There wasn't much talk on the way back to Novac. There was no need for any. Boone had done what he had to do. If we had tried it any other way, then most or all of us would almost certainly have been killed. I couldn't have shot it out with thirty legionnaires in the middle of a camp with no cover, Boone couldn't have gotten down into the camp without being spotted, and there was just no way that either of us could have gotten to Carla in time. Even if we had opened the ball she would have been taken onto that ship and taken upriver anyway, spending the rest of her life as one of Caesar's personal whores and her child being either a Legion baby factory or just another grunt sent to the front lines as cannon fodder like so many others. If it had been my wife and child, I would have done the same thing.

After slipping out of the camp in the confusion following Boone's shot, taking advantage of the moment to act shocked and determined like the rest of the legionnaires and heading into the brush to "find the shooter" and retrieving my own gear and clothes, we made our way to Station Echo and then to Novac via a mountain trail that I knew of from one of the ambush raids I'd been on with Gibson and the others. We got back to town and found that Angeline was gone, that she had packed up and left a day after we left. I didn't blame her for that. In the back of my mind I was actually glad that she had pulled out. She'd been setting her cap for me and I knew that I was no kind of man for her. She was a beautiful woman and a good one, a woman that deserved a man who could provide for her, keep her safe, and give her a home and family that she could call her own.

I had never been much on home and children. I'd always wanted kids of my own and Jenny and me had talked about having children a time or two, but I was too much of a rambling man to be tied down like that. I was a man born for the high hills and the open desert, for the smell of clear water in the morning, of creosote and mesquite fires, and of meat that I'd killed that day broiling next to a pot of black coffee. Maybe in a few years I'd be tamed down enough to have a place like that. For now there was just too much new country to see, too many battles to fight, and too many enemies to face.

No one asked much when we came back into town. Manny Vargas looked at Boone for a moment, but he said nothing as he went to his own room and put away his gear. Vargas looked at me as if to say something, but soldiers like us rarely need explanations. We'd both been through the ringer and we'd seen how the Mojave chewed people up and spat out their bones to bleach. He'd been a Great Khan once, or so Boone had said, and he knew better than anyone how brutal the Legion could be when they wanted to be. I saw everyone else's eyes on us when we came back, but no one had the stomach to ask. Boone went to his room while I went to Sally's for a good meal and some coffee that I hadn't made myself.

There was plenty of talk around the restaurant about the war, the desert, and the troubles of the town. Someone said that there had been trouble over at the old Repconn Testing Site where the town got most of its scrap metal and such. There had been shooting and some loud bangs a couple of days ago, and some of the prospectors and miners in town were telling me that ghouls had come pouring out of the site and flooded the canyons to the point that no one could come or go to the site to prospect or gather scrap. They asked if I would be willing to go over and try to get them out, but I had things to do that were more pressing. Ranger Andy had already stopped me and said that a courier had been in town looking for me with orders to return to Camp Forlorn Hope as soon as I was healed. I felt like hammered shit after the long hard march, but my wounds were pretty much healed and I was eager to get back on the front.

I stayed only a night at Novac. I had myself a good meal at Sally's, packed up my gear, and before the sky was even gray in the east I was on the trail and headed to Forlorn Hope. There was a Gecko call and a whistle from the dinosaur as I passed under it, and I knew that Boone was watching my back. I felt safer than a newborn babe in his mama's arms as I crossed that open flat under the watchful eye of Craig Boone and his rifle. I followed the old road until I came to the mountains, then left the worn-out asphalt and took the old trails that snaked through the peaks and the canyons and lost themselves in the maze of game trails and thin paths that few men used. I saw tracks of coyotes, Geckos, and Mole Rats, but none of men.

The sun was just coming over the horizon when I came into Forlorn Hope. I found a place in the barracks and threw down my duffle, laid out on the cot, and I was back at home again. The days passed by quickly, days becoming weeks and one moving into the other with little change. The situation on the front had pretty much stabilized in the days since I'd been gone, but now there were raids and other troubles to contend with. There was still constant fighting in the valley below Forlorn Hope, the trails in and out of the area had been mined, and there were daily raids on NCR supply lines and on the outlying villages and settlements. Supplies had become scarce in camp and ammunition was becoming a problem as well. The quartermaster was even starting to have men collect dogtags from the dead so that he could see whose rations to cut off and redistribute.

Every day I went out and watched the trails with either the other Rangers in camp or with a squad of NCR troopers, laying little ambushes and setting traps where a legionnaire might be going along his murderous way. A corporal in Forlorn Hope had a little competition going where he offered a pool of caps for whoever could bring in the most Legion ears. Get it, legion-ear? Yeah, I didn't think it was very funny either. He took bets on who would win or how many would be brought in, then offered the whole pot to whoever could bring in the most ears from dead legionnaires. Naturally it sounded pretty good to me and it wasn't very long before I was in the lead. I had taken scalps before, but I'd never taken ears from my kills. After every fight, the few that we had, I went around and taken the ears of them that I'd taken down and wore them around my neck on a leather string.

I saw the looks that I was getting around camp. Everyone saw the necklace of ears when we came back from some ambush or raid and it gave them pause. Even Major Polatli turned away when he saw it. I didn't care. The way I saw it, every time I killed one of those bastards it was one less man that could take someone else's family or enslave someone else's wife, daughter, mother, or children.

Some people back in the NCR were starting to feel sorry for the Legion, saying that they were just like any other power and that they were just trying to make their way in a hard land. They lived like Tribals in the most primitive ways, compared to the relative comfort that the people back at the Hub or in Frisco were enjoying, but that was by their own choice and not out of necessity. Some were saying that this war had dragged on long enough and that we should either call it quits and pull out or talk peace with Caesar and let the Mojave go. First off, there is no such thing as peace with Caesar. He and all his subordinates respect only strength and power and if someone isn't of the Legion then they are considered an enemy to be destroyed and conquered. Eighty-six tribes had been conquered by him and his armies, almost all of them decimated and their populations massacred to a man. Hundreds of thousands of people had died at their hands, probably more. That was their measure of peace. Anyone that thought they could have a proper sit-down with that kind of men was no one I wanted anything to do with.

War has been a way of life of mankind since the beginning. Warrior cultures have always been the most powerful and the most prosperous, and the Legion saw themselves as the ultimate warrior culture in the world. They had met an enemy in the NCR, an enemy who could match them in numbers and in guts and one that could defeat them in battle as they had done, barely, at the Dam all those years ago. I had seen what they did to enemies, and it was nothing that a bleeding heart sitting pretty in his Hub office would find anything to feel sorry for. Anyone that said I had gone off the deep end was welcome to their opinion, as long as they kept it to themselves or stayed civil when they said it.

A couple weeks went by without major incident. There were sporadic fights in the hills and in the valley, a few raids on the outskirts of the camp, and we had taken out quite a few little groups of legionnaires along the mountain trails and in the desert beyond the hills. Gibson was still in camp and I spent most of my time with him and Ranger Grey. Cooper had finally gotten the transfer to First Recon that he'd been putting in for forever. He was a damn good sniper and a top-notch tracker and hunter, so I was sure that they would benefit from having him. First Recon was stationed at Camp McCarran last I heard and were mostly sent out to snipe at Fiends and the occasional bandit gang that was brave enough to attack southern New Vegas.

The radio and the campfires were alive with gossip every night, as were the mess halls and the camp tavern tent. I had spent many an hour of down time in the barracks or out by the little stream that flowed down from the higher peaks just sitting around on my bunk or a chair and listening to Mr. New Vegas coming over the waves with the latest news. Most of it was the usual stuff, war news, politics from back west, and the latest gossip from around the Mojave. I heard a lot about the Powder Gangers and their mutiny at the NCRCF a short time ago and that they were raiding around the area of Goodsprings and Primm. Some of the prospectors that were coming from the east even claimed that they had all but taken over Primm and pushed the locals around like it was nothing.

There was a lot of talk about the courier that I'd heard about the day of the Battle of Nelson. He had been shot in the head and left for dead, apparently, and had been dug out of a shallow grave by someone in a checkered suit with a fancy 9mm Pistol. That explained how he had survived. I've never had much respect for the 9mm as a fighting cartridge. I've seen men take a dozen rounds from a nine and just keep on coming. A .357 mag will stop a man in his tracks and if taken in the head will literally blow it apart, although a .44 will do it better. A 9mm does almost nothing unless a body uses hollow points.

Most of the talk was about his miraculous recovery after the wound, which I could understand, and about the things he'd been doing since he came to. No one seemed to know his name and so they were just calling him the Courier. Made me wonder what they were calling me over the waves when I wasn't listening. Apparently he'd been robbed of his cargo, some kind of parcel that he was supposed to deliver to New Vegas, then shot and left for dead by whoever had robbed him. It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened. Mojave Express couriers were notorious targets for bandits, Tribals, and the Legion because of the valuable cargos or large cash sums that they usually carried. I'd known a few of them and for the most part they were tough men. I'd seen men take hard wounds and come back almost from the brink of death, in fact there were a few that were saying that my own wounds from Nelson were too much for a man to survive, but for a man to take a bullet to the head and come back from it was a man that had levels of toughness that few men could match.

Sitting around the fire of an evening over coffee and the night's ration of beans, I found myself thinking about Angeline. She was a hell of a woman, the kind that would make some fool happy if he ever managed to tie her down and make her his own, and more and more these days I found myself thinking of that night before I left with Boone for the Cove. She had all but offered herself to me there in the bungalow and like a damn fool I had turned her down and gone off on a fool's errand that had been for naught. Nobody needed to tell me that I had been an idiot to turn her down like that. In another time and place I would have jumped at the chance, but my heart still belong to my dear departed Jenny and it just didn't feel right being with another woman. I thought about her more and more often now, in quiet moments out on the desert or in the dark evening hours around the barracks or the campfire, wonder where she had gone to or what she might be doing.

It was on one such night that a soldier came up to me with a letter from Ranger Chief Hanlon in Camp Golf, Ranger headquarters and the forward command post for most of the NCR forces in the Mojave, asking me to come and see him. That was unusual. Hanlon was a tough old he-coon that had been up the creek and over the mountain and many people said he was single-handedly responsible for the victory at the First Battle of Hoover Dam. He was a respected leader among the Mojave Rangers and a man that was feared by his enemies, but he was also a no-nonsense man that preferred to lead from the front when he could and to leave the daily routines to his men in the field when he couldn't be there. If he wanted me or any Ranger to come and see him personally then it could only mean that something was up. Angeline had said that I had been put in for a medal for what I'd done over in Nelson, but medals were given in ceremonies by officers in little rooms.

I wasted no time. I went to Major Polatli and he assigned me to the next supply run that was scheduled to head for Camp Golf, set to depart the next day, and that night I packed up my gear and my bedroll. I was up and about before dawn and ate a hearty breakfast in the mess hall before heading to the camp entrance to meet the supply crew. There were eight men, all soldiers and all armed to the teeth, and with them were four pack Brahmin wearing pack saddles. Two of them wore empty packs that would be loaded down with supplies to be brought back, while the other two were loaded down with food, ammunition, and most of our own gear. We all wanted to be light on our feet in case of fast action and so we put our duffel and the heavier packs on the animals. We left the camp as the first rays of dawn came over the eastern shore of the Colorado, all of us walking with our rifles in hand and our senses attuned to the desert.

Two days passed without incident. We walked along the old roads and all of us went with our weapons out and ready. The Legion had been raiding the returning supply trains regularly, so we weren't much worried about them. They wanted the supplies that we would bring back and so wouldn't be interested in empty Brahmin packs. I was more worried about the raiders that camped along the highways and the packs of Golden Geckos that had been spotted near the ruins of Vault 34. The radiation from the old vault had made them huge and very aggressive, much more than the average Gecko, and in the last few weeks there had been reports of them coming down from the mountains and attacking people out of the blue. We heard them in the distance and once I saw two of them sitting on a ridge watching us pass by, but they never came close enough to cause any harm.

I walked well out from the cavalcade, preferring to be out on my own where I could listen to the sounds of the desert and get a good lay of the land away from the sounds and distractions of the caravan. Twice I went out hunting with two of the troopers, both times bringing back game for the campfire. I saw the tracks of animals in the hills and once the tell-tale markings of a Cazador landing over a kill. The last thing I wanted was to run into one of those things so I eased back to the trail and topped out on the ridge that ran along the east side of the road. A big wash dropped away from the hills to the north and wound away toward the east and slightly north, running under an old system of pipes that had once supplied fresh water to Vegas. Looking down the wash, something caught my attention on a little rise that split the wash almost in two where a base had been built for one of the larger pipes.

Looking through my binoculars, I could see the rise pretty well. Someone back down the line had built a rickety rope bridge across the wash on both sides of the base pad, connecting both slopes, and at the center of that pad was a campsite. At least, what was left of a campsite. I could see bodies strewn across the sand and burned places on the white ground, and down in the wash was a dead Brahmin that had tumbled down from the camp. I looked the camp over for a few minutes before I went down to investigate, looking for any sign that the attackers might still be around, and then skirted the ridge and made my way down to the campsite.

Whatever had happened here had happened fast. I found three men in Leather Armor sprawled out in death on both sides of the camp, all with Plasma Rifles and spent Microfusion Cells around them, who must have been the attackers. The burned places I had seen from the ridge were places where men had been disintegrated by energy weapons, their ashes piled where they must have been standing when shot. There were spent cartridge cases all over the place and I found a beaten-up Varmint Rifle down the slope near the dead Brahmin, whose packs had been emptied and then burned. Every piece of gear from the camp had been piled on the campfire and burned as well, everything from the foodstuffs to the spare weapons of the caravaneers. The fire was dead and hadn't been lit in days.

It was a dim reminder of the dangers of the desert. I'd seen a hundred scenes just like this, although this site had a little something that was different. Raiders and legionnaires usually take the cargo and gear from slaughtered caravans, while here it had all been stacked up and burned. Why do that? Why just burn thousands of caps' worth of goods when there was no chance of being caught way out here and the city so close? There were traders and stores that would buy such things at a high price and with no questions asked, so why burn it all? It just made no sense. I left the scene and went back to the train, just coming up the road, with something to think on as we went along our way.

Camp Golf had grown a little since my last visit. I had been here just a couple months ago and it had been just the old resort and a scattering of tents near the lake, but now it was a full-blown army encampment complete with a sandbag wall that surrounded the entirety of the camp. There were towers at regular intervals along the wall, which used the old water pipes as part of the defense in a few places, and each tower had a machine gun and a team of gunners in it. The field of fire was excellent, with the grass and brush cleared away for about a hundred yards all around the camp and the open plain providing a clear line of sight from anywhere in or around the resort building that served as camp headquarters. It had been quite a lively place back in its day, with people paying hundreds or thousands of caps, or whatever they used for money back then, just to come and use the golf course. I have no idea what golf is, but I know I wouldn't pay that much just to play it for an hour.

I left the pack train at the main entrance to the camp and went to the main building. I saw some soldiers hanging out near a tent on the far side of camp, just lounging around and not really doing much of anything, and I asked them for directions. They were a sight, I have to say. One of them was a skinny punk with a black Mohawk haircut who looked like a cleaner version of a Fiend, another was a big, burly country boy that had to have been fresh off some Brahmin farm out west, and the last one was a four-eyed type that was a little too full of himself for his own good. His nose was buried in some Pre-War book when I walked up and when I asked the way to the resort he just sort of sneered and gave me a once-over like I had seen drill sergeants do for new recruits. I decided right away that I didn't like him.

"Don't mind them, Ranger," a voice said from behind me and to my left, "they're not called the Misfits for nothing."

"The Misfits, huh?"

"Yeah. They're a collection of all the soldiers that the rest of the units in camp don't want anymore. Razz got busted for chems, O'Hanrahan is just too big and dumb to be worth much at anything but close-up fighting, and Pointdexter, well, you've met Pointdexter. I'm Mags."

I turned to look over my shoulder then and saw the cutest button of a redhead that I'd ever seen in NCR khakis. She offered her hand and I took it, finding a firm handshake on the other end and eyes that looked like they belonged on a seasoned trooper from the front instead of this little slip of a woman before me. Her manner and her stance were entirely military, and she had a way about her that made me think she was in this army for life and not just for the monthly pay like a lot of others were.

"HQ is just over there. The big building with the two-story balcony. You can't miss it."

"Thanks."

It was true that a body just couldn't miss the resort building. It was probably the biggest Pre-War building between New Vegas and the Pacific and was by far the most well preserved. Most of the original structure was still there when the NCR first took it over and so far as I knew it had required only a little upkeep. I saw the big sign that said "House Resort" over the doors as I went in, and from the balcony above I could hear the unmistakable ring of the radio and Mr. New Vegas chatting away.

The main room of the resort was like nothing I'd ever seen before. There were still green carpets on the floor and there were pictures on the walls showed scenes of a time long past, and there were places where some of the original paint was still showing. There was a big round counter in the middle of the room with a big snow globe on it next to the computer monitor. I asked where I could find Chief Hanlon and the trooper behind the counter pointed me to the second floor balcony. I went up the stairs and found the door leading to the balcony, turned the knob, and stepped out into the bright late morning sunlight.

On the far side of the balcony I could see Hanlon. He was sitting in an old wooden chair next to a small table which held the radio I'd heard. It was turned up loud and I could hear Big Iron playing away as I stepped through the doorway. There was another chair on the other side of the little table. I walked softly and my boots made little sound on the hardwood balcony, but I knew that he knew I was there. Nobody survived as long as Hanlon had in these parts without having senses like a Deathclaw. I walked up beside him and stood there, rifle in the crook of my arm, and I followed his gaze to the sun climbing higher in the sky and to the shimmering waters of Lake Las Vegas. It was a pretty sight, all right, and one that I was suddenly glad I got to see.

Ranger Chief Hanlon was a big bull of a man. His long hair and beard had gone grey, although there was still a spattering of black in them, and his shirt sleeves bulged with the remnants of powerful muscles. He looked old and worn out and his face had enough wrinkles to have worn a dozen bodies, but that big pistol on his hip and the massive shells in his belt had no nonsense about them. That was a Ranger Sequoia, a .45-70 beast that would break the average man's arm if he tired to fire it. Only the toughest of Rangers carried those. His face was covered with those deep-set wrinkles, but I knew better than to think of him as old and feeble. Those wrinkles were war maps that had been drawn by decades of hard living and hard fighting in a land that did not suffer fools. That man had levels of toughness that other men couldn't even begin to scratch.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

His voice was gravely and deep, just like the man that used it. He didn't look at me as he spoke, but rather he just looked at that steadily climbing orb and at the beautiful desert all around us. He knew this place and he liked it, that much was certain, and anyone could see that he was at home in this war torn place.

"What's that, sir?"

"The sunrise. The lake. Everything. You don't see very many lakes like that back west. They all got drained out years ago. They broke the dams, drained the aquifers, and put every last drop of fresh water into drinking. I know it was needed, but it was still a damn shame."

"I agree, sir."

"Sit down, Ranger Weathers. Let's talk."

Well, sir, I did just that. I leaned my rifle against the back of that little table and pulled that other chair back then planted my rump in it. Big Iron played on for a couple more minutes while we sat there, just enjoying the view. I could see why Hanlon spent so much time up here. I hadn't seen a view like that in a long, long time, if ever, and I could just sit and look at it all day if I could. The desert, the mountains, the lake, everything that a man needs to live. This was my country, my home.

"I've been hearing a lot about you, Weathers. I heard that you saved a lot of men's lives back there at Nelson. I had a request come across my desk for you to be given a medal, and I think I may just sign it. We need good fighting men out here. We need men that can scrap and aren't afraid to get into the thick of things."

"Thank you, sir."

"I also heard about your wife and your family. Terrible business, that. I had to bury my own family years ago, albeit under different circumstances. My wife died of pneumonia and my daughter got bit by a Nightstalker. Happened not too far from here. This was all frontier country back then. We were fightin' the Khans and the Omertas and the Fiends back then. The Legion was still far away in Arizona. It was a hard life back then. I took their loss hard, but I didn't let it get me to the breaking point."

"Pardon me for asking, sir, but is there a reason I was called here?"

"Yes, there is. A very good one."

He still didn't look away from the scenery before us, but he reached into his vest and dug for something in the inside pocket. After a moment he pulled it out and dropped it on the table beside the radio. I recognized it immediately. It was a string of ears that I'd taken on an ambush less than a week before, cut from the corpses of five dead legionnaires and hung on a dogtag chain that I'd taken off of a trooper they had tortured to death. I remembered shooting those men down from the cover of the Joshua trees, going down to collect their gear, and cutting off those ears with my Bowie knife.

"I think that's a good enough reason, don't you Weathers?'

"I don't follow, sir."

'This is a war, Ranger Weathers. War is brutal, it's ugly, and it's terrible. It always has been, always will be, and it'll never change. But just because war is ugly doesn't mean that it has to make the men that fight it ugly too. I've seen men go down this road before. They get a taste for blood in their mouth and after a while it becomes like whiskey to them. They know it's bad for them and that it'll get 'em into trouble, but they just keep going back for more just to get that feeling that comes with it.

"I lost my wife to pneumonia and my daughter to an animal. That didn't make me go out and kill every Nightstalker in the Mojave or shove penicillin down the throat of every sick person I found so I could kill the disease. I knew that they wouldn't have wanted that. Do you think that if your ma or your wife or your brother sisters saw you now that they'd be pleased? What do you suppose they would say if they saw those ears in your bloody hand, taken in their name?"

"I don't think they'd say anything, sir. They're dead. They were killed by bastards just like the ones I took those ears from. With all due respect, sir, I didn't lose my family to nature. They were murdered. I can get the ones that did the deed, but I don't know who or where they are so I just kill every legionnaire I find to make damn sure. I thought that's what I was trained to do in the first place. Isn't the point of war to kill the enemy?"

"The point of war is to win and to win in a way that makes it possible to live in peace when the war is over. I'm not just talking about nations, son, but men too. A man has to live with himself once the deed is done. You think you can live with that? With all the things you've done since your family passed?

"Right now, you're all full of hate. Hate makes a man sloppy, makes him forget why he was fighting in the first place and just makes him wanna fight for fighting's sake. A man can't live that way. I've been through it, Weathers, and a damn sight more than you have. Everything you've been through I've been through a dozen times and I'm still alive. I'm still alive and I can still look at myself in the mirror every day. You're a good man, one of the best we have, but I can't let you slip down that slope any farther. I'm taking you off the front lines."

"What?!"

"You're hereby reassigned to Camp McCarran under command of Colonel Hsu for actions against the Fiends and the Powder Gangers."

"Powder Gangers? You're taking me off the front to chase after convicts and chem addicts? Sir, I don't want to sound like an asshole, but I don't give a -"

"Be very careful how you finish that statement, Ranger. I could've taken your badge for this. A few men that have a lot more clout than me wanted you out of the Rangers on a Section 8 discharge once they saw these ears, but I talked 'em out of it. I told 'em that we need good men out here and that there's a lotta country we can use them in. Right now the Powder Gangers are tearing a mighty wide swath through the Mojave and the Fiends are hammering us back to the very walls of New Vegas. Since Nelson fell the NCR military has neither the men or the time to go chasin' after them. That makes it a Ranger problem.

"Take my advice, Weathers, and pull your freight. Go to McCarran, shoot a few Fiends, hang a few cons, and get your head on straight. I need you on the front, that's true, but you're too close to the situation out there. One look at an enemy in red and you go ape-shit. I can't have a man on the line with a death wish putting other good men at risk to satisfy his own personal vendetta. Do you understand me?"

I couldn't think of anything to say. I wanted to reach back and plant a right hook right across his jaw. I wanted to make him try for that big pistol in the weather-beaten holster on his hip. I wanted to just stand up, walk out, and head straight back to Forlorn Hope. He could have my star, my commission, all of that. I didn't give a damn about that or anything that didn't result in dead legionnaires and plenty of them.

The trouble was, I did give a damn. The Rangers were all the family I had left now that my own was gone. Before the Rangers I'd had nothing, and without them I'd have less than nothing. I could go off and wander, but that was no life for a man to have. It was full of adventure and there would be plenty of opportunities for my vengeance, but that kind of life gnaws on a man. Living hand to mouth, trusting only to his wits, jumping at every sound in the desert for fear of attack. I didn't want that. Deep down in my gut, although I hated to admit it, I knew he was right about ma and Jenny. Ma hated violence in all its forms and Jenny wouldn't hurt a fly if it stung her. They had been gentle souls, too gentle for this world, and I knew in my heart that they would be appalled to see what I'd become. I wasn't their Daniel anymore. I was something else, something that even I had once called barbaric. Taking ears from corpses to win a silly contest? That was something that a madman would do. That was something a legionnaire would do.

"Am I understood, Weathers?"

"Yes, sir. I understand."

"Good. Now how about you go get us some coffee and biscuits from the mess hall. I'm feelin' a mite peckish. You and me, we can set a while and chew the fat. Who knows? We might even take in the sunset."