The game was table-stakes pot limit with a four-bit ante. There were six players around the table, playing with varying degrees of interest and intensity. Boag singled out a middle-sized man whose face had a shape and texture that reminded Boag of heaped walnuts in a wooden bowl. The man played carelessly, without a great deal of attention; obviously he was playing to pass the time and didn’t much care about the game, but he was getting a good run of cards and in the first ten minutes Boag saw him rake in two fair kitties and one forty-dollar pot.

One of the others addressed walnut-face: “You finding enough good cards tonight, Elmer. You put the Indian sign on that deck?”

“You know I had it in mind to try cheating you boys,” Elmer said cheerfully, “but when you all sat down to play I saw I wasn’t going to have to. ’Scuse me a minute, save my chair. Deal me out one hand.” Elmer went over to the bar to buy another drink and the player beside him put his boot up on Elmer’s chair to keep anybody else from sitting there.

When Elmer returned to his chair Boag settled down to watch the game and wait it out.

Elmer said, “Lee Roy, when you aim to get delivery on that cherrywood bed I ordered?”

“Should of been here by now. I can’t say. You know the way things get, coming across. They had to ship it out of Boston and probably it got held up wagoning acrost Panama. Then they bring it up to San Pedro on an ocean steamer and they transfer it onto one of the Johnson-Yaeger steamers up there, and it got to come all the way back around below Baja California and up to the mouth of the Colorado and then they got to transfer it again over onto one of the riverboats. I mind that rocking horse Mrs. Watson ordered from Baltimore took eight months getting here. You just never can tell.”

Boag sipped his beer and watched with his eyes half closed. A man who could afford to order a cherrywood bed shipped from Boston wasn’t poor.

One of the other players said, “Hey talking about steamers and all, what the hell happened to the Uncle Sam?”

Lee Roy said, “What you mean?”

“She was due in yesterday. Still ain’t showed up. My cousin Brill supposed to be on board, comin’ back down from Hardyville. I hear he made two thousand on pelts this season. Man we want to rope him into this poker game, he shows up.”

“Well two days ain’t much overdue,” Elmer said comfortably. “I raise you three dollar, Sammy.”

“Fold,” Lee Roy said. “I wouldn’t worry much. She might of got hung up on a sand bar. Sometimes takes them three, four days to work loose of them sand bars in the river.”

“I call,” Sammy said, “give me two cards.”

Now that gave Boag something to think about. The Uncle Sam hadn’t showed up in Yuma yet but Boag hadn’t passed her anywhere on the river and he’d come all the way down by raft behind her. He’d expected they would probably ram right through Yuma on the river and keep going right down to the estuary of the Colorado, which was in Mexico and out of Arizona’s jurisdiction. But she hadn’t come through. Now where the hell did you hide a hundred-foot paddlewheel steamboat?

It took him fifteen minutes’ thinking but he finally worked out how they must have done it, and that made him feel better. A good deal better because it meant he wasn’t as far behind them as he had feared.

He watched Elmer’s stake grow steadily for two and a half hours until Lee Roy suddenly stood up and pressed both fists into the small of his back to lean back and stretch. “That’s it for me, Elmer, your luck’s running too good tonight. I’ll see you boys.”

It broke up the game. New players started to move in to the table and once three of the original players had left, Elmer didn’t seem to see any reason to stay around and let the others try to get even. He scooped his winnings into a canvas poke and pulled the drawstring shut and stuffed the poke down in his hip pocket, finished off his drink—it was the fifth shot of whiskey Boag had seen him down—and meandered out of the saloon, pausing twice to talk to acquaintances. While Elmer was talking to the second one, at the bar, Boag moved slowly to the door and went outside.

It was about midnight and the traffic had thinned out on the street. Boag put his boots down into the loose dust of the thoroughfare and walked across the way to the dark passage between two red-light houses opposite the saloon. He posted himself in the shadows until Elmer emerged from the saloon and when Elmer turned up-street Boag let him get a block away before eeling out onto the boardwalk and following him.

At the mouth of an alley Boag caught Elmer from behind, clamped his palm over Elmer’s mouth and lifted the revolver from Elmer’s holster. Boag jammed it in Elmer’s back and hissed in Elmer’s ear:

“Eef you don’ keep es-shut op, I goeen to keel you. Onnerstan’?”

Elmer nodded and Boag removed his hand from the man’s mouth. “Now don’ turn aroun’.” He lifted the fat poke from Elmer’s hip pocket and stuffed it into his own.

“Now you es-start walkeen. Es-straight ahead an’ you don’ look back, onnerstan’? You look back an’ I goeen to hahv to es-shoot you. Ahora ve.” He prodded Elmer in the back with the gun muzzle and Elmer walked away unhurriedly, an easygoing fellow who took such things with equanimity. Boag waited until Elmer had traversed most of the length of the alley before Boag wheeled back around the corner and broke into a sprint across somebody’s dark lawn.

He slipped through back alleys for ten minutes before he stopped in a passage behind a thriving saloon. Lamplight spilled out of a high back window, enough for him to see. He emptied Elmer’s poke and separated the coins from the greenjackets; he distributed the coins in his pockets so that they wouldn’t make telltale bulges. The greenjacket bills he stuffed back into Elmer’s poke because paper money was printed up by various local banks and Elmer might be able to identify his own greenbacks, although it was doubtful since he’d just won most of them in the poker game. Still there was no point taking the chance. Boag left the poke, the green-jackets, and Elmer’s revolver in the pile of trash behind the saloon; guns had serial numbers and Elmer might be able to identify that too.

With one hundred and forty-six dollars in coin on his person, Boag climbed into the loft of a horse-boarding stable near the waterfront and fell asleep almost instantly, his leg throbbing only a little.

He had himself clothed and outfitted and ready to go by nine in the morning; by nine-thirty he had ridden beyond sight of the Yuma bluff and was trotting north on the hard-mouthed horse toward the confluence of the Colorado and the Gila.

It was a used McClellan army saddle for which most civilians wouldn’t give ten dollars, which Boag had paid for this one; he was used to the split-tree saddle, he’d ridden them nearly twenty years. The rifle was a .38-56 Winchester with calibrated hunting sights and the revolver was a .45 Colt Theuer-conversion model, ten or twelve years old but the rifling grooves and lands were in good shape and there wasn’t any rust on it and the gunsmith had let him have it for four dollars. He’d bought ammunition moulds and primers and crimpers as well as several boxes of cartridges so he was ready to reload his own if circumstances took him where you couldn’t buy cartridges, especially for the .38-56 which wasn’t all that common a caliber. He’d picked it for its high velocity and long-range accuracy; a steady enough rifleman could keep all his shots within a hat-size circle at four hundred yards with this rifle, and that was a lot better than the Army .45-70 he’d been used to, where you were out of luck beyond two hundred yards.

He had a few luxuries like a flint-and-steel fire-starting mechanism, a rain poncho, a good flat-crown border hat, and somebody’s old heavy plaid flannel riding coat which might keep him warm if he had to ride up into the Sierra. He had spare underclothes and socks and he’d bought a pair of moccasins which were now in the saddlebags along with several days’ worth of food. The canteen was a two-gallon container: heavy, but if you ran out of water in the desert you were dead.