He’d dropped his pack this morning but kept his pistol and a canteen—and he knew this environment well, if not this particular mountain. The whitebark pines and junipers were a familiar world, the chokecherry brambles and wild grass. There was a †utter of grasshoppers to his right. The insects scattered as Newcombe loped over with his ri†e in hand and they hunched together behind a tangle of boulders. They’d heard voices above them distantly. Someone up there liked to yell to his friends, a boy, alternately impatient or happy, his young voice carrying across the open sky. It seemed like a good sign, but maybe the kid was only excited because Leadville troops had recently arrived. “What do you think?” Newcombe whispered. Cam only shrugged. In many ways their relationship reminded him of his bond with Albert Sawyer, the man who’d taken them to the lab in Sacramento. His friendship with Sawyer had been loaded with mistrust and need and ‚erce loyalty all at the same time.
