And he still had sixty-four dollars in his new jeans. He’d bought well—all except the horse, about which he was beginning to have his doubts. Thirty-five dollars for a seven-year-old sorrel gelding with the gait of a razorback sow and the mean eye of a wolverine.

But the horse moved along at a good clip and he guessed that would do.

He found the Uncle Sam where he had thought she would be. You couldn’t really hide anything that big. They’d put her where nobody would look for her for a while. It was where she had to be and Boag had no trouble.

They had steamed her up the Gila a few miles to a point where the highway veered away from the riverbank and went around behind the far side of a big hill. They’d anchored her up under the overhang of some big cottonwoods. Nobody would come across her by chance; you had to be looking for her to find her. So far, nobody had any reason to be out looking for her.

Except Boag.

Obviously Mr. Pickett had planned it all pretty well in advance. The buckboard was still on deck, they hadn’t bothered to use it. Boag examined the tracks leading away from the boat. The horse and mule tracks (he assumed they were some of each although from the remaining indentations it was impossible to tell which was which) were too numerous to count but there had to have been thirty or more. They’d probably loaded about two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of gold onto each pack animal. It made for quite a mule train. But that was a lot more maneuverable than wagons would have been.

He followed the trampled mess up around the hill and across the highway, tracking southeast. It had been some years since he’d been down here on Cavalry patrols but he had no trouble remembering how it lay. A hundred miles of dry soda lakes and baked soil that was scorched and cracked and shriveled by a perpetual drought and a perpetual sun. Tumbleweed and cactus and the occasional mesquite and patches of greasewood and organ pipe. Give this country an inch and it would take your life. You had to shake out your boots in the morning before you put them on because if you didn’t you might be putting your toes in with a scorpion or tarantula or centipede or black widow.

He had a look at the horse-droppings. None of them was still moist or green. Hard to say how much wind there had been in the past few days; the extent to which sand had drifted into the tracks was no real indication of how long they’d been gone, but working out the probabilities in his head he judged they had to have three days’ jump on him, possibly closer to four.

He tested the weight of the canteen—a nervous gesture; he’d just filled it in the Gila and watered the horse and drunk his fill—and then he gigged the horse out into the Sonora Desert.

When the cruel sun climbed high he knew he was going to have to surrender to it and take shelter. His cracked lips stung with sweat. If you kept moving in this blast of heat you’d use up too much water on the horse and yourself. There were waterholes down along the Border but they were two days along from here; you had to ration things. Better to travel the cool hours of evening and night and early morning. There would be a moon again tonight, getting on toward last-quarter; enough to track by.

Somewhere deep underground a rock cistern gathered enough moisture to feed the long roots of a clump of mesquite. He hobbled the sorrel and bedded down under the meager shade. Dust motes hung in the sunbeams that lanced down between the branches. He slept; he had the ability to relax completely when there was nothing to do.

The clock inside him brought him awake when it was cool enough to eat. Somewhere around half past four by the sun. He gave the horse a ration of water and scrubbed out the old Army mess kit with sand, put everything away where it belonged, saddled the horse and untied the hobbles and went on his way into the evening.

In the night three times he came across the bleached bones of travelers who had tried to make the crossing without sufficient experience.

In places the wind had blown the tracks over completely but it was impossible for a thirty- or forty-horse trail to disappear that quickly; a few minutes’ scouting around and he always picked them up again. The trail led him steadily southeastward on the high flats. Mr. Pickett knew exactly where he was headed.

There were a few towns down that way—Sonoyta and some others, scattered around the oases of the plain. Beyond the Border there were mountains and then more desert, although that desert was not as dry or treeless as this one. Mr. Pickett was heading into Mexico as he had said he would. The question was, once in Mexico—where then?

He found shade at nine-thirty in the morning and although it wasn’t fully hotted up yet he decided not to risk another few miles; he ate and bedded down and waited out the heat. He was up before four, eating dried beef and pinto beans and the last of the cornbread, and feeding the horse a nosebag ration of grain and a hatful of water. The canteen was less than half full now. He put a pebble in his mouth and rolled it around with his tongue to keep the saliva going.

At sundown he came upon what he had feared he might find. The tracks began to split up.

By twos and threes and fours, groups of horses peeled away from the main gang and went their own way. All of them headed generally southward but the little bunches were diverging by miles. The main track got smaller and smaller and finally there was no way to know which was the main track any more, and at ten or eleven o’clock that night Boag had to toss a coin. He picked a set of four-horse prints and settled down to follow them south.

He was guessing but his opinion of Mr. Pickett was that in each group of four-horse prints you would probably find two trustworthy old-time Pickett rawhiders, one pack animal loaded with gold, and one relative newcomer to the Pickett-Stryker organization whose potential greed would be tempered by the constant presence of the two old rawhiders who probably slept in shifts and kept both eyes on him. In that manner Mr. Pickett would guarantee, as much as it could be guaranteed, the safe delivery of that portion of the gold to wherever it was destined.

Splitting up this way would be a risk—three men and a packhorse being far more tempting to bandits than an army of twenty-odd men armed to the teeth—but then it did make the track harder to follow and it also provided good odds that most of the four-horse groups would get through.

It was odd the way he kept thinking of Mr. Pickett’s men as old rawhiders. It was the same way he thought of himself as an old soldier. They were mostly in their forties, not old men at all. It was just that they’d been riding with Mr. Pickett for more than twenty years, most of them. They probably averaged six or seven years older than Boag, that was all; by his best reckoning Boag was thirty-seven. In Mississippi they didn’t keep close birth records on field niggers. Boag didn’t know but that he might be a field nigger right now if the war hadn’t emancipated him when he was about fourteen or fifteen by his own reckoning; he had lied about it—he was big, he had always been big—and the Army had thrown him right into its new black horse-regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, because Boag had a natural eye with a rifle and the seat of Boag’s pants fit very well on the back of a standard-size Cavalry horse.

They had fought the Sioux on the northern plains and the Comanche on the southern plains and there had been several years’ garrison duty and then the Army had sent them out under Crook to find Geronimo.

Then when the Indian wars were over the Army decided to cut back about two hundred personnel. They found in the service records of Boag and Wilstach that they’d both been busted back to private several times for various infractions, so the Army discharged them in the middle of Arizona and they found themselves in the desert with no trade but soldiering, no job but drifting, and the road leading finally to the Ehrenburg jail.