West (short story)

Card previously published a shorter version of this story in the collection Free Lancers: Alien Stars IV (1987).

After warning them, Jamie starts to follow them and, when the Winston highway patrol refuses to let them take an alternate route, he decides to help them get past the Bushwhackers.

In the spring, Jamie tells the group about how when he was a child his mother made him keep his younger brother and sister locked in a closet until they went insane.

During the trip from Jamie Teague’s home in the Great Smoky Mountains to Utah, the group finds a little mute boy whose parents had been killed by mobbers.

The short story "Salvage" by Orson Scott Card takes place about fifteen years after the events in "West".