The Last Texas Ranger Who Captured a Comanche Giant Alive — What the Giant Told Him Through the Bars

The ranger’s name was Cases Holloway.
41 years old. 6’1″.
Lean in the way men get lean when they’ve spent half their lives on horseback and the other half waiting for someone to come over a ridge with a rifle.

He had a scar that ran from the corner of his left ear down along his jaw—a souvenir from a fight at Adobe Walls he never talked about.

His hair had gone silver at the temples by the time he was 35.
His hands looked older than his face.

He had been with the Texas Rangers for 18 years when this happened, and he was, by his own quiet counting, the last man left from the company he’d ridden with out of Austin in 1861.

Every other man he’d started with was either buried, drunk, or gone.

That spring, Cases was tracking a man.
Not a band, not a war party—one man.

The reports had come in for the better part of a year: a figure spotted at the edge of homesteads, cattle gone in the night—not slaughtered, just missing, as if they’d walked off the earth, riders who said they’d seen something on a ridge near sundown that didn’t move right.

The descriptions never matched, except for one detail:

Whoever this was, he was big.
Not big the way a tall man is big—big in a way that made grown men stutter when they tried to put numbers on it.

One settler outside Tascosa told the local sheriff he’d come close enough to see the man’s shadow fall across his barn, and the shadow was longer than the barn was wide.

That settler left Texas a week later.
He moved to Missouri and refused to ever speak about it again.

Cases didn’t believe any of it.
Not the height, not the missing cattle, not the part about the shadow.

What he did believe was that some Comanche man had refused to go onto the reservation after the surrender at Fort Sill, and was living rough out on the caprock—and that this man was now the responsibility of the Texas Rangers, because nobody else was crazy enough to ride out there alone.

So Cases rode out there alone.

He took a roan mare named Oho, a Sharps rifle, two pistols, three weeks of hard tack, and a single pair of irons heavy enough to hold an ox.

He left Coldwell Junction on a Monday morning in late April.
He told the marshal he’d be back inside a month—or he wouldn’t be back at all.

For the first 11 days, he found nothing.

He found old fire rings—gone cold and gone strange.
The stones around them had been placed wrong.
Not in the practical circle a man makes to keep his coals from rolling away,
but in a pattern Cases didn’t recognize.

He found tracks once in a dry wash,
and they were the wrong shape for boots and the wrong size for a man.
He sat looking at them for a long time before he climbed back on his horse and kept riding.

On the 12th night, the wind stopped.

I want you to understand what that means out there.
The wind on the caprock doesn’t stop.
It comes from the southwest and it scrapes everything in its path.
A man who lives out there starts to hear the wind even in his sleep.

When it stops, you wake up.
You wake up the way you’d wake up if a clock stopped ticking in a quiet house.

Cases woke up that 12th night under a sky that had too many stars in it,
and the air was so still he could hear his own blood moving.

That’s when he saw the fire.

Not close. Three, maybe four miles out—
on a flat shelf of land that ran along the edge of a canyon.
A single fire, small and steady—the kind a careful man builds.

Cases stayed where he was.
He let his own fire die.
He watched that distant flame until the sky started turning gray in the east,
and then he got on his horse and rode toward it.

The fire was out when he arrived.
The shelf was empty.
The ashes were cold.

But there were tracks leading down into the canyon,
and the tracks were enormous.

Cases left the mare tied at the rim.
He took the Sharps and one pistol,
and he started down on foot.

The canyon was a place the Comanche had names for.
White men had names for it, too—
but the white names were newer, and they didn’t fit.

The walls were red sandstone, weathered into shapes that looked in the morning light like things half-remembered from a dream.
The bottom was cool and quiet,
and a thin creek ran through it,
and the cottonwoods along the creek were full of birds that went silent as Cases walked past.

He found the man about an hour in.

The man was sitting on a flat rock by the creek,
with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up.
He had a bone knife laid across his thigh—easy enough to grab.

He was not hiding.
He was waiting.

Cases stopped about 30 paces out,
raised the Sharps,
and said in slow, plain English that he was a Texas Ranger,
that the man was under arrest,
and that any sudden movement was going to be the last movement he ever made.

The man on the rock looked at him.
And then the man on the rock stood up.

—

I have read Cases Holloway’s own account of this moment.
He wrote it down years later in pencil on the inside cover of a Bible he carried until he died.

I have seen photographs of that Bible.
The pencil is faded and the script is small and careful—
the way a man writes when he is trying not to leave anything out.

And what Cases wrote in that careful hand was this:

“The man stood up, and he kept standing up.
And there was a moment when Cases thought he had miscounted how tall a person was supposed to be.”

The man on the rock was, by Cases’s best guess, 6’9″ tall. Maybe 6’10”.
He was not heavy the way a tall man is sometimes heavy.
He was built the way an old oak is built:
long bones, deep chest, hands that hung past where you’d expect hands to hang.

His hair was loose and gone half-silver.
His face was lined in a way that didn’t quite match his frame.
He could have been 40.
He could have been 70.
He could have been older than that.

And Cases wrote in the margin of his Bible that he believed—in some quiet part of himself—that the man was older than that.

The man did not pick up the bone knife.
He set it down on the rock instead—carefully,
the way a man sets down something he’s done with.

Then he held out his wrists.

Cases said later that the worst part of that whole ride home was not the fear of an attack.
The man never threatened him.
The man never raised his voice.

The man rode the second horse Cases had brought for prisoners,
and he sat that horse with his back straight and his wrists in the irons and his eyes on the horizon,
and he did not speak for four straight days.

They reached Coldwell Junction on the morning of the fifth day.
The whole town came out to watch them ride in.

Cases wrote that he remembered the silence of it—
the way nobody cheered, nobody jeered, nobody said anything at all.

The blacksmith dropped his hammer.
The woman who ran the general store crossed herself.
The marshal came out onto the porch of the jail with his hand on his sidearm,
and he stayed that way the whole time Cases walked his prisoner up the steps.

—

The town jail at Coldwell Junction had two cells.

The man fit in one of them only because he sat down.
Standing, his head would have brushed the rafters.
Sitting, with his back against the brick of the rear wall and his knees drawn up the way they’d been at the creek,
he filled the cell from corner to corner—
like the room had been built around him.

The marshal locked the door.
The marshal stepped back.
The marshal said something under his breath that wasn’t quite a prayer,
and he walked out into the front office and poured himself a drink
and would not return to the cell block for the rest of that day.

Cases stayed.
He pulled a chair into the corridor about six feet from the bars.
He sat down.
He took off his hat and laid it on the floor.
He looked at the man through the iron,
and the man looked back at him through the iron,
and they stayed that way until the sun went down.

The first words were spoken at moonrise.

The man said—in clear, plain English, with only the faintest curl of an accent at the edges of his vowels—
“You did not shoot me.”

Cases said he had not.

“You could have.”
Cases said, “Yes.”

“Why did you not?”

And Cases wrote in the margin of his Bible that he had not known how to answer that question then,
and he had never figured out how to answer it since.

What he said out loud that first night was that a man who lays down his knife on a rock
is not the kind of man you shoot.

The captive in the cell looked at him for a long moment.
He nodded once.
And he said, “Then we have time to talk.”

—

There were four nights of talking.

I want to pause here for a breath,
because what comes next is the part of the story most people don’t believe.
And I want you to be sitting where you can listen carefully.

While you’re here, if you’re enjoying this one—
this story is brought to you by Macar’s Story.
If you’re listening on this channel and you want more of the same,
the subscribe button is right there.

Tap it. It’s free—
and it tells the algorithm that quiet, old, slow stories still have a place in the world.

And while we’re on the subject:
if you’re hearing this on a channel that isn’t ours,
that’s a stolen upload.
Report it and come find us at the source.
We’d appreciate it.

One more thing before we go back:
I want to ask you something.

Have you ever spoken to a stranger and felt, halfway through the conversation,
that they knew something about you that they had no business knowing?

Drop it in the comments. I’ll read it.

Now, let me take you back to the jail at Coldwell Junction.

—

The first night,
the captive told Cases his name.
He said it slowly—the way you’d say a thing you weren’t sure the listener could hold.

The name was Takahote.

Cases wrote it down in the Bible exactly as he heard it,
and he wrote next to it that he did not believe this was the man’s true name,
but that it was the name he was being offered,
and that he would use it.

Takahote said that he was the last of a line—
not the last Comanche. He was careful about that.
He said there were many of his people still living on the reservation and in the hills,
and they were his family—
but they were not what he meant.

He said there had been a line that ran older than the Comanche themselves,
older than the horses his people had ridden,
older than the buffalo.

The line had been here when the first men crossed the caprock,
and it had been here when those men had gone on,
and it had been here when the next men had come and gone,
and the line had been here ever since.

And the line had grown shorter with each generation.

He said he was the last of that line.
He said his mother had been the one before him,
and her mother before her,
and so on—back so far that he could not count it.

And he would not have spoken any of this to a white man,
if the time had not come.

Cases asked him what the line was for.

Takahote did not answer.
He looked at the small barred window above his head, where the moonlight was coming through,
and he said, “Only—tomorrow night.”

And he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the brick,
and he was—as far as Cases could tell—asleep within a minute.

Cases did not sleep.
He sat in his chair for the rest of that night,
with his hands on his knees and his pistol on the floor beside him,
and he watched the giant in the cell breathe.

He wrote that the breathing was slow and deep,
and that it seemed sometimes to make the air in the corridor move.

He wrote that he had felt many things in his life—in war and out of it—
but that he had never felt before what he felt that night.
He couldn’t put a name to it.
The closest he came was to write down in the margin the word:

old.

Just that. Old.

—

The second night, things began.

By that I mean things outside the jail.

Cases came back to the cell block at sundown,
after eating with the marshal in his office.

The marshal had been a different man all day.
He hadn’t spoken much.
He’d kept looking out the window—
the way a man looks out a window when he expects weather.

There was no weather.
The sky over Coldwell Junction was clear and dry,
and the wind was up again, the way it should be.

But the marshal kept looking anyway,
and he had not eaten his supper.

Cases asked him what was wrong.

The marshal said, after a long pause,
that the dogs in the town had stopped barking.

You wouldn’t think that would matter.
But anyone who has ever lived in a small town on the edge of empty country
will tell you that the dogs are how you know the world is still working.

They bark at riders, at coyotes, at strangers, at each other.
They bark at nothing.
They bark all the time.

And on that second evening in Coldwell Junction,
every dog in town had stopped.

They sat where they were sitting.
They lay where they were lying.
They did not whine.
They did not growl.
They watched the sky.

Cases wrote that he went out to look,
and he saw the dogs,
and the dogs all turned their heads at once when he opened the door of the marshal’s office.

They watched him.
They did not move.

He went back inside and he locked the door behind him.

When he sat down across from the cell that second night,
Takahote opened his eyes and said,
“It knows I am here.”

Cases asked, “What knows?”

Takahote said, “What the line is for.”

He told Cases the story then.
Not all of it.
He said he would not tell all of it—
because no man should carry all of it,
and because some of it could not be spoken in any tongue.

But what he said was this:

There was beneath the caprock, in a place his people did not name and did not approach,
a thing that had been there since the world was younger.

It was not a god.
It was not a spirit in the way Cases had heard the word used by missionaries.
It was a thing. A presence.

It had been there before any people had walked the land.
And it had been there when the first people had walked the land.
And it had wanted to come up.

And the first people had stopped it from coming up—
by being present, and being awake, and being unafraid.

And there had been ever since a line of those who watched—
who knew where the place was,
who went there and stood there,
and did not leave until the thing went back to sleep.

Takahote said the line had grown thin.
His mother had been the one before him,
and she had taught him,
and she had walked with him to the place,
and they had stood there together,
and she had told him that one day he would walk there alone.

He had walked there alone for the first time when he was 19 years old.
He had walked there alone every season since.
He was—by his own count—63 years old,
and he had walked to the place more than 200 times.

He said that on his most recent walk, just before the spring,
something had been different.

He said the thing had come closer to the surface than he had ever felt it.
He said he had stood there for three days and three nights,
and on the third night he had heard it speak.

Cases asked him what it had said.

Takahote said he would not repeat the words.
He said he had left the place at dawn on the fourth day,
and that he had known then that the line was going to end with him,
and he had walked north until the rangers found him,
because the time had come for the watcher to be replaced,
and he could not be replaced by one of his own people—
because his own people were broken and scattered and starving,
and had no quiet left in them to do this work.

He said the watcher who came next would have to be a man who had quiet in him.
And he had been waiting for such a man on the rock by the creek.
And he had laid down his knife when Cases had come down into the canyon,
because he had known.

Cases wrote in the margin of the Bible that he had wanted very much at that moment to laugh.
He did not laugh.
He wrote that he could not have laughed if his life had depended on it.

He asked Takahote what would happen if the line ended—if nobody watched.

Takahote said, “Then it comes up.”

And he closed his eyes again,
and the second night was over.

Outside, the dogs of Coldwell Junction had still not made a sound.

—

Now hold on with me here for a moment.
Take a breath,
because what I’m about to tell you is the part of the story I have the hardest time telling,
and I want you to be ready for it.

While we’re paused:
if this voice and this kind of story is something you’d want to spend more time with,
remember The Hollow Files—10 cases like this one, the same voice, 5 hours of quiet trouble.
I’ve put it together for you.
The link is in the description and pinned at the top of the comments.
Take a look when this one’s done.

Now let’s go back to the jail at Coldwell Junction,
where the third night was just beginning.

—

On the third night, Takahote spoke first.

He said, “Adobe Walls.”

Cases said nothing.

“You were in a place called Adobe Walls.”

Cases did not answer.

“There was a man with you. He was younger than you.
He had a brother who could not ride.”

Cases did not answer.

“The man with you was hit in the chest.
He did not die quickly.
You stayed with him.”

Cases wrote in his Bible that he had never told a single living person
the things he had told that man at Adobe Walls in the last hour of his life.
Not his commanding officer.
Not the marshal.
Not the woman he had almost married in 1871, before she had given up waiting and gone east.

There was nobody alive who knew the words that had been said.
The man who had heard them was dead.
There were no witnesses.
There were no records.

Takahote said in the dark of the cell the last sentence that man had spoken before he died at Adobe Walls.

It was a sentence about a place in West Texas—
a specific creek, a specific bend in that creek,
where the man wanted to be buried even though he knew he would not be buried there,
because Cases could not carry him that far.

It was 22 words long.
It was—Cases wrote—the most private thing he had ever heard another human being say.

Takahote said it word for word.

And then Takahote said:
“He has been waiting.
He thought you would come for him.
He still thinks you will come.”

Cases wrote that he stood up from his chair then,
and he walked away from the cell block,
and he went out into the street,
and he stood in the middle of the street for a long time.

The dogs of Coldwell Junction watched him.
They did not bark.
They watched him, and they watched the sky,
and the moon was full and very white and very close.

Cases wrote that he did not know how long he stood there.
He wrote that when he came back inside,
the marshal was asleep at the desk and the lamp had burned out
and the cell block was very dark.

He sat down in his chair.
He said into the dark that he believed.

Takahote said, “I know.”

And the third night after that was mostly silence.

Near dawn, Takahote spoke again.
He said, “Tomorrow night they come for me.
You will be told to go with them.
You will be told to bring me to the fort.
You will be ordered.

You must not go.
You must stay here.
You must stay in the place I will tell you.
And you must wait, and you must watch,
and you must not be afraid.”

Cases asked him what would happen on the road to the fort.

Takahote said, “I will not arrive.”

And he turned his face to the wall of the cell,
and he did not speak again until the fourth night.

—

The wagon and the escort arrived from Fort Koncho on the afternoon of the fourth day.

Two officers and six soldiers.
They had a special wagon with reinforced sides,
and they had heavier irons than the ones Cases had used,
and they had orders signed by a colonel whose name Cases had heard but never met.

The colonel wanted the prisoner brought to the fort.
There was, the order said, a great deal of interest in this individual at the highest levels.
There were people who wanted to look at him.
There were people who wanted to measure him.
There were doctors from the East who had been written to and who were already on a train.

The officer in charge was a captain named Lockidge.
He was 36 years old, very neat, very polite.
He shook Cases’s hand and thanked him for his service.
He said the army would take it from here.
He said Cases was, of course, welcome to ride with the escort if he wished,
given his familiarity with the prisoner.
He said it would be expected.
In fact, it would be appropriate.

Cases said he would think on it.

The captain looked at him for a moment,
then nodded and said the column would leave at first light.

—

That fourth night was the longest night of Cases Holloway’s life.

He went to the cell block after dark.
The lamps were lit.
The marshal had gone home.
Cases was alone with the prisoner,
and the prisoner was sitting the way he always sat—
with his back against the brick and his knees drawn up
and his eyes open and very calm.

Takahote said, “It is time.”

He told Cases the place.
He described it carefully.
It was south and west of Coldwell Junction,
two and a half days’ ride,
at the head of a dry canyon that fed into the Pecos River.

He said there was a stone shelf there with a crack in it—
no wider than a man’s hand—
and that the crack went down into the dark,
and that the watcher’s place was on the shelf above the crack,
and that the watcher did not speak,
and did not light fires,
and did not sleep deeply,
and did not leave for nine days at a time,
and then came back to the world for one day,
and went back.

He said the watcher carried nothing but water and dried meat and a blanket.
He said the watcher did not pray and did not sing,
because the thing in the crack was drawn to noise.
He said the watcher only stood there
and was awake
and was not afraid.

Cases asked him how a man could be unafraid of a thing like that.

Takahote said:
“By understanding that the thing has been afraid of him
for longer than he can imagine.”

Cases wrote that he did not understand that sentence then,
and he had thought on it every day for the rest of his life.

The captive said one more thing.
He said, “When the soldiers come in the morning, the cell will be empty.
Do not be the one to find it empty.
Be in the street already.
Be on your horse already.
Ride south before the sun is up.

Do not look back.
And do not stop.
Because if they catch you,
they will hold you and they will ask you questions you must not answer,
and the answers will not save you.

The road to the place is what you must remember.
Repeat it to me now.”

Cases repeated the directions.
Takahote nodded.
He said, “Good. Go now.
Do not come back to this cell.”

Cases stood up.
He picked up his hat from the floor.
He looked at the giant in the cell.
And the giant looked back at him—
and they did not speak the way two men say goodbye.
They did not need to.

Cases walked out of the cell block.
He saddled his roan mare in the marshal’s stable.
He took with him a canteen, his Sharps, both pistols, three days of food,
and the Bible he had been writing in.

He left the irons.
He left the badge of the Texas Rangers on the corner of the marshal’s desk
with a short note that said:
“Gone. Do not follow.”

He rode out of Coldwell Junction at 3:00 in the morning.

The dogs watched him go.
They did not bark.

He wrote that as he rode past the last building on the south end of town,
every dog in Coldwell Junction stood up at once,
turned its head toward the cell block,
and lay back down.

—

The cell, when the soldiers opened it at first light, was empty.

The irons were still on the floor.
They were locked, and they had not been opened.

The door of the cell was locked,
and the key was on the marshal’s desk,
where it had been left the night before.

The windows of the cell were untouched.
The brick of the rear wall was solid and old and unmarked.

The captain from Fort Koncho stood in that cell for a long time.
He sent his men out to search the town.
They searched for two days.
They found nothing.

They asked after the Texas Ranger who had brought the prisoner in,
and they were told he had ridden out in the night
and left no word of his destination.

The captain sent a rider back to the fort with a report that—
when I read it in the archives—was three sentences long:

“The prisoner is not at Coldwell Junction.
The means of his departure cannot be determined.
The ranger Holloway has deserted.”

—

Cases Holloway was officially listed as a deserter by the Texas Rangers on the 5th of May, 1879.
He never appeared on any payroll again.
He never collected the pension he was due.
His name was struck from the company rolls.

His commanding officer wrote a private letter to the governor of Texas,
asking that the matter be quietly closed on the grounds that Holloway had served honorably for nearly 19 years,
and that something had clearly happened to him in the field
that the army did not have the wisdom to understand.

The governor agreed.
The file was closed.

But Cases Holloway did not disappear.

He went where Takahote had told him to go.

—

The Bible I have been quoting from was found in 1896
by a sheep rancher named Allard Crowley—
in a tin box wedged into a crack in a stone shelf
at the head of a dry canyon that fed into the Pecos River.

Crowley had been looking for a strayed ewe.
He had climbed up onto the shelf because he thought he heard something in the rocks.

He did not find a sheep.
He found the Bible,
and a small pile of cleanly broken bone buttons—
of the kind that came off a Texas Ranger’s coat—
and a folded blanket that had been very carefully laid in the lee of a stone,
and the ashes of a fire that had been cold for, by Crowley’s estimate, less than a week.

There were no human remains.

Crowley took the Bible to the sheriff in Coldwell Junction.
By that time, the marshal Cases had known was dead,
and the new sheriff was a younger man.

The younger man read the Bible all the way through one evening,
and the next morning he gave it back to Crowley
and asked him to never speak of where he had found it.

Crowley agreed.

He kept the Bible in his house for the rest of his life,
and he taught his sons to keep it after him.

And when the last of his line died in 1941,
the Bible was donated to a small museum in Lubbock,
where it sits in a glass case—
and where, if you know to ask,
the curator will bring you a chair and let you sit and turn the pages with cotton gloves,
and read what Cases Holloway wrote in pencil between 1879 and a date that is never specified.

Because the last entry in the Bible has no date at all.

The last entry is one sentence.
It reads:

“He was not lying about being afraid of me.”

That is the end of the writing.

—

There are stories that come after, of course.
There are always stories.

A peddler in 1884 claimed to have seen at sundown on the rim of a dry canyon south of the Pecos
a man so tall he had taken him for a tree—until the man turned his head.

A surveyor in 1891 wrote in his report that his crew had refused to camp in a certain stretch of country
because the men had said somebody was watching them from the rocks and was not blinking.

A cattle drive in 1904 lost no animals and saw no trouble passing through that country—
but the trail boss noted in his journal that his horses had walked with their ears flat the entire two days,
and that when they had come out the other side,
the lead mare had stopped and turned and stared back into the canyon for a long time
before she would move on.

There are dozens of such stories. I have read them all.
I will not bore you with them.

They are scattered through local papers and personal letters and unpublished diaries
of a hundred quiet people who lived in that country between 1880 and 1940.
And they do not, taken one at a time, prove anything.

What they prove, taken together, is that somebody was up there for a long time—
and maybe still is.

—

I do not know what happened to Cases Holloway.
Nobody does.

The Bible’s last entry was written—by the look of the handwriting—by an old man.
The hand is thinner than the early entries.
The pencil is fainter.

But the man was alive long enough to write it,
and to put it in the tin box,
and to wedge the box into the crack in the stone
where he must have known a rancher or a hunter or a curious child grown into a curious adult
would one day find it.

He did not leave a name in the last entry.
He did not leave a date.
He left only that one sentence about the thing in the crack
having been afraid of him for as long as he had been afraid of it.

And then he closed the cover,
and he put the Bible into the box,
and he went—I think—back to his watching.

—

The thing in the crack, whatever it is, has not come up.

Or it has come up and it has gone back down again so many times
that we have forgotten what coming up looks like.

And we live now in the quiet between its risings,
and we mistake the quiet for the way things are.

I cannot tell you which.

I have stood on that shelf myself—
on a clear November afternoon, two years ago—
and I have looked at the crack in the stone,
and I have laid my hand flat against the rock,
and I have felt in the rock a coolness that did not match the day.

I have heard nothing.
I have seen nothing.
I have stood there for an hour, and then I have come down.

I am not a watcher.
I do not have the quiet in me.
I am like most of us—a person who tells stories,
and does not stand on stone shelves for nine days at a time without sleeping.

But somebody is—I think—still up there.

And that is the part I cannot stop turning over in my mind.

Because if the line of watchers ended with Takahote,
then the line that began with Cases Holloway is a different line—
a new one—
a line that, by my count, has been going for 147 years now.

And lines that long have a way of having more than one person on them.

Takahote told Cases the watcher would have to be a man with quiet in him.
He did not say there would only be one.
He did not say the line could not grow.
He did not say a person would have to be a ranger, or a soldier, or a Comanche, or a man at all.

He said only that the person would have to be unafraid,
and would have to be awake,
and would have to be willing to stand on a piece of stone for a long time
and not look away.

There are people like that in every generation.
There are people like that listening to this story right now.

You may know one.
You may be one.

You may, on some quiet evening when the light is going strange and the dogs are not making a sound,
find yourself walking south and west out of whatever town you happen to live in—
and you may not be able to tell anyone why.

If that happens to you, I am not going to tell you to be careful.
I am going to tell you to remember what the giant said:

The thing has been afraid of you for longer than you can imagine.

—

That is the thought I want to leave you with tonight.

Cases Holloway died on a stone shelf in West Texas—alone, an old man,
watching over a crack in the rock that the rest of the world does not know is there.

Or maybe he did not die.
Maybe he is still up there, in the way that some of the old stories of the caprock are still up there—
walking around in the wind,
doing the work that nobody else remembered needed doing.

I cannot tell you which is true.
I do not think it matters.

The work, whoever is doing it, is still being done.

That is what I believe.

And on the nights when I cannot sleep,
and the wind outside my window has gone still in a way it should not have,
I find a strange kind of peace in believing it.