Black Jack had served James West well over the years, always responding to each command, sometimes with more spirit than was necessary, but Black Jack was never one to give up the chase. Following the trail of Unger's three goons had begun as not much of a challenge, then snowballed into a game of cat and mouse as the three men on horseback split up.

There was no way of knowing which horse carried the Mick, and which the other two. West's goal was to follow the clear leader. The Irishman would be the one who knew where Hannah and Louise were. Jim studied the mix of prints in the road until he could discern the hooves of the Irishman's horse over those of the others. The Mick had been the first to branch off.

Jim took the road less traveled and wound his way into the Mississippi countryside.

Arte's departure from The Wanderer earlier that day had seemed a gentle start to a benign day until Jim returned to the varnish car to find it tossed, and a note pinned to the wall with a letter opener. In a nearly indecipherable scrawl he had been warned to show up unarmed in the town of Marcum with Joseph Unger's back pay, or Louise and Hannah would be killed.

Jim had searched the whole of the train first before assuming that the warning spoke the truth. The feeling that the situation was spinning tornadically out of control made the trip to Marcum seem shorter than he expected. He arrived to find a barn in flames and his partner covered in soot and coughing it out of his lungs, and the aging library security man dying from a gunshot wound, claiming that Joseph Unger's impotence was the culprit behind the whole thing.

Then Arte mentioned treason.

Suddenly the unexpected desire for the back pay made sense, but nothing else did. None the less he had left Arte in the capable hands of Marcum's town surgeon and raced off after Unger's men.

Now, following only the Mick, Jim began to get the feeling that he was being followed himself. The road he traveled was narrow, fenced in by the last of the late fall foliage and thickets of briars. There weren't many places to force his horse off the road. There was however a stout tree branch that he found he could climb onto from the saddle. He was several branches higher, his horse roaming freely around the base of the tree when he spotted one of the two new henchman the Mick had hired.

Confusion marring his face, the goon eyed the empty horse, then the sides of the road, coming to the same conclusion Jim had. Just as the goon reached for his gun, his eyes lifting toward the barren branches of the tree, Jim cocked back the hammer on his own pistol and said, "I wouldn't."

The goon considered for a long moment then eased his hand away, putting both palms up.

"What's your name, son?" Jim asked, noticing for the first time how young this one was.

"Angus." The boy answered, his eyes bouncing from the tree, to the riderless horse, to the side of the road and back again.

"Why were you following me, Angus?"

With a casual confidence that Jim didn't much like, Angus shrugged his shoulders, lowering his hands a little. "It's a free country. I was just passing along. Wasn't following you in particular."

"In that case you can consider me a robber, and this a hi-jacking. Take off your gun belt and throw it toward the black."

Angus gave him a sneer, but moved his hands to comply, once more hesitating as his hand passed by the gun butt. By the time the gun and belt hit the ground Angus was still entirely too confident. Jim cocked his head, peering through the reddened leaves that separated them, then waved the gun barrel.

"And the shoulder gun."

Angus paled a little, but again did as he was asked, emptying the holster.

That had taken some of the bluster out of him. Angus was no longer cocky, but still plenty mad. Jim wasn't confident enough to try jumping down from his perch with the boy still sitting his horse.

"Dismount, on the right side."

Having to think to through the awkward move, Angus was distracted as he stepped down from his horse. By the time he straightened, Jim was on the road with him, Angus' guns in one hand.

Jim pointed his own weapon toward the road down which they both had come and said, "Walk."

"Yer leavin' me afoot?" The boy demanded, outraged.

"Once you get back to Marcum and turn yourself in to the Sheriff, you'll get your horse back. And your guns, if the Sheriff's of a mind."

"This is rob-"

"Yes...it is, isn't it? Move." Jim said with a barely contained smirk. He waited until the boy had turned and started walking before he approached the young man's horse, talking softly to the animal. Once Angus had walked around the bend out of sight, Jim quickly collected the horse, and the weapons and mounted Black Jack.

He put as much distance between himself and the boy as possible, pulling the extra horse along with him.

The guns he eventually tossed into the thicket alongside the road, keeping the bullets. The horse he released near a small farmhouse, its yard for the moment deserted.

There were petticoats drying on a line, and the smell of food baking. The toys of small children collected on the well-worn porch. Hardly the place where West expected to find an outlaw and two hostages.

He rode for miles, encountering few other homesteads. The thickets, he discovered, had been planted intentionally to protect fields that usually lay a few meters beyond the natural barriers. Miles and miles of fields that were likely owned and farmed by sharecroppers. Some of them might have been freedmen, some of them white. These were hardly plantations, however. This was the poor part of the south, made all the poorer by the Northern backlash that followed the War Between the States.

Any abandoned shacks, Jim approached carefully and searched thoroughly. The farther away from Marcum he went the less confident he felt about the path he had chosen.

He discovered that he had chosen the correct trail in the same moment that he realized he had become too complacent about his search. Unfortunately Black Jack was the first to suffer the consequences. The bullet smacked into flesh before Jim heard the shot and his horse bucked, and skittered, letting out an outraged protest to the assault. Jim was crushed against the trunk of a tree then dumped into the thicket before Black Jack took off.

Dazed, caught in what felt like a hundred tiny thorns, Jim's struggles only earned him more pin pricks of pain and made him all the more stuck. He ripped an arm free only to have to thrust it back into the mess of briars to get as his gun. Above the sound of his own struggles he could hear someone approaching and finally gave up on the sidearm, popping the release on the derringer he kept hidden up his sleeve. At least minimally armed Jim tried to relax, peering through the growing gloom of twilight at the man approaching.

"Ye're not as good when you don't have an audience." The Mick said, opening the breach of the rifle he had used to shoot Black Jack and pushing another shell into the chamber. "Though I will give you that fine bit of maneuvering when you got the drop on Angus. He's a bright boy, but...young. Good of you to let him out of it with only a wounded pride. Foolish, but good of you."

The Mick was talking to him, but Jim realized he hadn't yet been seen. He was far enough into the briars, and the light dim enough, that he was blending into the mess. The Mick was nothing more than a dark shadow beyond the curling vines, but he was backlit by the setting sun. A far easier target.

The only problem was that Jim couldn't move without making noise, and noise would draw the Mick's attention and aim.

There was a chuckle from the road, as if the Irishman had been reading his thoughts. "You're right. I haven't found you yet, but as stuck as I'll bet you are, all I need do is play a little roulette with this thicket, and I'll find the mark eventually."

"Did you bring me to Marcum to kill me?" Jim asked, hating to admit, even to himself, that the Mick was right. The silence game wouldn't have lasted long, and in the mean time Jim had questions and the Mick seemed to like to talk.

"No." The man said, and Jim watched as the shadow changed, the gun now resting against the Irishman's shoulder with the barrel pointing toward the sky. "Captain Unger decided that he wanted his due after all, and as I was certain that your actor friend didn't have it with him, and since we couldn'a find it in that fancy car of yours...well of course you had to be the one to bring it."

"Unger's daughters...where are they?"

"Now that, dependin' on who you ask, is a most peculiar question. But...the day has been a long one so I'll give you the answer ye're wantin'. The girls are hidden, and for the moment whole."

The longer he lay against the briars the deeper they dug into his skin. Each move would produce pain but Jim found that he could free his arm with very little noise, one thorn at a time using his fingertips. His left arm had been relatively mobile to begin with and he was soon working on freeing the right.

"What does Unger expect to gain anyway?"

The Mick laughed, then brought the gun to bear and fired into the thicket, a foot beyond where Jim lay and to the right. Far too close. In the echoing silence that followed Jim could hear the click of the breach, the scrape of a new round sliding home. The cock of the hammer.

"Suffice to say, that Unger wishes to go about his business in peace, without the meddling of government men. It was Yankee meddlers that started the war. Ye didn't learn then, and ye still haven't learned."

"You might say that our winning the war disrupted the lesson." Jim snapped.

The Mick's response was another shot. This one was too close. It burned through the gap between Jim's right arm and his side, taking a piece of hide with it. Jim took a breath and swallowed the cry of surprise, riding through the pain and forcing his fingers back into motion.

The Mick calmly reloaded the weapon, apparently none the wiser that he had essentially hit his target.

Jim's arm was almost free. As he worked the last few thorns out of his jacket, he realized that the Mick had gone completely still, his head cocked.

"Did I kill ya then, Yank?"

The last two thorns finally popped free and Jim said, "Nope." before he cocked the derringer and fired at the shadow before him, aiming low. He fired both barrels as quickly as possible, already digging for his sidearm before he heard the Mick groan and topple to the ground.

There was no way of getting out of the thicket quickly. Jim shrugged off his jacket first before he sat up. The graze on his side was long, soaking his white shirt through with blood. As his weight shifted Jim could feel the thorns in his pants digging into his legs and backside, but he ignored it all, going for the knife he kept over his spine, grateful that he kept at least one edge as sharp as possible.

He began sawing his way through the vines clinging to him, using his folded jacket to tamp down the bushes preventing his access to the road. By the time he tumbled free he looked very much like a living pin cushion, some of the vines still clinging to him. His hat, was wedged into the vines, lost to nature so far as he was concerned.

The Mick lay on the road, still alive, his hands clutching at his left knee. The rifle was still beside him but Jim kicked it away before the Mick could wield it then bent to search the man for any other weapons. While he had the opportunity Jim pulled a kerchief from his pocket and stuffed it inside his shirt over the wound, then tied a bandanna sharply around the Mick's knee.

The resulting moan brought the Irishman out of semi-consciousness and Jim yanked him to a sitting position by his lapels.

"Where are they?" He asked, then reached down and dug his thumb into the man's wounded leg until he choked on the pain and put a hand up in protest.

"I'll tell ye, I'll tell ye."

"No...you'll show me. Get up."


The doctor had disappeared. Off seeing to Sheriff Stone, or perhaps he had gone to bed. Arte didn't know where, but the pounding on the door of the doctor's office interrupted his thoughts and he opened it to have a small child thrust into his arms. Bewildered he tried to make sense of the wailing of the child's mother, but the consonants and vowels ran together into a mush that he couldn't comprehend.

When Weeks appeared he moved quickly, taking the child from Arte's arms and speaking in the same gibberish to the mother. A mix of Spanish and English, Gordon finally realized. The child was sick and his fever had spiked in the afternoon hours. The mother, desperate, had forced her husband to row her and the boy upriver to Marcum, the closest town with a doctor.

"Mr. Gordon, heat some water for me, and a basin of cold water please." Weeks ordered then told the woman in her native language that she had to remove as much clothing from her child as possible.

"You speak Spanish.." Arte said as the doctor pulled some powders contained in glass jars from the cabinet near the stove. Arte lifted one of the cooking panels so that he could drop wood onto the fire, then replaced it setting the pot of water on to heat.

"It is Latin based, and Latin is the language of physicians everywhere. There are many Mexican immigrants in the town south of Marcum."

With his supplies gathered the doctor tried to pull the distraught mother's hands away from her child but she refused to let go. Arte stepped in, speaking softly as he pried her hands away, "Deje que el médico haga su trabajo."

"Usted habla español también." Weeks responded surprised, before he turned to the boy, coaxing a mix of powders and honey past his lips.

"It makes my job a little easier too." Arte said. As the hot water came to a boil the doctor talked Gordon through the process of mixing a special herbal tea that was then spoon fed to the young boy. Arte made a cup for the fretting mother as well, then realized that there was a third party still missing from the drama.

He left the doctor's office, walking through the darkness that had to have fallen no more than an hour ago. The streets were empty, lights burning in most of the buildings on main street and some of the houses beyond it. The church was once more occupied by the devout. Arte walked down to the docks wishing he had thought to bring a lantern with him and called for the husband and father of the two patients now inhabiting the doctor's front room. He hadn't caught a surname from the mother, but he knew the boy's name was Alejandro.

As his feet hit the boards he searched the platforms closer to the surface of the water and saw no vessel that would match the description the lady had given. Would the father have brought his sick child, only to abandon him and his mother in Marcum? Were all fathers useless and given to abandoning their offspring at the first opportunity?

When he returned the doctor looked up from where he sat by the child on the bed. "Did you find him?"

Arte shook his head, giving the woman a sympathetic look that she did not see, her eyes fixed on the boy.

"I'm not surprised really. Most of them are farmers." The doctor responded, as if that were explanation enough, and rose into a half-crouch collecting the basin of cold water from the stool he had pulled close to the bed, wiping the boy down head to toe. The child responded immediately to the cooling relief, and Arte heard the mother gasp hopefully, her hands clasping in front of her in prayer.

"Can I get anything else?" Arte asked, feeling somewhat useless.

"No...no. The powders should work their magic from within, and the cold compresses should help from without. The boy looks healthy enough otherwise. Who knows what his home conditions are like, though his clothes are clean."

After a moment the doctor looked up, eyeing Artemus. "How are you feeling?"

Arte leaned back against the counter crossing his arms. He started to smirk, then felt the expression fall from his face, the turmoil of mixed emotions bubbling just below the surface, denying him the usual flippant attitude. The longer he'd thought about it the more he had come up with one question that irked him more than the others.

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

Monitoring the boy's temperature with one hand on his forehead, the doctor reached for the cold compress again. "Before?"

"Thirty years ago, when the Louise was born. When Anna revealed to you that I was the father. Why didn't you tell me then?"

Cooling the boy's face and neck the doctor pursed his lips as he read the thermometer then set it to the side. "Tell me, Mr. Gordon, what good would it have done, had I dropped the responsibility of a newborn baby on your shoulders. Keeping in mind that you were first fully conscious almost four days after the incident, and by that time Anna, Mr. Unger and their children were long gone."

Arte found he didn't have a response. And, as he returned the doctor's unwavering gaze he understood that the doctor had asked himself that very question, likely more than once then, and in the years that followed.

"And Hudson?" Arte asked, watching as the doctor took another temperature reading before he waved the mother to come closer. In quite tones he reassured her in her native tongue, then showed her the technique he had been using to cool off the boy's raging temperature. Relieved to be given a task the woman nodded anxiously to each instruction, before she sat beside the boy taking over the doctor's work.

"Hudson?" Weeks said, as he rose, then nodded with realization. "You refer to the man we knew as Hetsy."

This was the second person to refer to Hudson by another name, a name that Arte knew was familiar but he couldn't place it.

"When Hetsy first set foot in Marcum he was a traveling salesman. Set up his cart on the edge of town but he wasn't terribly good at selling anything. He made money, somehow. I know because he spent it in town. He came to Marcum the same day that the showboat came. The first time. Right about the time that you were settling in, I think too.

I didn't like Hetsy. He was selling castor oil and opium and calling it a miracle cure, but in my mind he was as harmless as every other snake oil man to come through. I did what I could to discourage the more treacherous of his products, and he put up with me. Paid special attention to the showboat, but then who didn't in those days. When the showboat moved on, and the excitement died down, we found that Hetsy had moved on too. I wasn't surprised. Many of the folks had spent what little they had on tickets to see the show. They had little frivolous money left to spend on knickknacks and so-called miracle cures."

The doctor paused, his hands on his hips, throwing his mind back. "Yes...Hetsy moved on and life continued again until the months passed and the showboat returned. And there like clockwork was Hetsy again, with his cart. Selling new fancy voodoo cures that he'd obtained in New Orleans, beads, and baubles he'd collected in his travels.

He was the one who brought you to my door that night."

Arte straightened, his back stiffening, his eyes widening with the sudden shock of adrenaline. The doctor nodded. "Yes. He'd been one of the first to respond to the flaming show boat and had rescued Anna and her eldest child, and he claimed to have fished you out of the drink. Had a bit of an altercation with Anna and Joseph too, once she was up and walking around. The man seemed earnest, and intent, but there was a little bit of the fanatic about him. As though he were a true psychotic with a well-formed mask of sanity in place."

Arte thought about Hudson's voice just before he pulled the trigger, forcing buckshot through a human being at point-blank range, nearly cutting the Red Head in half. It had been far from the sane thing to do in the situation.

"That argument was the talk of the town for about a day, too. The old codgers who liked to gather on the boarding house porch discussed how Anna seemed to know Hetsy, but clearly Joseph Unger didn't. Some said the argument was about the boat, and they thought Hetsy might have been the owner. Some said it was to do with a love triangle. Of course no one could put Anna to blame, but they suspected either Unger or Hetsy of some sort of wrong. There were just as many wild stories the following night, the night that Anna, and her children disappeared with Joseph Unger."

"The night they took the tug.."

"Yes." Doctor Weeks nodded before he moved back to the bed containing the sick child, once more applying the thermometer, waiting as the mercury rose, then giving the young mother encouragement and further instruction. "The old man who used to be the dock master was especially keen on what he claimed to have seen that night. He swore up one side and down that he saw Joseph Unger holding a small pistol against his eldest daughter's side, forcing his wife to board the tugboat."

When Arte started to interrupt, Weeks put up a hand. "The old man was known to have seen many things, and it was dark when the family left. Also, no one else could ever corroborate. But...as hallucinations go, this one was a little more detailed than what Will usually came up with. Anyway, about a week later rumors were starting to spread that a negro family, freedmen living on a small patch of farmland, had witnessed a tugboat being set ablaze and scuttled in the middle of the river. It was rumor...of course, but when neither Anna, nor Joseph Unger were heard from again. ...then Hetsy returned to town. The way he looked he might have been in a scuffle. He bought a ticket for a boat going south with that inexhaustible cashflow of his and..." The doctor shrugged.

"You let the man die." Arte said, vaguely accusatory. "You alleged that he was a rapist and a philanderer."

Weeks pondered Arte the way a man might consider a tricky chess move, silent for a minute before he took a deep breath. "Mr. Gordon, Hetsy was going to die whether I hovered over him with Hippocratic concern, or not. Prolonging his life would have meant prolonging his pain. And according to Miss Marlene Riley he was a rapist. He did not, apparently, return to Marcum only to buy a ticket and leave. He attacked Miss Riley as she was leaving the school-house, dragged her into the woods and molested her. She wasn't found until after dark, and even then she was incapable of speech until a day later. When she would finally admit that she had been molested she identified Hetsy as her attacker. She described him in detail, but the most damning evidence came from his own mouth. Through out the attack Hesty called Miss Riley 'Anna'."

"What...what became of Miss Riley?"

"She bore a child as a result. Gave that child to an older couple in the town desperate for children and...drowned herself, in the river." The doctor's eyes and voice had gone cold, his tone stoney, demanding that Arte make an effort to justify Hetsy's actions, or make a claim that it was a case of mistaken identity. Yet Arte could not.

He suspected that were he to dig into Hudson's past he would find more and more inconsistencies. He knew nothing about the man and yet he had been willing to believe he was an ally, and an advocate. There was only one discrepancy.

"Hudson...Hetsy, looked after Hannah and Louise from a distance, for most of their lives. He never...hurt them." Arte shook his head, unwilling to voice the idea, finding he didn't have to.

"You would have done the same, had you known."

"What?"

The doctor had leaned once more over the boy, who was sleeping soundly, his temperature markedly lower. He gave the mother reassurances and suggested that she try to rest. "If you had known that you were Louise's father thirty years ago you would have been just as protective."

His mind wasn't making the connection, and his face must have clearly reflected it. Weeks sighed. "Mr. Gordon, Harold Hetsy was most likely the father of Anna's first child."


Black Jack returned readily when James whistled for him. His flank was streaked with blood and he was limping heavily, the bullet likely buried in the muscle. He couldn't be ridden and Jim took the saddle off, leaving the blanket on. The Mick's horse was down the road and around a corner, hobbled in the thicket. Jim took the animal's saddle off as well before he brought the horse back to the wounded Irishman.

"Ye expect me to ride without a saddle?"

"Your less likely to run this way, and you shot my horse." Jim said, then hoisted the man up, making a stirrup out of his joined hands. He ignored the Mick's pained groans, more concerned about the pain Black Jack was suffering. The burn at West's side was irritating but not life threatening...to West anyway. Every time it pulled, or the myriad of thorn pricks on his skin started to itch, Jim was more and more ready to kill the Irishman.

Thankfully the road came to a sudden end less than a mile and a half later. It gave a severe bend, turning behind a barn then dissipating into the overgrown grass of someone's front yard. The farm-house had two candles burning, and a fire was tingeing the air with wood smoke.

"Who's in there with them?" Jim asked, and when he didn't get a response he slapped the injured man's knee.

The Mick paled, curling toward the horse's neck before he moaned, "Unger...he insisted on comin' down with us."

"What is this place?"

"Unger owns it. He and his wife lived here for two years."

"Alright, get down." Jim ordered, pulling his sidearm. He waited until the Irishman's feet touched the ground before he grabbed the wounded man's shoulder and shoved him forward.

To his shock he was on the ground a second later, the breath jolted from his body. He was registering the move the Mick had pulled, an over the shoulder toss that should have been impossible with the wound to the man's knee, when the Mick scooped up the rifle and checked the chamber. Disappointed to find the gun empty the man approached none the less, raising the rifle by the barrel prepared to drive the stock into James' skull.

West still had his hand gun, pulled and pointed dead center between the Mick's eyes, but he wasn't willing to shoot. He scrambled to his feet and waited, a little breathless, shocked at the sudden, almost demonic passion that had overcome the man. Gradually common sense overruled the frenzied violence and the Mick let the gun sink back to the ground.

Jim gritted his teeth, pressed a palm against his throbbing side and ordered, "Move."

Before they'd even crossed the yard the door opened, the silhouette of a woman outlined by the faint flicker of the fire in the main room.

"Hannah?"

"Yes. Mr. West, but how did you know to come-"

"Are you and Louise alright?"

The figure paused before Hannah's bewildered voice responded, "Of course. I heard voices and the horses...my Heavens, you've been injured! And Mr. Getzman!"

The Irishman cast him a sidelong glance that made Jim's gut twist, before Getzman waved the girl off. "S'alright, darlin'. I'll be fine. Took a bit of a tumble."

"It's not fine at all. We haven't a doctor, but we can still do something about all that blood. Come in then." Hannah said, her voice taking on a hint of maternal authority that she'd never truly had the opportunity to exhibit.

Jim kept Getzman from moving any further by lightly pressing the muzzle of the gun into his back, then called, "Hannah, come out please."

The woman tilted her head, then stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind her. "Mr. West, this night air is hardly conducive to-"

"Is Joseph Unger inside?" Jim asked, dropping his voice.

"Yes, sleeping last I knew."

"Get your sister, and we'll leave. Are there horses?"

"Leave! I hardly intend to leave, this is my home now, Mr. West. Father has explained a great deal, and he's gifted this property to Louise and I."