“So you have to prove something now,” Don Pablo said in his voice that was half a wheeze. “You will of course get killed and that will be the proof that you were not afraid. The only one who will know it is a lie is yourself, and of course when you are dead no one can force you to confess it.”

“You’re a little deep for me now.”

“Señor Boag, I have seen the eyes you exchange with Dorotea.”

Boag stiffened.

Don Pablo waggled his frail hand. “Did she visit you in the night? I suppose it does not matter. I will be truthful. If you were a man who could afford to buy a villa like this one then I should not object to anything you did; I would be pleased to see Dorotea go with a man who can make her happy. I suspect if you asked her to ride away with you this morning she would do it without a backward look.”

“You’re wrong.”

“No.”

“Shall we ask her?” Boag said in the most formal Spanish he knew. He got up to move toward the door.

“Wait. Hear me out.”

“Get it said, then.”

“I have accustomed her to a certain kind of life. I can no longer provide it myself. But when I look into your future I must ask you to get on your horse and go. For Dorotea’s sake, no es verdad?”

Boag studied the ravaged face. “That was what I aimed to do anyway. But after I go you ask her. The trouble with both of you, you don’t trust each other enough.”

“You are very kind,” Don Pablo wheezed. “I hope we meet again.”

When Boag rode away she was standing just outside the gate and she was still watching him, one arm raised to shade her eyes. When he had his last look at her from a low hill four miles out, she was only a speck.

After that it was days and days on horseback, going from town to town trying to ask questions without being shot for it.

It took a week to get a line on Mr. Pickett. Along the Rio Bavispe in a town called Huásabas there was a fat man in a cantina who knew Mr. Pickett by sight from the old scalp-bounty days and said he had seen Mr. Pickett ride through the town two weeks ago with six hardcase riders and several pack animals. So they had split the bunch up again. Heading for where?

The fat man said Mr. Pickett had headed out up the mountain toward Granados, but in that town Boag found no trace of the rawhiders. He cast around for spoor in the memories of goatherds and vaqueros and mountain people of indeterminate occupation; it took another four days before he turned up a trace of Mr. Pickett’s passage at Mazatán, west of the Yaqui River. Again Mr. Pickett had been seen riding away to the south; this time it was said he had nine tough men with him and at least half a dozen pack mules. For rawhiders with a lot of spending money they had been curiously well behaved, they hadn’t treed the town the way gringo gangs liked to do. Possibly Mr. Pickett had given orders to be on good behavior because that way nobody would notice them, but it was having the opposite effect because the town had noticed how well behaved these toughs were.

The trail was not getting any warmer but Boag was patient. He had nothing else to do.

It was getting on for the middle of May; along the Yaqui River the heat was intense. Boag’s sorrel wore out and he had to give ten Yankee dollars along with it in trade for a sturdy blue roan mare. He was nearly down to the twenty dollars he had started with before he’d rolled the poker player in Yuma.

Here and there he passed the signs of combat and the tracks of wheeled cannon carts. Rebels and troops were having it out but the warfare in the countryside didn’t seem to have much effect on the villagers Boag talked to; perhaps they had lived with revolutions so long they had got bored with them.

In Nuri there was a mescal-swilling alcalde who was glad to have a stranger to drink with; the alcalde was a gossip and a philosopher. From three hours of his talk Boag gleaned a few shavings. Fourteen horsemen, leading nine pack mules, had passed through the area more than two weeks earlier; no one had recognized any of them but it was thought probable that they had to do with the revolution, so no one approached them.

“Which side?”

“Who knows,” said the alcalde in his cups. “Does it matter?”

The riders and pack animals had moved on to the west, back toward the Yaqui River.

Boag went that way. But it was not until four days later in Cocorit that he found traces of them again. A talkative bartender in the cantina on the central square. “Yes there were fourteen men, I counted them because I was concerned about how many bullet holes there might be after they left. But they behaved themselves with distinction. They were here the one night, very courteous to everyone but they kept mainly to themselves. In the morning they traded a few horses with the stable man, Cruz, and they left.”

“Their leader,” Boag said. “A man with a yellow mustache and pits in the skin of his face? Not a very big man?”

“No, I do not recall him that way at all, Señor. The leader was a very large man in fact.”

Boag thought about that. “A lot of brown hair on the backs of his hands?”

“Exactly, Señor, that is the man.”

Ben Stryker, the segundo.

But where did that put Mr. Pickett? If he wasn’t traveling with his men, where was he?

Anyhow there were at least six or seven men missing. There had been twenty or more of them at first; now the reports were fairly consistent, thirteen or fourteen men at most.

So Mr. Pickett was off somewhere else with half a dozen men. Doing what?

It looked as if Boag was following the wrong bunch. But it was the only trail he had to follow.

Cruz at the livery barn was a nervous little chatterbox who chewed on coco leaf while he talked. Yes he still had three of the horses the gringos had traded; they were in the corral, would the señor like him to point them out?

Boag didn’t know why he bothered to look. He’d never seen their horses before anyway. They’d had a remuda of fresh mounts ready for them on the Gila River where they’d beached the Uncle Sam under the trees. He hadn’t ever set eyes on those horses so it wasn’t surprising that none of the mounts in Cruz’s corral looked familiar.

It was just that it helped give him the feeling he still had some kind of contact with them. The thread was frayed but it was still a thread.

“Was there among them a man with a yellow mustache and a pitted face?”

Cruz did not recall such a man although of course there were a dozen men or more and it was many weeks ago and he could not remember faces all that clearly. “But the leader was a striking man, striking, a very tall man, he spoke Spanish very well but with a Yankee drawl, his accent was not so good as yours, Señor.”

“How many horses did you sell them?”

“Five, it was all I had to spare.”

“Any of them have distinctive markings?”

Cruz had to think about it, visibly. Boag found a silver peso in his Levi’s and placed it on the flat-sawed top of a corral post. Cruz covered it with his hand. “There was one sorrel with a very pale mane and tail, I recall. Almost like a palomino’s mane and tail, yet the horse itself was very dark red or brown.”

“Any of them have a split shoe, anything like that?”

“You mean something that would leave a hoofprint you could recognize. No, Señor, I recall nothing like that.”

“The brand on this horse with the palomino’s mane?”

“That was a horse from Chihuahua, Señor, it had several brands and I believe the most recent was the big circle of the Ochoa rancho.”

When Boag rode out of the place Cruz’s voice followed him: “I hope you find your friends.”