Nathan remembered Vin sitting alone watching the evening shadows encroach, like living things, across the mesas, outcrops and scrub, for a long time. Nathan wondered what the former bounty hunter saw when he looked out on nature, so rugged and unforgiving.

Vin studied the silhouettes of the mesas, spires and obelisks that made up the desert behind them. His thoughts might have surprised their healer.

Misshapen castles
Bizarre jagged precipes pulsating in heat wave disguise
Ageless mirages taunting and urging
Useless arms to drag over unnaturally sharp grains of sand

Vin saw the untamed beauty. It had lost some of its appeal after coming so close to losing their friends to the unforgiving nature of the land.

Those arms cry don't give up
Blistered eyes and arid tongue dream of hope
Tears endlessly baked away still cry
Calluses long since rawed by grit
Plead bleedingly for one last chance at mirages

The beauty was still there. He shouldn't blame the land for how men had tried to us it.

I suffer as each part of me suffers
My tracks at last are fading from crusted earth
Cracked and barren features mirror my own
Lifes flow leaves my extremities...
Concentrates at my failing source

The sons-of-bitches had tried to make the desert guilty of their sins - like they had tried to make his poetry guilty of his inability to track.

I am aware I go against myself
Numbed sight attacks your mirage -
For as I dwindle -
Rejuvenating rains long since gone -
You defeat yourself

The desert was just there. Neither good nor evil. The tracks hadn't been there. The men had intentionally left him with nothing to follow.

I rise on your own heat waves
Carried to oases I only built of your mirages
I will return one day
I will fill with moisture and hope
The impression I left before your face

Buck and Ezra were finally sleeping a healing sleep instead of the semi-conscious state where they were fighting for their lives.

Larabee hadn't let them lie Buck flat until he was sound asleep. There was something there, something that Larabee knew would make his friend feel threatened and vulnerable lying in his weakened state. There was something in their past that they didn't share. But Nathan wasn't up to examining it at the time and his eyes wouldn't stay open in his exhaustion.

Josiah was lost in thought, not meditation. He had something on his mind.

JD was watching Chris.

Chris was getting drunk. Vin thought about calling his friend on it, but that wasn't their relationship. Buck got in his face about such things. Vin would be there to pick up the pieces.

Suddenly a loud crash of glass breaking brought Vin quickly to his feet. Only then did he notice it had gotten too dark to really see the desert around him.

The campfire flames were reaching for the sky, fueled by the last of the whiskey from the broken bottle Larabee had thrown into them.

Nathan was on his feet before he was fully awake, trying to recognize any possible danger.

JD had leapt, startled.

Josiah quickly, protectively moved between Larabee and the others in the camp.

The move was justified as the gunfighter started toward Nathan. Josiah blocked his path. Larabee called past the larger man to Nathan. "Buck and Ezra. They must have said something. Said who was behind this!"

The healer walked closer, recognizing a pain in his friend that medicine couldn't heal. "No names."

"JD, you were with them longer." Larabee turned on the younger man.

"I'm sorry, Chris." He lowered his eyes as he had to disappoint his hero. "They told Ezra they got paid $1,000.00. That's all."

"There's got to be something, otherwise why… why not just kill them?" He asked bluntly.

"There was something Nathan said..." Josiah spoke, but almost to himself. It didn't matter. The tone in his voice had them all listening. "... about how you had to know your patient. How they would react, how they would think."

He turned and met the eyes of their leader. "Chris, someone comes after you, he faces you like a man, or if he's a coward, he'll back shoot you. What kind of being comes after a man through his friends?"

Chris was silent. Josiah followed the inevitable train of thought and tried to cut it off. "Don't go there. Chris, Ella killed your family to keep you, not to punish you. Who would kill others to punish you?"

"Someone trying to recreate the person you were when you thought your family had been killed for that reason." Vin offered up.

Josiah shook his head. "He isn't killing. He is attacking everyone; setting everyone up to fail. Buck to fail to protect JD." He nodded to Chris, "You to fail to protect people you cared about. Nathan and Vin..."

Instead of finishing the explanation, Josiah took three pieces of paper from his pocket and handed them to Chris. Not understanding, Chris read them.

Vin and the others moved in to see what was on the parchments, fearing they already knew what secrets the Parson was letting out to the world.

Chris scowled and looked at Vin, "Who sent this to you?" His eyes turned to Nathan, "You don't believe this do you?" Josiah had saved the three pieces of paper that had placed doubt in his friends' minds. Chris read the notes that attacked Vin's poetry, Nathan's healing and his own past. It was the first time the others knew they had all been attacked with the written word.

"How long have you had these!" Larabee approached the elder peacekeeper threateningly.

"I'm sorry, Chris," Nothing Larabee could say could make him feel worse. "I knew there was something about the letters, but we've been so busy I hadn't had time to put it together."

It was Vin's turn to run interference this time as Larabee stalked toward Sanchez. "It's not just you, Cowboy. Someone attacked all of us." He unhesitatingly me the green eyes, flecked with gold when anger raged. "It's like Josiah said, the part of me that feels the words, helps me read nature. They threw me for a while..." Vin began.

"But they cheated to do it." JD added with youthful innocence and insight. "They didn't leave any trail to recognize."

Tanner hadn't been sure his words had reached his friend. When his emotions fail safe went to anger, he listened to very few. But the fire in his eyes seemed to turn to smoldering embers as he turned at their youngest's words.

"Nathan, you have to understand if you hadn't known to mix natural cures with medicine and knowledge, we would have lost Ezra and Buck tonight." Vin stated. "Who ever wrote those things knew that."

"I'm okay with things." Nathan smiled, "Josiah had a talk with me as well."

"Ella Gaines." Larabee's voice dripped with venom.

"It wasn't you who were attacked, Chris, it was all of us."Josiah observed. "She might kill us, but attack our confidence? Nathan and his lack of formal education; Vin his sensitivity. The way to make you think you failed was to make you think you had failed to protect us from your past." Josiah's voice pleaded with the man in black to understand this.

"Who have we caused to fail that would be so elaborate?" Nathan asked. It was beyond any of them to understand what kind of man it would take to hatch this scheme or why.

"No one is that crazy but Ella." Larabee repeated.

"Think about it, you know that's not how she would attack." Sanchez stood his ground.

"Then there ain't no one like that! You see things happening you don't like. You're looking for reasons for those things." Chris growled.

Josiah wouldn't be dissuaded. "Whoever he is, he's only worse than anyone else who uses words to do harm because he's so good at it. He knows what he's doing; knows where to attack." Josiah said with an anger borne of his past and his experiences with men who knew how to manipulate guilt and words.

"What about Ezra and JD?" Nathan asked. "Why didn't he attack them, too?"

"He may have. And we don't have enough of the puzzle to put it all together."

"Or maybe things didn't go the way he planned." JD offered abruptly.

They all looked at him. He hesitated, thinking he didn't have the experience to work this out with his heroes, but he did have information that might be important, "Those men weren't supposed to take Ezra. I heard them say so, just me and Buck. Maybe if they'd left him, he would have kept you so stirred up or so angry, you wouldn't have figured out..."

The others were staring at him. Suddenly very self-conscious, he stuttered to Chris, "S-sorry, it's just sometimes... you and him... you know... Sorry." The boy lowered his eyes.

Above him the others met each other's eyes and knew there might be more truth in all of this than they wanted to believe. They were quiet, all lost in individual thoughts.

Then they heard it. "Ezra, damn it, wake up!" Buck's gravelly voice cut through the silence.

JD jumped first.

Later, Chris Larabee would think he should have cared enough to react first to their friend's voice.