Now on Mr. Pickett’s backtrack Boag was thinking about Wilstach and thinking about all that gold. Of course he was just one man and he was a little crippled up by the bullets he’d taken on the river, but he had nothing better to do with his time and you needed some reason to get up in the morning.

There was the revolution going on in Sonora; there always was. Boag expected to have to dodge some combat. In times of rebellion in Mexico anybody suspicious was in danger of getting killed merely as a precautionary measure.

In a midmorning blaze of heat he reached Tanques Verdes where the four horses ahead of him had watered. Under the shade of the towering algodones Boag went from the trading post to the blacksmith’s stable to the saloon asking questions about the three men with the packhorse. An hour’s questioning convinced him that the three men had not been Mr. Pickett or Stryker. As he had guessed there was one relatively young man, a Mexican, and two middle-aged gringos. One of the two gringos had stayed with the packhorse at all times during the six or seven hours the men had spent in Tanques Verdes four days ago. None of them had said anything that anybody remembered about where they were headed. They had eaten supper and ridden into Mexico at sundown.

Boag filled his canteen and replenished his food and rode out after them.

A gauze of dust hung low over the desert. He rode past the heap of stones that marked the international boundary and climbed toward the foothills in Mexico.

The track was vague and intermittent. Winds had blown the prints over, sometimes for hundreds of yards at a stretch. Boag scowled irritably at the earth and often had to guide on flimsy probabilities: an iron-scratched stone, a carelessly broken greasewood branch where a horse had brushed too close. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he would come across a patch on the lee side of some boulders or brush where the prints of the four horses were still identifiable. He hadn’t lost them but he was losing time with all the circling and back-tracking it took to stay with them.

In the past twelve hours he had climbed a steady and barely perceptible incline and was probably two thousand feet higher in elevation than he’d been last night; the difference in sun-temperature was apparent and it was no longer impossible to travel by day. He pushed on through the sun hours and only stopped for half an hour to noon on the north side of a hill.

By now of course somebody back in Yuma would have gone looking for the Uncle Sam and probably they’d found her on the Gila but the tracks had had several more days to blow over and it was not likely any posse would take up the hunt. Johnson-Yaeger would complain to the Territorial Governor at Prescott and in due course an official inquiry would be lodged in Mexico City, probably identifying Mr. Jed Pickett, and as usual it would be put into some dusty drawer and ignored. Mexico City was still busy getting out from under all the problems that had been created by the reign of Maximilian and Carlotta and they didn’t have time down there to poke around looking for gringo fugitives.

He was relieved not to be burdened any longer by the weighty presence of the old woman and the persnickety little Pilar who wanted to be called Carmen.

Angling more directly south than before, the tracks led him up across foothills into a minor range of mountains with which he was not familiar; the Geronimo chase had not taken the Buffalo soldiers this far west in Mexico. There was timber up here, the ground was covered with a silent lawn of pine needles and the late afternoon sun flickered through the pines like a moving signal lamp as Boag climbed toward the high passes, keening the ground.

It was a hard country for tracking; the pine needles did not take impressions and hold them. But the ground was soft underneath and in bare spots they had left hoofprints in the rotted half-mud. It was one of those open mountain forests with no underbrush; the high corridors ran unobstructed between rows of lanced pines and the air was very cool with a sharp coniferous pungency. Boag’s horse moved along with very little sound and for a moment he was reminded of a church he had once rested in, an empty church in some mountain village south of Fort Defiance.

He was hurrying the horse because he knew there would be no tracking after dark in these woods. At sunset he was ready to give it up for the night when he picked up the lights of some establishment winking through the forest and he homed in on them, riding into a little village of log buildings that was decidedly un-Mexican in flavor; you thought of all Mexico as being nothing but mud huts and dusty plazas and narrow streets in squalid colors. This was more like something in the Wyoming mountains. But wherever men went they built with the materials at hand and up here the most plentiful things were pine trees.

Probably a community of trappers and prospectors and those who traded with the mountain Yaquis. There were half a dozen log cabins, cook-smoke rising from the chimneys of three of them, and there was one large building with a galleried porch across the front and a pair of long hitch rails at which Boag counted seven tied horses. All but one had Mexican rigs and there was no packhorse but he hadn’t expected to come upon any of Mr. Pickett’s people this quickly anyway. The one horse that stood out from the rest had a blanketed McClellan rig and when Boag looked closer he saw the U.S. brand on the horse’s flank. An American Cavalry horse, but not a regulation Cavalry saddle. Something to look out for, he judged; he dismounted and loosened the cinches and gave the hard-mouth sorrel a nosebag of grain and climbed the four wooden steps to the porch and walked along the porch to a window to look inside.

It was a trading post with a saloon bar along one of the walls. He counted six Mexicans standing at the bar eating pinto beans and pork cubes off wooden plates. They were hardcases, their chests crossed with bandoleros of cartridges. The seventh man was a gringo in a fringed buckskin outfit that looked as if it had been made up for a performer in a wild-west show. Boag recognized him mostly by the clothes and by the dirty white Cavalry hat with its crossed brass sabers; it touched Boag with surprise and then made him grin and he walked along the porch to the log door and went in, and the gringo in buckskin looked around with his dour long face—the lugubrious doleful face of a professional mourner— and broke into a painful creasing of wrinkles which passed for a smile. “Well zippity-doo-day if it isn’t the good Sergeant Boag!”

“Your humble servant, Captain,” Boag said.

“You’re a long way from home, Sergeant.”

Boag said, “I have to be.”

“Tequila or mescal or beer?”

“Tequila, beer chaser,” Boag said, and Captain Shelby McQuade relayed the order to the man behind the bar.

“You hungry, Boag? I don’t much recommend the food here, it’s enough to give a buzzard the trots but there’s not a whole lot of competition.”

“I could eat, Captain, my belly feels like my throat’s been cut. What you doing in this town?”

“I thought,” Captain McQuade said, “that question was one that nobody in a town like this ever asked.”

“No offense.”

“I’m just ribbing you. You’re welcome to ask.”

“Those boys with you, Captain?”

Captain McQuade looked upon the six armed Mexicans with distaste. Evidently none of them spoke English; they watched Boag with curiosity, reserving hostility. “They’re with me,” the Captain said without pleasure.

Boag sampled the tequila. “They seem to be putting bigger snakes in these here bottles this season.”

Captain McQuade’s mouth smiled again while his eyes sized Boag up. “Looks like you’ve got some kind of burden, Sergeant.”

“Well I’m looking to find some people. How long you been in this town, Captain?”