Aaron stood more than six feet tall in his old worn boots, and weighed nigh-on two hundred pounds without that big LeMat revolver he carried, though he didn’t eat any more than the other cowboys or a grizzly bear that’s just woken up in spring. He was older than the trail boss, and smarter, and as black a man as I’d ever seen…but his eyes weren’t any darker than mine, just sadder.

The cowboys were swapping stories, and I told them about the ranch I’d heard of in Texas which was owned and worked by women, and some of them said that beat all and some just called me a liar, but I could tell who wished it were true. Not as many of them as you might think, either: a lot of cowboys have only one use for women, and a few have none at all. Some of the cowboys told stories about women they’d known and Injuns they’d killed, and if I had a dollar for every one that was true, I probably wouldn’t have enough to buy a shot of whisky. Then I asked Aaron if he knew the song about the weeping woman. He looked at me warily, then began to sing it softly, his voice as low as new-mown hay. He knew verses that the young Mexican hadn’t, but the story was the same, and so was the setting: a ford across the Sweetwater, a valley known as the Devil’s Gate.

I nodded when he was finished, while some of the cowboys grimaced at the thought of the mutilated young cowboy. “Do you remember where you first heard that song?”

His eyes became darker, and I realized - too late - that he didn’t want to talk about his past. It was barely two years since the war had ended and I wondered if he’d been a slave, or maybe a runaway. “No,” he said. “Heard it a few years ‘go, know that much.”

“Have you ever been to Devil’s Gate? In Wyoming?”

“No. Is it a real place?”

“Yes. It’s where the Oregon Trail crosses over the Sweetwater.”

A few of the cowboys looked at me curiously and one asked, “You been there, cookie?”

“Ridden through there,” I said. “Years ago. They talked about the weeping woman then, but I hadn’t heard that song before.”

Another cowboy snorted. “You see her?” he asked.

“No,” I lied. “No, I said I rode through; I didn’t stop. And I haven’t been back in years.”

They were silent for a moment; none of them so much as broke wind. Then one of the wranglers laughed. “Hell, I’d probably go that far to see a beautiful woman myself.” That got them back to boasting and bullshitting about how what they’d done for women and what women had done for them, and I looked up at the north star and didn’t say anything and wondered how soon I could get back to Devil’s Gate.

I left the cattle and the cowboys at some town which wasn’t much more than a railhead and a street full of saloons: no school, no church, and mine was probably the only Bible - maybe the only book - for miles. Like the red shirt, it was a souvenir of my Pony Express days, but it was also a useful prop when I wanted to pose as a preacher. The cowboys had headed for the saloons and the dance halls, but I’d declined to go with them, even though one of the prettier saloon girls had given me a look that said she could see through my clothes and liked what she saw. Instead, I paid for a bath, and emerged from one of the town’s hotels as the Professor, in time to catch the next train north. I caught the train as far as I could - it felt good to wear clean clothes and sleep in a real bed again, even if it was just a bunk on a Pullman car - then bought a horse and rode most of the rest of the way.