He said, “He left about a week ago?”

“Today is Monday. They left here Wednesday evening. It is five days.”

“You didn’t send anybody after them?”

“I had no one left to send,” Don Pablo murmured. He roused himself, shaking his head as though to clear it. “I was obligated to inform my men that I had nothing left with which to pay them, that my estate was under mortgage which could not be repaid, and would be taken from me in due course. I gave them what little I could and dismissed them. The aged one, Miguel, chose to remain with us without pay. He is the only one.”

Well it wasn’t the way Boag would have done it. At least you could give them a choice. If you want to get paid you have to go after the son of a bitch and get my money back for me. But that wasn’t realistic, was it; not when you were talking about Mr. Pickett’s rawhiders. They had been fighting Yankees and Apaches and Mexicans for twenty-odd years while Don Pablo’s vaqueros had been chousing cows.

Miguel appeared. “La comida.” Miguel helped Don Pablo out of the chair and half carried him. Boag trailed them down the stairs and across the courtyard in the dusk. There was the rasp of cicadas, a cool dry wind, light clouds scudding by.

You could see where there had been paintings and candelabra in the dining room; now there was only the table and a few chairs which probably had been brought up from crew’s quarters. Señora Dorotea served the meal on chipped Indian pottery plates; the Don ate soup while the rest of them ate the meat of a rabbit Miguel had shot. The cattle herds, it was explained, had been sold along with everything else to raise money to pay for Mr. Pickett’s gold. It had been Don Pablo’s plan to sell the estate to the men in Monterrey and Durango who held the mortgages; then he would have been able to take Dorotea to a mountain resort for the cure. The cure seldom worked but it was worth the attempt; what else was there? There would have been money enough to buy their own resort.

“Now it is all ashes,” Don Pablo whispered into his soup.

It was as if he was already dead; it was just taking him some time to quit breathing. Boag said, “How long do they give you?”

There was a sharp glance from Miguel. The señora did not look up. Don Pablo said, “A few months, perhaps a year, perhaps two years or five. No one knows, really.”

“Then maybe you’re giving up a little early.”

Don Pablo cackled. It made him cough.

He lay on a straw tick in a small room off the veranda.

A light rapping at the door; he looked up and it was the Señora Dorotea. She rested her shoulder against the door-frame. “I was lonely,” she said.

He looked into her eyes; she gave a little smile as if to say she knew what had not been said and was not going to be said.

When he touched her cheek he felt her tremble. He ran his fingertips up into her thick dark hair, surprised by the cool smoothness of her skin. Her woman-smell filled him.

She sat on the cot beside him; the heavy rope of her hair swung forward. She bent down and he tasted her mouth and then she slipped her face away to guide his lips down her throat.

They took a long time making love.

Then he lay on his back, belly rising and falling with his breath, and she laid her head back against the hard muscles of his thigh and spoke in a voice drowsy with spent passion: “I think we have both been too long without this.”

She turned and curled up with her fists together against him, one knee hooked over his body. He ruffled her hair. “I feel hound-dog lazy.”

“Were you a slave?”

“When I was a little kid.”

“So was I. In a way.”

He turned his head to look at her. She said, “Pablo has not bought me and he does not own me. He knows that.”

“I thought you were married to him.”

“I am. But he has told me I may leave when I wish.”

“But you’ve stayed.”

“He needs looking after.”

“You’re a good woman.”

“I think I am,” she said. “When I said I was a slave I meant before, when I was a girl in the city. I was bought and put into a house there.”

“He told me about that.”

“Did he also tell you he bought me from the madam?”

“He didn’t say that.”

“But I had a choice. I could have run away from him. I knew he wouldn’t try very hard to get me back. Not that he did not want me, but he has never forced me to do anything unless it was what I wished.”

“He loves you.”

“He has never said that,” she said, and it made Boag remember the same conversation with Don Pablo.

“This gold,” she said. “Do you really expect to take any of it away from that man?”

“Well I expect to try.”

“Is it enough to die for?”

“He owes me something else besides gold. There was a friend of mine.…” But he didn’t go on about Wilstach; it would probably make no sense to her. “He needs killing.”

“But how will you fight him if you find him?”

“Dirty.”

Her head stirred. Boag said, “There’s no difference between one way of fighting and another. The winner is the man still alive afterward.”

“If we could help, Don Pablo and I .…”

“Yes?”

“… Do you think you could try to recover Pablo’s money as well?”

Well there had to be a reason, he supposed bleakly.

She read his mind; she sat up. “That is not the reason I came to you tonight. Did you think it was?”

He made no answer of any kind; his silence argued with her, however, and in the end she got off the cot and reached for her clothes. “I suppose it is what you must believe. I was foolish, I should have said nothing.”

“All right. Forget it.”

“I shall try to. I hope you will also.”

He reached for her. “Come on then, let’s do this again.” In relief he laughed till his stomach hurt. And when they had made love he kissed her thoroughly on the mouth. “That’s to be sure you won’t forget me right away.”

She teased him. “I have a very poor memory.”

He kissed her again.

He had been a soldier all the years; in the Army you learned not to think about women except when there were women within reach. Either you had women or you did not, and if you did not have them there was nothing but pain in thinking about them. But he knew he was going to think about Dorotea. They had not had much time together but it was enough to make him wish there was more.

There was nothing dog-in-the-manger about Don Pablo Ortiz. He summoned Boag to his chambers in the early morning and when Miguel had left the room the young Don said, “Are you a man of means, Señor Boag?”

“Do I look it?”

“You look like a penniless black gringo to me. But I have learned something about appearances.”

“I am what I look like.”

“And you seek to do battle single-handed against a cut-throat army. It would not be putting it too strongly to state that you have the life expectancy of a lit sulphur match.”

“I’d rather not put it just like that.”

“Do you know what I think, Señor? I think you are hoping you never find Jed Pickett. You are hoping you will continue to arrive at places to find that Jed Pickett is no longer there, he is still a week ahead of you. He will always be a week ahead of you, Boag; I think he was born a week ahead of you.”

“If I don’t really want to catch him why should I keep chasing him?”

“I think it gives you something to do, something to justify your existence. And I think you hate being afraid. You hate it that much.”

Boag thought, it was true. Not once in his life had he been so afraid as that night in the river in the swirling afterwash of the Uncle Sam’s paddlewheels, the water tumbling him over and over until he was sure he would drown, and knowing that if he surfaced the guns on deck would finish him. Mr. Jed Pickett had no right doing that to a man.