Then he lost the spoor for more than a week. No one to the south or west had seen the gang. It was farm country getting down toward the Gulf; there were plenty of people, too many for the rawhiders to have passed unseen. So they must have doubled back. Boag rode back to Nuri and singled out the alcalde who liked to drink.

“It is good to see you again, Señor Boag.”

“Let me buy you a mescal, alcalde.”

“Simpático. Like your friend the tall gringo.”

“He bought you a drink too, did he?”

“Only four days ago it was.”

Boag grinned to hide his excitement. “So they did come back this way.”

“Nine of them did. With their pack mules.” The alcalde lifted his mescal in toast. “Salud y amor, Señor Boag. I think your friend was very glad to hear you were looking for him.”

“You told him about me.”

“Yes of course. He said it had been a long time since he had seen you and he looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing you again.”

“I don’t suppose he told you where that might be.”

“Well he did say if you should return I could tell you he was going to spend a few days in San Ignacio. He hopes you will find him there before he has to leave.”

“I’ll just bet he does,” Boag said.

So Ben Stryker’s bunch knew Boag was behind them. Knew his name, from the alcalde. He wondered what they thought about that. It had to worry them a little. But he wished he hadn’t told the alcalde his name because if Stryker had known only that a black man was looking for him it would have been more mysterious.

San Ignacio was a foothill village well to the east of the Yaqui River. It was a hot place built on the south slope of a barren hill; a stupid place to build a town. There were ’dobe huts with thatched roofs scattered around the hillside with dirt paths worn from one ’dobe to the next but there was nothing regular enough to be called a street. Even the church looked poor.

Boag reconnoitered from a distance. He rode all the way around the village and then approached it from the upper end. He supposed he was looking for a dark horse with palomino mane and tail; he didn’t see one. He only saw two horses at all. One was tethered to a picket rope behind somebody’s hut. The other had a saddle on it and was tied to the hitching rail in front of a building that probably served as cantina and general store and post office and whatever else the town had need of.

His anticipation had cooled by now. He didn’t see any place in this village where you could hide fifteen horses and mules. Of course it was possible they had put a couple of animals in each hut and paid the villagers to keep silent. But that seemed an awful lot of preparation to go through if they knew there was only one man looking for them and they couldn’t even be sure he would ever come this way.

More likely they’d leave one man here to see about Boag. That would be the horse hitched in front of the cantina. It had a Mexican saddle but that didn’t mean anything, Mr. Pickett’s men had been in Mexico off and on for years and of course some of them like Gutierrez were Mexicans themselves.

He kind of hoped it would be Gutierrez. He wanted to meet up with Gutierrez again.

He had no patience to wait for nightfall, which perhaps would have been the wiser thing to do because in daylight there was no way at all to approach the cantina without being seen from inside it.

He sized up the cantina’s openings. There were windows on all four sides, but not many of them and not large ones; in these hot places you didn’t build in a whole lot of windows for the sun to beat on. The front of the place actually offered the best approach; there was only one window, set high in the wall to the right of the door. The door was shut against the heat and it didn’t seem to have any openings in it big enough to sight a gun through.

Boag dismounted fifty yards from the cantina and approached from an angle that kept the saddled horse at the hitch rail between him and that window. They could see him coming but they couldn’t get a clear shot.

With his shoulders braced stiff against a half-expected bullet he entered what might have been the town square if it had been more regular and had more buildings. His eyes flicked all the corners in sight, the huts and the church and the cantina.

A woman in a loose frayed dress walked slowly across toward one hut, supporting her pregnant abdomen in both hands. A dog lay asprawl and panted in the strip of shade beside the church.

The feel of the place was wrong; demons were on the prowl. Boag stopped sixty feet from the saddled horse and turned a slow circle on his heels.

The church door opened and a soldier came out onto the top step. A Mexican infantryman with a .45-90 rolling-block rifle. It was held across his chest at the port-arms position. The soldier just stood there, he didn’t make a move.

The pregnant woman stepped aside to let another soldier walk out of the hut she was bound for. She curled past the soldier and went inside. The soldier also held his rifle at port-arms and watched Boag with weary indifference.

Soldiers stepped out of all the huts around the ragged square.

In the end a Lieutenant of Infantry emerged from the cantina with a corporal behind his left shoulder. The Lieutenant’s holster flap was unbuttoned, but he didn’t bother reaching for the revolver. “You will abandon your gunbelt please, Señor Boag.”

“What the hell for?”

“You are under arrest by authority of Governor Ignacio Pesquiera.”

“For what?”

“I was not told the charges,” the Lieutenant said. He gestured wide to encompass the eight soldiers and their rifles. “Do you care to fight the drop, Señor?”

Boag looked around at them all. He’d been so long in the Cavalry he hadn’t even thought about Infantry. Not everybody had a horse.

It was pretty elaborate just to put the grab on one man. A Lieutenant and a detail of soldiers—rurales, they were; militia of Sonora.

Well if they had wanted to kill him they’d have done it. They wanted to talk to him. He would find out what it was all about.

Boag dropped the gunbelt in the dirt.

Laced with hurts he lay in the jail at Ures and in spite of the crowded stench of it the warmth and the pain enveloped him and sleep rolled his head against the wall.

It had been two days’ march down from San Ignacio and in Ures they had thrown him into jail without explanation. He kept waiting for someone to come and question him or accuse him of something but for four days they had done nothing except feed him slop twice a day. From that or from the water he had got dysentery, for which one of the guards had prepared a concoction which he dished out to everyone on alternate mornings; it was the old remedy of bones burnt to ashes and it worked well enough to keep you from losing your mind. But that left Boag more free to hate.

It was a helpless anger. No one told him why he was here. On the fourth day he began to rage around the jail because at least it would make them pay attention to him and perhaps that would cause them to tell him something useful. But they only worked him over with pistol-butts and riding quirts.

Like most Mexican jails it was not divided into cells. It was a big cavernous room which no one had cleaned in years. The filth was overpowering. There were chamberpots but not enough of them. Men with dysentery occupied them, squatting, for half-hour stretches in twisted agony while other men could no longer wait their turns and defecated on the floor.

Boag spent hours considering how he might tear something apart that he could use to pry the bars open. There was nothing. The place was not all that well built and if he had had a friend on the outside it would have been easy in the night to goad a mule into kicking a hole through the dry adobe wall. The floor was rammed earth and it might be possible to dig out but that would take forever and there were no tools.