The Forbidding Palm does not attack the town the next day, so the posse heads south for a bit looking for Lo, but can't find him in the wilderness. Then they head for the coin, which turns out to be at the geological formation called "the devil's postpile". Joseph has heard the place has a bad reputation. Cady has heard that if you bury someone there, they come back... They arrive there late in the day, but decide to make camp a mile or more away, and backtrack a bit.

The next day they return to the pile, and find two miners (and the corpse of a third) already there. These are Jeb and Ted Baels, burying their brother George so that he will come back to them. "Momma always said he was the smart one." The posse briefly tries to get them not to, but in the end decides to help them bury him and wait up that night to see if he will come back (and in their own minds to put him back in the ground if anything untoward happens). They spend the morning shifting the shattered basalt columns, and George is laid to rest with a word from James.

In the afternoon they follow their dowsing coin to another part of the pile, and shift rocks until they find the corpse of a man buried with one of the silver coins. They take the coin, surprised when the corpse just lays there. During this whole day, the weather is rainy and dark... making the pile slippery and treacherous.

That night they make camp at the edge of the pile, while Ted and Jeb wait on the pile for George to come back. Near midnight, they start hearing noises in the pile. Those asleep are awakened and scramble onto the pile, while those awake go to get the Baels brothers off the pile. They only manage to get halfway off the pile before hordes of walking dead appear around them - horribly misshapen by being crushed under the weight of the rocks. They start shooting their way out. At that moment, they all feel their spirits try to take control... and James succumbs. Having already scrambled off the pile with Robert, he makes for the horses. Robert chases after him when he realizes what has happened, and manages to cut the saddle on the first horse James jumps on. He gets a bullet to the head for his trouble, and falls bleeding. Luckily the bullet doesn't kill him immediately.

The others fight (and mostly run) their way off the pile. Cady manages to wound the horse James is taking with a soul blast - with her spells she is the only one who can even see it through the dark and the rain - but he escapes anyway. Elder Tanner twists an ankle on the pile, and has to be helped off by Ted (who he was trying to help off himself). Then he has to heal Robert, and is knocked unconscious himself by the strain.

In the morning they track James, and find the dead horse about midday. After that they continue tracking for days. It's slow going, but between Tobey's tracking skills and Robert's keen eyes they manage not to lose him completely. After four days they find a little mining camp called "Hope Creek". The thirteen miners who live there are all killed, shot dead, and their own ammunition taken.

The next day they continue to track James and are nearly taken by surprise by a native scouting party.

Natives: What are you doing here.
Tobey: We're tracking a dangerous man.
Natives: Wears a black suit, carries two guns?
Party: Yup.
Natives: Why?
Tobey: We want to stop him.
Natives: No problem. He stopped.

The posse agrees to be disarmed and taken to the Indian camp, which is large but apparently temporary - they're having some sort of meet.

Cady hears someone being tortured in one of the big long-houses as they wait, but can't identify what later turns out to be James. Robert handles the talking when an old lady named Born in a Bowl comes out of that house to talk to them. She makes a lot of suggestive comments about Robert (mostly in a language no one speaks, though Cady catches the gist of it). Robert's claim to be an Eagle shaman is tested: he has to hold a stone heated in the fire without flinching. He barely manages it, and is pronounced a shaman. A white shaman, but a shaman. This makes later negotiation with Born in a Bowl easy - knowing that Eagle forbids his shamen from lying, even by omission, she just asks what she wants to know. Is James normally a good man? Yes. How did they come to be possessed? What else should she know? That Bart and Tobey are dead. And so on.

She takes them to see James, who is being scourged in an effort to make the spirit leave him. He is cursing up a storm, and Tobey threatens that since James wouldn't want to live that way, she should just lop his head off. The threat makes the spirit relinquish its hold, and James comes back to himself half naked and tied down while being whipped. He mostly accepts it as his due, though Born in a Bowl stops the whipping and has him untied.

She invites them all to eat with her, and they do so. She tells them that she know of a Tinglit shaman named Too Wet Dog in Oregon Territory who is a master of tattoos, perhaps able to neutralize the tattoos they wear - though not for Bart and Tobey, who are beyond that now. She suggests they go to Shan Fan and sail to the mouth of the Columbia river where he lives, and gives them a token to give to him as proof that she sent them.

Then she asks Robert if Eagle has told him of the events of a decade ago, about the great change, and Robert admits he has not. She takes it on herself to tell the posse the story of the shaman Raven, who in his hatred for the white man gathered followers and went into the Hunting Grounds, killing the old shamans who imprisoned the great evils thousands of years ago and freeing them once more. She tells them that Raven and his followers now serve these evil spirits, and that those spirits wish to spread fear... until the world is afraid enough to be like the dark parts of the Hunting Grounds, and they can again walk the earth.

"Eagle has set you a strange path. I feel I should help you to walk it." - Born in a Bowl

LB: Robert listed me after the Mormon in his litany of evil! And he only said I compel small evil spirits, not that I traffic with evil spirits! I am truly touched.