough to be wary of the furious storm clouds that had gathered behind his eyes. Nodding but saying nothing, Adam took himself across the street to drink from his canteen. Sofia wheeled her mount around and followed him. He deliberately avoided walking under or even looking at the hanging corpses, instead investing his attention in the grimy windows of a bookshop. Miguel watched them move all the way across before turning back to the elder Mormon.

"Women?" he asked in a voice as arid as a salt pan.

"And children," Aronson said. "Here, pass me the camera. I'll document it for the authorities in Kansas City. Perhaps we should look around for some clue as to their identities. Papers or a camp of sorts."

The rising tone of his voice was inflected with the thinnest of hopes. Not that Miguel might find such information but that by busying himself with such details, Aronson might pass through the next few minutes without losing too much of himself. Miguel hazarded a quick look inside the collapsed confines of the building and felt his heart hardening with another layer of scar tissue. He was no policeman, but he could tell from the way the bodies were piled up at the back that they had either cowered there or attempted to force an exit through the rear of the building. They had been alive when the coffee shop was set afire.

He cast his eyes down at the road surface and after a few seconds found what he was looking for: shell casings. A weapon or weapons had been used here to force the women and children into the building. Almost certainly to keep them there. He picked up the brass casings and metal clips that had held the casings together. The rounds were larger than those used in the M16, possibly a machine gun. He could not say. He was no expert in these things.

The vaquero shook his head, a banal gesture in the face of such black-hearted malevolence, but since he had nobody on whom he could vent his fury, it was best not to give it free rein.

A crash and a string of muttered oaths drew his attention outward from his cheerless thoughts. Aronson had tripped on a blackened crossbeam. The Mormons were not given to profanity. Even under extreme duress in Crockett the only real cursing Miguel had heard was his own. But Cooper Aronson emerged from the burned-down coffee shop still swearing under his breath. Distant thunder rolled over the town, and Miguel felt a few spots of cold rain on his neck.

Aronson shook his head at the cowboy as if he, too, had nothing else to offer.

"I suppose we had best see to the burial of these poor people," he said in the tone of a man girding himself for something he would rather put off forever. "I'll send Adam and Sofia back to the others. We'll need help."

Miguel nodded. "You and I can see to cutting some of them down. It is not good work for women or boys."

The Mormon leader flared angrily. "It is not good work for us, either, Miguel." But his loss of control was momentary, and he added a quick apology. "I am sorry, my friend. That was unworthy. You are right. We should do as much as we can between us. I'm going to suggest we put all of the bodies in the coffee shop and collapse those walls on top of it. It's not proper, I know, but it's probably the best we can do short of staying longer to dig individual graves."

The rain was coming down harder now, obscuring the silent rail yards to the south of the town in a dark gray band. Miguel shuddered inwardly. This was going to make an already unpleasant task all but unbearable.

"It is a better end than they have come to already, Cooper," he said. "I agree. Those walls will come down without much effort, and they will form a good… what is the word for the grave of stones?"

"A cairn," Aronson said. "They'll form a cairn. We'll just need to be careful that we don't collapse the walls on top of ourselves." He called Adam over from where he'd been investigating the bookstore. The lad hurried back, followed by Sofia, both of them carrying an armful of paperbacks, looking a touch happier than they had been. Miguel read with curiosity some of the titles Adam had chosen. An orange book called The Martian Chronicles topped the stack, and beneath it Hammer's Slammers. He couldn't make out the writers of those books, but they were not the sort of thing Miguel had read to improve his English for the settler's test. Sofia, he was happy to see, had picked more appropriate reading for a young lady of some bearing. Some literary novels, by the look of them, by a woman named Helen Fielding. Almost certainly a novelist of high literature with a name such as that.