The Son

Still the shadow has not appeared. Have begun to look in all the dark places, out of the corner of my eye, but . . . nothing.

The Americans . . . he allowed his mind to roam. They thought that simply because they had stolen something, no one should be allowed to steal it from them. But of course that was what all people thought: that whatever they had taken, they should be allowed to keep it forever.

DESPITE THE DISAPPEARANCE of the last of the original Mexican families (many of whom have been here five or ten generations—longer than any white), a new crop has arrived to fill their places.

“You’re a good man,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone like you.”

The displaced tribes—from the easterners like the Chickasaws and Delawares to the more local Wichitas and Osages—continued to be resettled in our hunting grounds.

The Comanches had taken back a smart sprinkle of their old territory; the frontier had collapsed several hundred miles.

He was no better. His people had stolen the land from the Indians, and yet he did not think of that even for an instant—he thought only of the Texans who had stolen it from his people. And the Indians from whom his people had stolen the land had themselves stolen it from other Indians.

It had become clear to me that the lives of the rich and famous were not so different from the lives of the Comanches: you did what you pleased and answered to no one.

By the end of summer, most Texans were certain that if slavery was abolished, the whole of the South would Africanize, no proper woman would be safe, amalgamation would be the order of the day. Though in the next breath they would tell you that the war had nothing to do with slavery. It was about human dignity, self-governance, freedom itself, the