Boag and Wilstach just looked at the Mexican and he didn’t talk to them again for two or three days.

Gutierrez got out two days ahead of them but when Boag and Wilstach were turned loose by the sheriff on the edge of town with four-bits apiece spending money, courtesy of the Town of Ehrenburg, along came a buckboard with Gutierrez driving. “Climb aboard.”

“What’s all this?” Boag said.

“Amigo, you want a ride up the line or you want to wear out your cavalry riding boots on them stones?”

“Up the line to where, Gutierrez?”

“I got some friends want to meet you.”

“Why?”

“I told my friends you two had strong backs. I watched you work that rockpile on the road.”

Boag and Wilstach exchanged glances. Wilstach said, “I ain’t no pack mule for a Mex outfit.”

“Ain’t no Mex outfit. Man name of Jed Pickett, maybe you know him.”

Boag said, “I heard the name. Scalp hunter.”

“That was before,” Gutierrez said. “They canceled the bounty down to Sonora, you know.”

“Ain’t that a shame now,” Wilstach said.

“Come on,” Gutierrez said. He was sweating under his hat. “Let’s get moving, make a breeze on ourselves.”

“What’s Jed Pickett want with us?”

“We need a couple spare hands. You want to climb up or stand there? I’m fixing to move.”

Jed Pickett had a good campsite back in the hills a mile east of the Arizona bank of the river. There was shade under a dozen cottonwoods and a trickle of water out of a hole somebody had dug in the dry creekbed. Boag counted twenty-seven horses on the picket line and eighteen men whose evidence met the eye: bedrolls, saddles, moving human shapes. Maybe the nine spare horses were for pack-saddle work or maybe they were trade-off mounts.

So Pickett had nineteen men, minimum, counting Gutierrez and himself. “What the hell’s he need with two more men? You people planning to go to war?”

“You talk to Mr. Pickett, he’ll explain.”

“Thing is,” Wilstach said, “I don’t see no other black faces down there.”

The buckboard rutted down the hillside toward the cottonwoods. Gutierrez said, “Now listen here. I spent twenty-one days on that chain gang just to pick up men for Mr. Pickett. I didn’t enjoy it a whole lot. You two don’t work out here, my twenty-one days is wasted. Mr. Pickett ain’t gonna like that and I ain’t neither.”

“Now I could get all broke up about that,” Wilstach said. “Couldn’t you, Boag?”

“You two,” Gutierrez said in a friendlier voice, “was the only ones out of that whole chain gang I thought was worth bringing to Mr. Pickett. That ought to mean something.”

“We’re here,” Boag said. “We may as well hear what the man has to say.”

Five men who looked as if they might have helped burn Lawrence, Kansas, stood at the edge of the cottonwoods with rifles in their crook’d elbows when the buckboard came down into camp. Boag made them out to be a Mexican and three hardscrabble whites and an Indian, possibly Yaqui. This was a mixed gang of the kind you didn’t find much in the Southwest; the kind of gang you found usually in Mexico, which was sensible since that was where the gang had come from.

The five rawhiders grinned at Gutierrez with five shows of bad teeth. Flat curious glances scraped Boag and Wilstach. Gutierrez said, “Hóla, chingados,” by way of greeting to the five men, and the buckboard lurched into camp past them.

A man stepped out of the big tent. Big bones, Boag noticed. A leather face and brown hair thatched over his eyes, large hands covered with brown hair and a pair of revolvers cross-belted at his hips. From the man’s eyes Boag judged he was not Mr. Pickett; to boss a crew like this you needed harder eyes than those.

“Ben Stryker,” Gutierrez explained. “Segundo.”

Boag didn’t stir but it was good to have his judgment confirmed.

Ben Stryker made a half-turn away from the buckboard as it stopped. “Mr. Pickett sir,” he called.

The tent flaps parted and a man emerged, straightened from his stoop and put his contemptuous stare on Boag and Wilstach. “This all you could find, Gutierrez?”

“Good men, you said. I could find plenty of the other kind.”

“Shit,” Mr. Pickett said. He spat the word out as if it were a fly that had buzzed into his mouth.

Mr. Pickett’s face was rough and pitted and as motionless as a professional gambler’s. He had a stiff blond mustache. He wasn’t an oversized man. He flicked a sideways glance at Ben Stryker who loomed a head taller. “What do they call themselves?”

“You could ask us,” Wilstach said. “We got tongues.”

Boag sat on the buckboard seat in no hurry to get down. Gutierrez was descending to the ground apologetically. Stryker said, “Mr. Pickett don’t like to look up at a man he’s talking to.”

“Then he’ll have to grow two feet,” Boag said and stepped down. He was taller than Stryker and a lot taller than Mr. Pickett.

Mr. Pickett said, “All right, you’ve got size and a tart tongue. What else can you say for yourself?”

“Nothing until I know what kind of auction block I’m on.”

“You know who I am?”

Boag had already reviewed what little he knew about Mr. Jed Pickett. During the war Mr. Pickett had ramrodded a guerrilla column in the Border States, a stringer for Bloody Bill Anderson, but that had been twenty years ago and men got older and sometimes soft where they sat and soft where they did their thinking. Mr. Pickett didn’t seem that kind, but he’d been a two-bit leader of two-bit men long enough to get arrogant. Down in Sonora they’d put a fifty-dollar bounty on Apache scalps and Mr. Pickett had been one of the gringo bounty-hunters who had made a living off that until Boag and the rest of the Tenth under General Crook had run Geronimo to ground. So Sonora had canceled the scalphunters’ bounty and the Jed Picketts were out of work just like the Boags and Wilstaches. It did give them something in common and that was why Boag had come along to see about all this.

“I know who you are,” he answered.

Gutierrez said quickly, “These two both Tenth Cav, Mr. Pickett. The big one was a sergeant.”

“Then they know their way around horses and guns.” Mr. Pickett fastened his unfathomable eyes on Boag. “What do you go by?”

“Boag.”

“You?”

“John B. Wilstach.”

“Line trooper?”

“Corporal,” Wilstach said with his rowdy little grin. “Corporal five times and busted back to line trooper four times.”

“Boag, you have a front name?”

“Just Boag.” They’d called him Sergeant for a first name so many years he’d forgot about the real one. Leave it forgot, he decided; it had never done him much service.

“You both in the Sierra Madre with Crook?”

“Aeah,” Wilstach said.

It seemed enough to satisfy Mr. Pickett. He turned back to his tent and lifted the flap. “Fill them in, Ben.”

Stryker went over to a half-dying campfire and indicated a black coffeepot. “Want any?”

“If you ain’t got nothing stronger,” Wilstach agreed.

“Tequila in my bedroll, you want.”

“Yeah,” Wilstach said, “yeah.”

“Boag?”

“Tequila’s fine.” He hadn’t had a drink in thirty days and more.

Stryker broke out the bottle and passed it around. They were all mighty friendly here and Boag suspected every bit of it.

Stryker explained about the gold bullion in the express-company office on the Johnson-Yaeger pier in Hardyville. “It’s been all winter since the last riverboat made it up the river that far. They got a lot of gold waiting.”

“How much is a lot?” Boag said.

Pickett’s men had drifted through all the camps above Hardyville in the hills. When they’d put all the bits and pieces together it began to look as if the camps had delivered a lot of tonnage of raw ore to the smelter in Hardyville and when you discounted exaggerations and rumors it still looked to add up to pretty near a ton and a half of bullion.