“You’d better let us in then.”

Boag heard the grinding of a chain. That would be the mechanism that opened the gate.

The guard with the torch had reached the first lantern and was touching the lantern with the flame when Boag shot him down. The torch rolled away on the cobblestones and the guard crabbed his way back toward the steps, trying to get away from the light that pinned him. The troops were charging into the compound now and Boag waited for them to get close enough; they started to dismount and deploy and that was when Boag started shooting. It drove most of them toward cover and Boag ran out onto the cobblestones, plunging into the rearing confusion of horses before anybody could get a clear shot at him.

He caught a horse by the reins and lifted himself into the saddle. Laid himself flat across it and whacked the horse’s flank with a revolver, hard. The horse reared and he saw its wickedly rolling eye; it came down running and he steered it toward the gate. Over the pound of hoofs and the shouts and the gunshots he could hear the winches grinding and he saw the gates swinging; they were trying to close them, to shut him in, but the horse squeezed through and Boag filled his lungs and bellowed:

“By God old Boag made it!”

And then the rifles on top of the wall opened up and he felt something slam into his back. It almost knocked him off the horse.

Christ I’ve been shot.

He clutched the saddle and kicked the beast frantically. The horse swept him into the alleys of Ures and the shooting behind him stopped, and there was no sound but the clatter of the horse’s shoes on the stones and the thunder of blood in Boag’s ears while the world began to reel.

In a midnight-dark, midnight-silent street he reined in. He could feel the moist warm blood along his flank; the bullet had sliced across the lower part of his back on the right side and traveled through part of his thigh before it went out. This was no time to take stock of that; he would worry later about what vital parts might have been hit—or he would die and not have to worry about it.

He had to give them something else to think about.

The store ahead had a porch roof that ran the length of the boardwalk in front of it. Fish-oil lanterns hung under the porch roof. From the saddle he reached out and plucked a lantern off its hook, unscrewed the filler cap and threw the lantern against the wall. The oil splashed out and a little fire started there. He guided the horse ten feet along the board-walk and picked off another lamp and threw it down too; he went the length of the block throwing lamps on the board-walk and when he galloped away up the street the porch was starting to burn healthily. Give it five minutes and the whole block would be in flames. It was the dry season and there was a good strong breeze.

His head was getting fuzzy. Have to get out of this town. I lit enough fires for one night. He felt the blood running and thought maybe they had put out Boag’s fire but he wasn’t going to give it up before he had to. He whacked the horse to a canter and clung wildly to the pitching saddle and fled the town of Ures.

Later he had a hard time sorting out the rest of that night in his memory; it never came together in a piece, there were only isolated instants. Like a night battle seen by the light of its artillery flashes.

Ures lay in the slot of a valley with the slopes of the Sierra Madre on both sides of it. The main road out led down the Rio Sonora to the provincial capital at Hermosillo and then to the Gulf. Boag had enough alertness left in him not to take the main road. He remembered putting the horse up into the mountains. He thought vaguely he was heading east but he wasn’t sure and it really made no difference to speak of; he had no destination in mind except escape.

It was Yaqui country, bandit country; not many travelers were fool enough to travel it, especially by night. But there wasn’t much they could do to Boag that hadn’t already been done.

When he got behind the first rising hill and the lights of town were blotted out by the land mass he stopped the horse and stripped off his shirt and made a ragged sort of binding for his wound. He was suffering from shock, he’d seen it in combat and recognized it in himself; chills and a kind of euphoria and a circling faintness with the blood drifting from his head. What you did for a case like Boag’s was lay him down somewhere warm and wrap him up in clean bandages and warm blankets and get hot soup down him and hope he didn’t die on you.

For a while he tried to persuade himself that if the bullet had cut any important organs he’d have died by now. It wasn’t very convincing; he’d known men shot in the guts or the kidneys who’d lasted a week and then expired.

But Boag only had one thing left and that was the knowledge that he wasn’t going to give up.

Later he recalled falling off the horse. It took him somewhere between five minutes and two hours to get back on the saddle. First he had to persuade the unnerved horse to stand still and ignore the smell of fresh blood. Then he had to hitch himself up an inch at a time into the saddle, and every inch drove splinters of red agony through all his fibers, and most of the time he believed he was not going to make it because the muscles just didn’t have the strength any more; the body was ready to quit before the head was, but Boag forced the body to obey.

The rest of it was mostly blacked out and never came back to him.

Somewhere in the early morning he had a few moments of awareness. The horse had stopped to drink out of a stream. Sunlight flickered through the pine branches and dappled the stream with dancing pins. The sunrise mist hung above the water and there was dew on the ground. It was a very peaceful scene filled with beauty and Boag thought it was probably the approach to the Pearly Gates, which surprised him a little because he didn’t expect they were going to let him in there, especially after setting the Bible on fire.

But then he thought, Hell I’m a good soldier, I’ll stand on my record. He remembered where he was: he had to get back to the troop and get the news to General Crook’s headquarters that Al Sieber had found out where the Geronimo bunch was hiding, the rancheria in the Sierra. Now which way was it to Captain Gatewood’s camp?

He was falling off the horse when a couple of Tenth Cavalrymen caught him and carried him over into the sunshine and laid him down and threw a blanket across him.

A little later he woke up again and Captain McQuade was looking down into his face. Boag knew it was part of the same dream.

Captain McQuade said, “What the hell, Boag?”

“Captain we got to get word to General Crook. Sieber’s got Geronimo located back in there.”

“That’s all right, Boag, we’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

Captain McQuade was talking to one of the troopers: “Let’s get that wound dressed.”

They gave him water to drink and then Boag slipped away again. When he surfaced the sun was straight up in the sky and Captain McQuade came striding along the company street; the men were packing up their tents. Someone fed Boag and Captain McQuade crouched down on one knee. “How you making it, Boag?”

“I thought that was a dream, Captain. What you doing here?”

“According to you I’m still looking for Geronimo.” Captain McQuade squinted at the sky. “We’ve got to keep moving, Boag, these hills are crawling with federates. Think you can sit a horse?”

“I guess I’ll have to. The rurales are after me.”

“What for?”

“I busted out of their jail down in Ures. Killed a couple of them.”

“Boag you’re incredible. Look, I’m heading south. Anywhere we can drop you?”