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"No Tom, we didn't carry him. You did...by yourself. You picked him up like he was light as a feather and walked up the hill and put him in the car." She paused and studied my expression. "You walked right up a 45 degree incline on a muddy slope, without slipping, carrying a 280 pound dead weight." She held up her muddy hands. "Tom,the rest of us had to scramble on our hands and knees. It still took us minutes and each others help...Tom," She gave me a piercing look. "...how did you do that?"

I felt a wave of confusion wash over me. The reverie of the moment before was lost in uncertainty. How had I done that? If I had done it, why didn't I know about it? And anyway, I had been so spent back on the bank of the bayou, I could barely stand. How could I have even lifted John's massive bulk much less carried him?

"I don't know Mary. My `friend' came. He told me to use the light. I thought it was a daydream." James Purcival looked preoccupied. "Act of power." he said under his breath. He seemed both agitated and excited. "I have seen it before.. when I was a boy. An old medicine man of my grandfather's people. He did something like that. I had put it out of my mind. I thought I had imagined it." His eyes became furious, alive with a fire and abandon that I hadn't seen in him. "The time has come. The return of the old ways. I knew it." He seemed to be talking to himself.

I looked over James Purcival, seeing a side to the man that surprised me. I would have guessed from his dress and poise that he was much more familiar with Manhattan nightlife and French wine than buckskin and pinion nuts. He had told Jesse he had family on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico but had been unwilling to say much more. My alleged `Act of Power' seemed to have brought the primitive out from behind the mask of the cultivated man.