It was an impressive estate and it got more impressive as he approached. You came up at it from below; the knoll was higher than it had looked from the mountains. The hacienda lofted itself against the sky like a cliff. It wasn’t forbidding, it was imposing; it looked like the kind of mansion you would like to live in after you got very rich. From its eminence it commanded the world beneath it.

It threw long shadows; Boag had ridden more than forty miles since sunup to get here and it wasn’t far to nightfall. He reached the barn and rode up past the apple trees and wondered why nobody with a gun had come out to greet him; obviously they had watched him approach, he’d been in plain sight for an hour crossing the grass flats.

There was a semicircle of driveway up to the big oak gate cut into the hacienda’s front wall; there were twenty posts with iron rings in them for the convenience of guests. He tethered the horse to one of them and walked up to the oak gate. It was twelve or fourteen feet wide and at least ten feet tall, cut into halves like the doors of some great church. A small door was cut into one of the gates. Boag lifted the huge brass knocker and the small door opened before he could clap it.

The man was a very old vaquero with a pinfire revolver in his sash. He wore the kind of leather cuffs cattlemen wore to prevent rope-burns.

“Yes?”

“I wish to see the patron.”

The old vaquero was uncertain. This was no gunslick bodyguard, Boag observed. An old retainer who’d spent forty years in the saddle chousing cows.

“Cómo se llama?”

“I am called Boag. It is about gold bullion.”

The old vaquero hadn’t made any moves toward the pinfire in his sash. He just stood aside and let Boag walk into the courtyard. The wooden lattice of the windmill dominated the square; a second-story veranda ran around all four sides of it and in two of the corners there were steps going up. The veranda formed a covered gallery for the entrances to all the downstairs rooms; it was typically the kind of house where there was no connecting passage from room to room and you had to come out into the courtyard and down to the next doorway if you wanted to go from one room to another.

There was a profusion of carefully tended flowers in pots and boxes in the courtyard; a great deal of brilliant color and bees rushing around them.

A young woman was coming down the stairs; Boag picked up the movement in the corner of his vision and wheeled and saw her reach the ground and come toward him smiling. It was a blinding smile on a stunning face. She had a cocked ten-gauge shotgun in her arms and it was aimed dead-center on Boag.

Boag froze bolt still.

Behind him the old vaquero spoke. “He wishes to see the patrón about a matter of gold bullion.” Very dry.

“Gold bullion,” the young woman echoed. She had a smoky voice. Her eyes stayed on Boag when she spoke to the old vaquero. “Did he give a name?”

“I have forgotten it, Señora.”

“It’s Boag.”

“Boag?”

“My name.”

“What does this mean, this Boag?”

“Just means Boag.”

“You speak with a gringo’s accent.”

“I come from north of the Border.”

“And you wish to see my husband about gold bullion.”

“I only want to ask him something. You could point that thing somewhere else.”

“You are nervous?” A pink tongue flicked across her lips; she was amused. “The señora knows how to use a shotgun, Señor Boag, and how not to. Let’s make a bargain—you hang your gunbelt on the windmill strut and I shall put down the shotgun and we shall both go and see my husband. You agree?”

“Seguro que sí.”

“Very good,” she said and Boag hung the forty-five up and followed her up the stairs. She had handed the shotgun to the old vaquero and he followed them upstairs; it wasn’t quite the bargain Boag had had in mind but if they’d wanted to shoot him they’d have done it by now.

Suddenly he realized the señora had stopped on the veranda. She was very still, looking at him, not blinking.

Boag’s eyes rested on the pulsing hollow at the base of her throat. Then they slipped down and he caught himself staring at the downed cleft between her breasts. She wore a sunbonnet and a man’s shirt open to the third button and a pair of black riding breeches; she was a tall woman with smooth dark skin and proud quivery breasts and a good flare to haunch and rump; and there was vibrant provocation in the way she was looking at him. There was a secret amusement of some kind, and a bold speculation. More like the eye of a girl at a whorehouse bar than ah aristocrat’s wife.

“Miguel you may see to your duties.”

“Sí, Señora.”

She turned to a door, passing Boag with a slow flirt of the shoulder. She opened it and spoke into the dimness:

“Querido. We have a visitor who wishes to discuss gold bullion with us.”

Laughter rang from the darkness within.

Don Pablo Ortiz laughed so hard he brought on a fit of coughing which he concealed behind a fragile handkerchief. The señora pushed the door shut behind her and Boag tried to get a better look at the man’s face but he was just going to have to wait for his eyes to adjust to the bad light. A fish-oil lamp burned on the table beside Don Pablo’s chair but it didn’t give much light.

The room smelled stale, as if its air hadn’t moved in a long time.

“Gold bullion,” Don Pablo said again, and chuckled. “Yes, well tell us about this gold bullion, Señor.”

“His name is Boag.”

“Boag?”

“Just so. Or so he says.”

Boag said, “There is a man called Mr. Jed Pickett.”

“Ah yes,” Don Pablo murmured. “So there is. So there certainly is.”

Boag could make him out now. A thin young man gone to waste, the white gentleman’s shirt lying wearily against washboard ribs. The pale skin of the Spaniard, a full head of hair that was shot thick with grey and tangled very fine as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it in days. Deep brackets of sickness creased his face on both sides of the pale lips; Don Pablo’s eyes were dull as slate.

Boag said, “I am looking to find him.”

Don Pablo looked him over and burst into laughter again. It doubled him over coughing.

Boag glanced at the señora. There was anguish in her eyes but she did not stir.

Don Pablo straightened in his chair, with effort. “Querida, a little drink for us all, por favor.”

Boag watched her move across the room. When she brought glasses to the table beside her husband he rested a proprietary hand on her rump, a casual and natural intimate gesture; and the señora who was no young child of the woods made as if to smile, trying to hide the pain in it. Boag wanted to leave this house of death as fast as he could.

The whiskey moved like a soft warm hand over the saddle-worn muscles of his body. He looked around the big room and thought it bare; there were only a few pieces of furniture, the massive divans and chairs; there were no ornaments on the mantelpiece over the great fireplace and he saw discolored rectangles on two walls as if paintings had hung there but had been removed.

Don Pablo smacked his thin lips. “It is good. Even the dying have a few pleasures, no es verdad?”

It was consumption of course. It wasn’t the first time Boag had seen it.

The señora said, “Are you chilled?”

“You might make a fire now, querida.”

A slantwise look at Boag, and she went out of the room; he couldn’t read the meaning of her glances.

Don Pablo said, “Now this gold bullion. What has it to do with you?”

“Some of it was mine. A little piece of it.”

“And you came all this way trying to get it back.”