He had worked it out in his head. It was about 375 river miles to Yuma and the current held a steady twelve or fifteen-knot speed down the Colorado. Taking an average that meant he would be about thirty hours on the river. He’d lost some blood and there was still the vestige of shock; he couldn’t expect to spend fifteen hours a day steering the raft so he gave himself three days.

He was already thirty-six hours behind them when he started, and the steamboat would pick up another day on him—maybe two days—but still they’d only be three or four days ahead of him out of Yuma and they had the weight of that ton-and-a-half of gold to slow them down. They’d have to use pack mules or wagons.

He didn’t have a plan worked out. That would come.

In the middle of the day he let the raft drift onto the sandbank in a bend by the western shore and he rested a while and ate the last of the porcupine meat that he was going to eat; there was some left but it would go rancid by nightfall and he kept it with him only to use as bait for fishing. He made hooks out of the metal eyelets of the buttons from Wilstach’s shirt-tunic and he said, “John B., you’re helping me catch up to that son of a bitch all the time.” Slender strips of Wilstach’s clothes made his fishing line and he tied Wilstach’s brass buttons just above the hooks to attract the eyes of the fish. He imbedded the hooks in porcupine meat and let the lines trail the raft and by sundown he had six little fish aboard.

He had come far enough to risk a fire; he built one Indian-style and rubbed willow sticks over arrowweed tinder to start it going. He disliked fish anyway but raw fish was too much to contemplate; he cooked them in their skins and cut them open afterward and ate them from the inside out, spitting out the bones, hungry enough not to mind the taste.

The leg was mending all right. He still hadn’t put his weight on it and he didn’t intend to until he had to. Things were coming along, he thought. He’d need a gun and a horse but he still had the two gold eagles in his boots and that was enough to buy a gun and some cartridges, and with that he could commandeer the rest.

“I know it, John B., it’s a damn fool thing to be doing. But I got nothing else to do right now and I never expected to make old bones anyway.”

The next morning the current took him into an eddy of rapids that smashed up his raft and almost drowned him and busted his leg wounds open all over again.

The sun had both feet on his shoulders. Above the rock banks the desert winked and glittered with pyrites; heat haze wavered above the ground. When his head cleared he looked ahead across the long curve of rocks and pebbles. No reed bottoms here, it was all rock and then withered sand country above that. Nothing to build another raft with. The muddy flow of the river rushed through the sands.

A single wagon stood sagging on the near bank just below the bend.

Boag tied up his leg and started forward on one knee and both blistered hands, moving with the careless deliberation of half-drowned exhaustion.

The effort sapped him less than halfway along and he had to lie down in the sun for a time; and that was when he heard something stir.

He rolled over on his side and dug for the sharpened belt buckle in his pocket. His eyes swept the rocks in a steady arc.

A flutter of brown movement drew his attention to the left. A ragged small figure emerged from the boulder and stared at him with large grave eyes: a scrawny little girl in a filthy sack of clothes.

She spoke to Boag in Spanish, in a piping high voice: “Quién es usted?”

The little girl came toward him without fear. Boag said in Spanish, “How many of you over there?”

“There is just me. And then there are the Mexicans.”

“How many?”

“Who are you?” she said again.

“Corazon,” he said, “I do not have time to fool with you. How many are the Mexicans?”

“The old man and the woman, that is all.” Her eyes were bottomless and held distrust but not fear. Her skin was the color of old copper; she had a narrow triangle of a face and black hair tangled with burrs. Anywhere from nine to thirteen years, she had. Boag said, “You’re Indian.”

“I am Yaqui.”

“All right.”

“You are a ladrón” she told him.

He started to drag himself toward the wagon. The little girl buzzed around him like a horsefly. Finally Boag got to his feet slowly. It was the first time he’d stood up in several days and the blood fell from his head; he tightened his belly muscles and waited for the dizziness to pass. Finally he hobbled toward the wagon, putting very little weight on the bad leg. “You look like a stinking Gypsy to me.”

“I am Yaqui,” she said angrily.

She kept worrying close to his heels while he stumbled along the rock bank toward the wagon. “Don’t dog me,” he said.

“Why should I obey a ladrón negro? Have you killed many men?”

Boag hobbled to the wagon. The old man and the fat woman sat in its narrow band of shade and the old man had a Spanish percussion rifle aimed at Boag.

Boag stopped two paces from the rifle. “Put your rifle down, old man.”

The old man looked sick; he was sitting still but his chest heaved with his breathing. His face was lined as though he had slept all his life with his face pressed against a screen of rabbit wire.

Boag bent down, gripped the rifle and pulled it out of the old man’s limp grasp. It had not been cocked and it did not go off. Boag slung it across the bend of his elbow. “If you point a gun at a man it only makes good sense to cock it.”

“We have very little ammunition left,” said the old man. He sat against the wagon wheel and soon the sun would reach its midpoint and either the old man would have to suffer its rays or he would have to move underneath the wagon. He seemed to drift; his eyes kept closing slowly and popping open again. He wore dust-coated remnants of good Spanish clothing, old now, worn thin and patched.

The fat woman said, “He has the fever,” as if in apology.

“He has chills?”

“Frequently.”

“When the chills start you should cover him up. Keep him covered and get all the water down him he can swallow.”

Her eyes beseeched. “Is that all one can do?”

“What do you want me to do? Hold his hand?”

“Will he be better?”

“He’ll be better or he’ll be dead.” He turned. “You ought to tell that little girl to wear a hat in this sun.”

Boag sank down in the patch of shade beside the old man. “What happened to your mules?” The iron rim of the wheel was hot against his back.

“Two Mojaves came here the night before last night,” the woman said. “They ate our meal with us and then stole our mules and our cow.”

“No mules,” Boag said weakly. He roused himself: “How do you expect to get anywhere without mules, you damn fools?” But it was in English, this last, and they only gave him puzzled looks, the woman and the girl; the old man’s eyelids had sagged and he wasn’t listening. Boag wiped a forearm across his face and looked at the river and saw that this had been a ferry landing at one time. The wreckage of a ferry-raft was tied up on the far side of the river.

The wind came damp and sultry off the river. He was thinking that old wreck of a ferry would make a good enough raft if he could find some kind of pole to steer it with. Maybe that wagon tongue of theirs.

The old woman had got started and seemed unable to stop talking now. “We have seen much misfortune. The revolution has destroyed my husband’s properties. We must go to my uncle in California, in the county of Tuolumne.”

“What revolution?”

“In Sonora the revolution.”

They were always having revolutions in the northern provinces but he hadn’t heard about a current one. “Tell me about that.”

“How can I tell you anything while my husband is so ill? We must get him across the river. This desert is a poor place for a proud man to die. He must be brought to our family in Tuolumne.”