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For the first time he considered giving up the chase while he still had time to make some kind of life for himself. Maybe, he told himself, he should beggar his losses and give up the trail, lonely and unforgiving as it was. Close this dark chapter of his life and start anew—make a life for Hattie and perhaps find a widow for himself, someone who could cool the burning rage and pain he suffered, who could take away the hurt and fill this hole gnawing in his chest. Yes, Hattie would finish her schooling, then come live with him and her new stepmother….

A vision of Hattie swam before him. Almost four years back he had found her in Nebraska. Lord, how she had grown into a young woman who looked more like her mother now than he ever had imagined she could. When he’d wrenched her from the clutches of the Danites, Hattie was damn near the same age as Gritta when he had married her. Jonah’s only daughter had grown to be every bit as beautiful and smitten with life as her mother.

No, he realized he would never be able to look at Hattie again without seeing Gritta’s face. Never able to gaze into his daughter’s eyes without cursing himself for quitting the chase.

“Goddamn you,” he grumbled aloud that evening as the black-bellied clouds quickly shut down the last shreds of fading light left in the sky. “Damn you if you go and give up when this ride gets hardest. Remember how you lost the trail before? But still you never lost hope, Jonah. Never give up before.”

He was of this life to suffer the pain—one sort or another. He had decided this was his lot to bear. And if he was called upon to endure, then his choice was simple: the pain of pushing on until he found them or could push on no more—that hurt seemed much, much easier to bear than the pain of living with himself knowing he had played out, folded, and given up.

He would not fool himself into thinking he deserved a better hand, nor cash in his chips and back away from the table. No, he would play out the hand dealt him. A man would, that.

As Two Sleep became Jonah’s brother of the blanket, they inched over the first heavy snows carpeting the passes of the Uintahs, then eased down the east slopes pushing on south. From time to time they crossed freight roads the Mormons used, choosing whether or not to follow them into the distance toward a small community of clapboard shacks, more usually of sod or adobe, settlements of fields and irrigation ditches and laundered clothes hung on a line behind the dirty shacks where dim trails of smoke rose into the cold air of that first winter in the land of the Mormons.

Only once more did he ever allow himself the sweet luxury of wanting to give up—halting the Indian as they gazed upon a cluster of mud homes in a nameless little settlement appearing all the more squalid with the early coming of winter night, dark of shadow and gray of twilight snow, the small windows in each shack lit with the warm beacons of light, figures passing between the light and those two lonely sojourners out in the cold. Back and forth the shadows moved as the fish-belly gray of evening descended to night upon that naked land of red escarpment and ancient geologic upheaval.

A warmth beckoned him in from the cold, those shadows no more than suggestions of ghosts from his past, ghosts of happier days calling the lost and wayward one to join them at the fire of remembrance on brighter times and lighter cares.

“Come, Jonah Hook,” Two Sleep said finally.

Eventually he tore his eyes away from the window and its seductive corona of light and found the Shoshone staring at him with what the plainsman took to be sympathy.

“You don’t gotta feel sorry for me, Injun.” He looked back at the distant windows now that twilight’s purple had faded to winter’s cold squeeze of black. “Never, never feel sorry for me. You hear?”

“Make camp. Food, then sleep. Tomorrow we go.”

“Always tomorrow, Two Sleep. How many more will there be?”

“Every morning I think we find them,” the Indian replied quietly, following the white man’s gaze at the distant spots of saffron light.

“You tell yourself that too?” Jonah asked, then sighed. “At times I just feel like …”

When Hook’s voice drifted off without finish, Two Sleep said, “You give up this trail, Two Sleep stay on it. This trail no more just for you, Jonah Hook. It mine too now.”

He finally nodded, feeling his shoulders sag, reluctant to release the anticipation of giving in to his fondest dream. Here at last vowing that he would never again grant himself the delicious ecstasy of the dream that took him down a far different path.

“Sometimes it feels like there’s just too damn much trail left to cover, Injun.”

“Tomorrow is the day,” Two Sleep reminded.

“Yes,” Jonah replied, urging his horse off gently. Once and for all he struggled to convince himself he had the patience of the eternal rocks themselves. “Tomorrow morning is the day.”