He might want to ride to the Yellow Cliffso and do some torturing himself.

Near morning the horse found water, a little trickling spring high in some rocks. The pool was only a few feet across but it was good water.

Kicking Wolf let the horse drink and then tethered him securely. Then he lay down in the water and let it wash his wounds. It stung but it cleaned him. He drank a little, and then drank more, until his tongue became the right size again.

He wanted to sleep by the little pool, but was afraid to. Ahumado's men would know of the water hole. They might catch him there. He rested an hour, let the horse drink, and then rode on through the day. It was sunny; he began, again, to see two things that were one. He saw a deer running and the deer became two deer. Kicking Wolf knew a bad witch must have made his eyes untrustworthy.

The pain in his neck and head was still violent, but he kept riding. He wanted to get back across the Rio Grande. Besides the pain in his head there was also a sadness in his heart. He had had too much pride and because of it Three Birds was lost. Everyone had told him that his plan was folly; even a foolish man such as Slipping Weasel, who did stupid things every day, had been wise enough to warn him against taking the Buffalo Horse to Mexico. But he had done it, for his pride--but his pride had cost his friend's life and he would have to go home humbled and shamed. Ahumado had taken the Buffalo Horse, the great horse of the Texans, as if he had been given a donkey. He had not acknowledged Kicking Wolf's courage, or anything else. Even courage, the courage of a great warrior, didn't matter to the Black Vaquero.

It occurred to Kicking Wolf, as he rode north, that the problem with his eyes might not be the work of a bad witch; it might be the work of his own medicine man, Worm. The old spirits might have spoken to Worm and told him that Kicking Wolf had shamed the tribe by his insistence on taking the Buffalo Horse to Ahumado. The old spirits would know what happened to Three Birds--the old spirits knew such things. They might have come to Worm in a vision and insisted that he work a spell to punish this haughty man, Kicking Wolf. Because he had had too much pride, Worm might have made a spell to change his eyes so that they could never see accurately again. Always he might see two where there was one.

Kicking Wolf didn't know. His head hurt, his friend was lost, and he had many days of riding before he got home. When he got home--if he did--no one would sing for him, either.

Even so, Kicking Wolf wanted to be home.

He wanted to see Worm. Maybe he was wrong about the old spirits. Maybe it was one of Ahumado's witches who had made the trouble in his eyes. Maybe Worm could cure him so that, once again, he would only see what was there.

When Scull awoke Hickling Prescott was on his mind and the smell of cooking meat was in his nostrils. His mother, a Ticknor, had been a childhood friend of the great historian, whose house stood only a block down the hill from the great Georgian town house where Inish Scull had grown up. The world knew the man as William Hickling Prescott, of course, but Scull's mother had always called him "Hickling." As Inish Scull was leaving for the Mexican War he had gone by to pay his respects to the old man, then blind and mostly deaf. It was well to know your history when going off to battle, Scull believed, and certainly his mother's friend, Hickling Prescott, knew as much about the history of Mexico as anyone in Boston--or in America, for that matter. To Hickling Prescott, of course, Boston .was America --z much of it, at least, as he cared to acknowledge.

Twice before, during the few weeks he had spent in Boston, Scull had made the mistake of taking Inez along when visiting the old man. But Hickling Prescott didn't approve of Inez. Although he couldn't see or hear and wasn't expected to feel, somehow Inez's determined carnality had impressed itself on the historian, who was not charmed. He didn't believe the sons of Boston should marry women from the South--and yet, to his annoyance, not a few sons of Boston did just that.

"Why, the South's just that riffraff John Smith brought over, Mr. Scull," the old man said. "Your wife smells like a Spanish harlot. I sat next to her at dinner at Quincy Adams's and I smelled her. Our Boston women don't smell--at least they smell very rarely. The Oglethorpes were low bred, you know, quite low bred." "Well, sir, Inez is not an Oglethorpe, but I admit she can produce an odor once in a while," Inish said.

"There are several appealing misses right here in Boston," Hickling Prescott informed him crisply. "I hardly think you needed to root around in that Oglethorpe bunch just to find a wife." He sighed. "But it's done, I suppose," he said.

"It's done, Mr. Prescott," Inish admitted. "And now I'm off to Mexico, to the fight." "Have you read my book?" the old man asked.

"Every ^w," Inish assured him. "I intend to reread it on the boat." "The Oglethorpes produced many fine whores," old Prescott said. "But, as I said, it's done. Now I'm working on Peru, and that isn't done." "I'm sure it will be masterly, when it comes," Inish said.

""Magisterial,"' I would have said," old Prescott corrected, sipping a little cold tea. "I don't expect we'll have to fight Peru, at least not in my time, and I have no advice to offer if we do." "It's Mexico we're fighting, sir," Inish reminded him.

There was a silence in the great dim room, whose windows were hung with black drapes. Inish realized he had misspoken. William Hickling Prescott no doubt knew who the nation was about to go to war with.

"It was reading your great book that made me want to join this war," Inish told him, anxious to make up for his slip. "If I might say so, your narrative stirs great chords in a man.

Heroism--strife--the city of Mexico.

Victory despite great odds. The few against the many. Death, glory, sacrifice." The historian was silent for a moment.

"Yes, there was that," he said dryly. "But this one won't be that way, Mr. Scull. All you'll find is dust and beans. I do wish you hadn't married that Southern woman. What was her name, now?" "Dolly," Inish reminded him. "And I believe her people came over with Mr. Penn." "Oh, that hypocrite," the historian said.

"It must have been a great sorrow to your mother--yr marriage, that is. I miss your mother. She was my childhood friend, though the Ticknors in general are rather a distressing lot. Your ma got all the shine in that family, Mr. Scull." "That she did," Inish agreed.

There were no black drapes in the stony canyon where Scull had awakened, thinking of Hickling Prescott. The walls of the canyon were pale yellow, like the winter sunlight. Scull had slept without a fire and awoke stiff and shivering. On such a morning a little of Inez's unapologetic carnality would not have been unwelcome.