“Just so you don’t drop me too hard, Captain, there’s a ranch down south of here belongs to Don Pablo Ortiz.”

“I think I know where that is.”

“You going that way?”

“We can make a little detour.”

“That’s mighty kind of you, Captain.”

“You’re a hell of a soldier, Boag. If you pull out of this I’ll want to talk to you again.”

“Still trying to recruit me, hey?”

“I need a segundo with his head screwed on straight. My God, Boag, you don’t know how bad I need that. Who put that slug in you? Rurales?”

“Prison guard, I reckon.”

“Must have been a .45–90. Big sonofabitching hole in you, Boag.”

“Well it’s the second time this year I’ve been shot up on Mr. Pickett’s account.”

“Third time they won’t shoot you up, boy, they’ll shoot you down.”

“There won’t be no third time until I’ve got Mr. Pickett under a gun, Captain. I promise you that.”

“You just get some rest, Boag. We’ll rig a litter for you.”

He didn’t remember much of that trip either. They rigged a travois behind one of the horses and that was all right dragging on the pine needles but when they got down into dry country the damn thing started bouncing on rocks in the ground and it was holy hell. Boag passed out and didn’t come to until nightfall.

Coffee with molasses in it. Some kind of thin soup. Toasted corn fritter. He got most of it down before he went under again.

Captain McQuade had some kind of Mexican medicine man who claimed to have been a medical orderly under Juarez. A wizened up old man with a deerskin pouch on a lanyard suspended from his neck. Herb potions and for all Boag knew crow-entrails. But when the son of a bitch cauterized Boag’s wound with a fire-hot running-iron Boag was ready to kill him except the pain knocked him out before he could figure out how.

Next day at noon camp they pried his jaw open to feed him some solid meat in little tiny chunks. Captain McQuade said, “Almost there, Boag. Sometime tonight.”

“Don’t you boys ever sleep?”

“We’ve got a train to meet down on the Yaqui.”

“You’re always going to meet trains, Captain, ever’ time I see you.”

“Boag, there’s nothing quite so satisfying in this life as the sight of a federal armored train blowing sky high off the tracks. It makes a marvelous potion for a jaded man. You want to try it sometime.”

“Well that do sound like plenty of fun.”

“Yes indeed it is. Those scabbed-up holes down in the calf of your leg, that the other time Pickett shot you?”

“That’s right, Captain. They ain’t very good shots as you can see.”

“They hit you, didn’t they?”

“They didn’t kill me, and that was their mistake.”

“Boag, you keep giving them enough practice and they’ll get good enough to kill you.”

“How come you keep trying to talk me out of this?”

“Because I think you’re a damn fool to keep after Jed Pickett. You’re biting off more than ten men can chew. I don’t want you dead, Boag, I want you in my army.”

“Must be plenty of mustered-out Buffalo soldiers you could hire, Captain.”

“I’m sure there are. But you were the best combat soldier in the Tenth Cavalry. That’s not flattery, that’s God’s truth. I even heard General Crook himself remark on one occasion that we could either send a squad of soldiers out to do a certain job or we could send Sergeant Boag.”

“I never heard that before.”

“Nobody wanted to give you a swelled head. When a man’s a superb fighter you don’t need to tell him about it, he knows it for himself.”

“Yes sir, I know what I’m good at.”

“You’re good at soldiering. Right now I’m the only army you’ve got, Boag.”

“You ain’t the only war I’ve got.”

“Why you’re just doing this for the sheer hell of it, aren’t you?”

“Captain, Mr. Pickett murdered my friend John B. Wilstach. I expect he owes me something on that account, not to mention some gold bullion we got in dispute.”

“I recall Wilstach. Spent more time in the guardhouse than out.”

“Well he was my friend, Captain.”

“Making an ass out of yourself won’t bring him back, will it?”

“I believe maybe it’ll make him feel a little bit better, wherever he is.”

“That’s a pretty wild assumption to die for.”

“You’re sure as hell a stubborn man, Captain.”

“Not half as stubborn as you.” Captain McQuade got up on his feet. “Time to move out.”

“Do me one more favor, Captain? Put me up on a saddle? That travvy’s fixin’ to shake me to pieces.”

“I’ll talk to the medico. If he says it’s all right.”

The wizened old medicine man came. Boag showed his distrust. The old man grinned through a few bad teeth that remained in the caved-in remains of his mouth; cackled and went away, and Boag felt very depressed but when they came to pick him up they put him on a blanket-draped saddle and Boag looked more kindly on the medicine man.

After the column started moving he changed his mind. If the travois had been pain, this was agony.

He was in and out of delirium for days. Afterward he decided it had something to do with safety, the disappearance of challenge. There was no immediate threat to him and so it was safe to go loose, to let the body take over; and simple impatience wasn’t enough to overcome that. Every fiber went slack and he despised himself; he had never tolerated weakness in himself.

He dreamed frequently of the señora; he imagined her—naked, pink-brown, tender; his hands remembered the feel of her hard tight little ass and her velvet breasts.

“Stop that,” she said. “Not now.” She pushed his hand away.

He blinked up at her. He felt hung-over as hell. “Did I have a good time last night?”

“What?”

He recognized the room and recollection trickled into him. “Uh. How’s Don Pablo?”

“He is the same.”

“How am I?”

“You ought to be dead but you are not.”

He didn’t want to twist his head to look down at himself. “Is it mending?”

“Yes.” She smiled slowly; her cross act had been fraudulent. “You have a very tough body.”

“It’s that black hide. Tough as armor.”

He yelped when she pinched him. “Tough as armor,” she said.

Then he slept again, warmed by the echo of her laughter. She must have bathed him because the prison stench was no longer in his nostrils. He had a picture of that scene and he wished he had been awake at the time.

Sometimes when he opened his eyes she was there; sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes there was daylight at the window. He had no way of counting the nights and days. He hovered in a kind of daydream for a very long time, not unconscious and yet not awake. Fevers sweated him and at times he was frozen through to the bones.

Once she said to him, “I am so glad you asked your friends to bring you back here.”

“There was no other place to go. I’m sorry to be a burden. Now you have to look after two sick men.”

“When I was a whore I dreamed of being a nurse.” Her hand rested on him with a natural intimacy.

On another day Don Pablo came into the room and smiled when he saw Boag was awake. “You feel better now?”

“Getting better all the time,” he said and instantly regretted it because it mocked Don Pablo’s condition and he hadn’t meant that; but an apology would only make it worse so he let it drift away uncorrected.

“Dorotea is very glad you chose our house for refuge.”

“She said that.”

“In a strange way I am glad too.”

“Why?”

“We have very few friends any more. You chose this house because you thought of us as friends. It was the señora of course, it was not me; but nevertheless I am gratified. Can you understand this?”

“I think I can,” Boag said and it occurred to him that with the possible exception of Captain McQuade—who had an axe to grind—he also had no other friends.