The makeshift cross was nailed home with a resounding certainty. Ferris stood back, mallet in hand. “Would anyone like to say a few words?” he said softly.

“May Gregg Thurliss rot in his grave and twice as fast in Hell,” Nancy said. She spat tobacco juice over the freshly turned earth. “It was his hubris that led us out here to die on the frontier.”

“Nancy, that’s not-”

“May he wander these hills as a specter for seventy times seventy days longer than he led us,” Corbin growled, interrupting. “May the injuns dig him up and use his bones to line their sewer pits.”

“I really think-”

“May his name be an insult for generations to come in English and injun…” Currie began.

“I meant something from the Good Book,” Ferris cried. “Something like you’d hear in a church.”