The wagon’s stripe of shade was very thin. Boag said, “You’d better get him under the wagon.”

He sat frowning at the river while the old woman struggled with the old man’s weight. “Nina, come and help me.”

The little girl moved reluctantly; they struggled and the old man tried to assist them but he seemed weak to the point of helplessness. It was curious he had been able to hold the rifle.

The old woman sat down by Boag. “There is no one to rob here except ourselves, and we are poor, it would not be worth your trouble. You must either go back in the desert or swim across the river. But you cannot go back, for you have no horse. What happened to your horse?”

“You will hurt yourself talking so much.”

“I have nothing to do but talk, and you have little to do but listen. You cannot return into the desert with that injured leg. You must swim across. I only ask that you carry the end of the rope and tie it to the ferryboat. When you have done that, we can pull the ferry across to us.”

“You have a long enough rope?”

“We have three riatas and if they are tied together they are very long.”

“You are mistaken. Three riatas would be two hundred feet, perhaps three hundred feet of rope. From here to the other shore is four times that distance. Perhaps more.”

“There must be a method,” she said with stubborn helplessness.

“What if I say you can die without my help?”

“Then that is what we shall do, is it not?”

“What if you do get to the far side? You still have no mules.”

“But we shall be in California then.”

“What difference does that make? It is still the same desert.”

The old woman seemed puzzled and confused. He saw that she had been doing the same thing Boag had been doing for several days: thinking ahead just one step at a time because if you thought it all the way through you had to give it up. The old woman had thought no farther than the other side of the river.

He could get across the river by himself all right. The old ferry would be an adequate raft.

Boag crawled down to the ferry landing. The flies were numerous but he paid them no mind.

When the little girl came down to the dock Boag laid his hand on the rifle. “You’re a witch. Get away.”

The little girl said, “They keep me because I can work but they hate me because I am Yaqui and they know the Yaqui is better than they are. You are a ladrón, you can understand. My father was a warrior and he killed many of them.”

“And they killed him, didn’t they?”

The little girl ran away. Boag picked up the rifle and hobbled back to the wagon. The wound wasn’t as bad as he’d feared this morning; he felt better about the idea of a swim across.

The old man was breathing heavily beneath the wagon, a flush on his cheeks. The little girl wandered away into the rocks.

The woman said, “The truth is that her mother was not a Yaqui. Her father may have been. A mountain thief, I am sure.”

“Your mouth flaps,” Boag told her.

“Would you shoot me for that, tough one?” A plump finger waggled at him. “You will not shoot, but you will leave us to die.”

“Old woman, I have trouble enough of my own.” He made his way down to the river. The flow was fast and steady, and frightening. He bounced the rifle in the circle of his fist.

Finally he went back to the wagon. “Listen to me. I will take you to Yuma—I go that way anyway.”

If the woman had feelings she gave no indication. “How will you do this?”

“Swim across, pole the ferry over to this side. The current will drive me far downstream before I reach this bank so you must get him on his feet and come down along the bank to meet me.”

He went back down to the crumbled landing and scowled at the river. This morning it had almost killed him.

The little girl trailed him there. Boag had the rifle in his fist and the little girl said, “You cannot take that with you.”

“You are right.”

“I will keep it for you.”

He didn’t trust her, but he trusted her not to be able to use the rifle. He handed it to her and stepped into the water. His toes felt the suck of the mud bottom. He stepped out again and stripped off his pants and shirt and placed them in a neat bundle on the landing. “Bring these to me also.”

“All right, ladrón.”

The sun was very hot on his bare flesh. He moved out into the current, feeling the force of the river against him. It rushed warm toward the south. He struck out into it.

In Boag’s judgment they made seventy miles before nightfall. Delay annoyed him but the old man was too weak to make a night trip of it. They camped in reed bottoms.

Boag lay on his back with one knee bent and the Spanish rifle across his stomach. After the fire was laid the little girl came and sat beside Boag and talked softly. “If we go to California the old man will die, and she will have her people. They will have no use for me.”

“Then you will have to learn to look out for yourself.”

The woman propped the old man up against the raft and they ate. The food was meager. Afterward Boag picked a spot to sleep, and did not awaken until sunrise. In the morning he had a look at the leg. Swollen but not much pus; the scabs were tight, the leg itched. Good signs.

The old man lay on his back, his mouth open and slack. Boag looked away with his eyebrows drawn together. He pitied them all and he was angry because he had to be pitying them; they were getting in the way.

The sun blasted his face. Heat glistened on the muddy surface of the Colorado and the water rushed past the banks, tearing bits of it away.

The woman crouched by the old man. “He is dead.”

They buried him in the riverbank. The old woman mumbled words and Boag filled in the grave and tamped it with a stone.

“That was kind,” the woman said.

Boag grunted.

“But there are still the three of us,” she said.

“No, there are the two of you and there is the one of me.”

“And we are not three? You have no sums?”

“I have no ties,” Boag said. “I’m a fool. I ought to let you get across the river by yourselves, the old man did.”

“And now you are a philosopher? Besides, we no longer go across, we go down the river, yes?”

“Yuma is as far as I go with you.”

“That is understood.”

The little girl waited until the woman went away to kill the fire; the little girl said, “She will sit in the sun in Yuma and die.”

“She doesn’t care about you, niña. Why think about her?”

“She does. She is only gruff.”

“I thought you hated her.”

“I do.”

“Make up your mind.”

“What are you going to do after we come to Yuma?” “Leave me alone,” he growled, and set his good leg in the mud to shoulder the ferry-raft into the river.

By the next night he was tired of them both, tired of the little girl’s chatter and the woman’s sour body smell.

In the dusk he poled the ferry-raft through the crosscurrents of the Gila fork. The Gila rose somewhere in the mountains over in New Mexico or far-eastern Arizona and came down the White Mountains, fed by the Salt River and some others, and went past Phoenix and a few no-account towns and finally flowed into the Colorado here a few miles north of Yuma. Buffalo-soldiering, Boag had followed the pilgrim highway along the south bank of the Gila a good many times across the desert. It was nobody’s favorite river.

He got the raft through the turmoil and they floated on down. Boag said, “You said you would tell me about the revolution in Sonora.”

The little girl watched them both with her big angry eyes. The woman sighed. “They are a people who must be slaves or tyrants. Revolution only means exchanging one group of tyrants for another.”

“Who are they this time?”

“Pesquiera is the governor. There are bandits and rebels trying to overthrow him.”