While they gathered slowly around him, Provo’s eyes dreamily tracked a scorpion under the shade of the rock shelf on the slope beyond the road. Its tail stinger was curled up over its back. Portugee Shiraz and Lee Roy Tucker sat down in the road, hammers across their laps. The rest crowded around, stinking of sweat, staying on their feet, and there was a lot of excited talking until Provo yelled at them to quiet down.

“We’ve got to split this bunch up,” he said when he had their attention. “We’ve got maybe three hours to get shet of this place before the noon water wagon comes. I want them to find tracks going every which direction. Alcorn and Pete Cruz, you take Torres and those two over there and walk north along the river till you get to Quartzsite.”

Tom Alcorn said, “Jesus, that’s eighty-five mile, Zach, we can’t just——”

“You can—or maybe you’d rather end up back in the hole? You can walk it in two days, drink out of the river, keep out of sight if you hear anything, duck into the river if you hear dogs. You find yourselves a blacksmith shop in Quartzsite after dark sometime and get rid of those irons and then you’re on your own.”

Lee Roy Tucker picked up the hammer in his lap. His adenoidal mouth was open; he was thin as a sapling, with pinched eyes and buck teeth. “Who elected you to give awders, Zach?”

Provo’s riot gun stirred. “I won’t waste time arguing. Alcorn, get your bunch moving. Now.”

“Shee-yit,” said Lee Roy Tucker, but he stayed put and watched Tom Alcorn and the other four walk away over the hill without remark. They were happy to go: Pete Cruz was talking about his woman in Guaymas when they walked out of earshot beyond the hilltop.

Provo singled out four more and sent them west, told them to wade across the Colorado and lose themselves in the California badlands. They didn’t like the idea much but Provo had the gun, and they went. None of them promised to stick to the route he had dictated, but it didn’t matter to Provo; all he wanted was to get rid of them.

He sent seven more, most of them Mexicans, due south—told them to hold to that course until they got well south of Yuma, across the Border into Mexico. They could walk east along the canals to Calexico. They grumbled, and went. Probably they’d get rounded up within twelve hours.

He sent the three old-timers down the Gila, eastward. The river was dry, only a few sinkholes, but they went, because Provo had the gun and Provo was a tough breed to tangle with; and because Cesar Menendez just stood there with his riot gun, watching them all with his fast little eyes.

Provo counted heads again. “Nine of us. That’ll do.”

“Do what?” young Mike Shelby asked. “What you got in mind, anyway?” Shelby was the only one of them with balls enough to ask that kind of question against Provo’s gun, but Shelby was the only one who knew how to take the sting off a challenge with an amiable smile. He had a wide friendly face and a head full of chestnut hair, and the innocence of his nineteen years.

Provo looked them over, walking around, going from face to face. “This time tomorrow,” he said finally, “those others will all be back in Yuma if they’re not dead. Same thing can happen to us if we don’t work together. Everybody understand me?”

Lee Roy Tucker said, “Maybe some of us might rather not take awders from you, Zach.”

Provo shifted the riot gun to his left hand. His right hand gripped Lee Roy’s arm. Lee Roy burst out in a gray sweat. The steel fingers bit into his arm, the strong thumb casually working flesh against cartilage against bone. Provo said, “When I say jump, Lee Roy, you say How high?”

He let go of Lee Roy’s arm and stepped back. Lee Roy looked unhappy, as if his shorts were bunching up. “I don’t think I want to mess with you, Zach.”

“You bet your ass you don’t.”

Anticipating trouble from Will Gant, Provo wheeled that way. Gant was tugging at a thick black hair in his nostril. The blunt head was anchored on a thick neck that bulged with folds of fat; the eyes were crafty. Provo didn’t bother to watch the eyes, with which Gant would be likely to feint; he watched Gant’s feet instead. “How about it, Will?”

“Depends what you got in mind.”

It was easy enough to read in Gant’s sullen face: he’d sooner herd sheep than follow orders from a half-breed Navajo. But Provo had the gun. Provo said, “I’m going to get us out.”

“All right. You won’t have no trouble with me.” Gant relaxed; his feet shifted and splayed.

Provo turned away, satisfied. “Everybody pay attention now. We’re going to walk straight over to the Colorado and sink ourselves down in the arrowweed over there until dark. Sweat it out. On the far side of the river, so the dogs won’t get to us. Come dark, we wade downriver into Yuma.”

“Into Yuma?” Lee Roy Tucker yelled.

“Shut up and stay still. We wade into Yuma and we wait under the ferryboat dock until sometime after midnight. There’s an eastbound S.P. freight comes in across the bridge about two in the morning. Pulls out for Tucson around three. There’s always half a dozen zinc-lined meat-hanging icebox cars. We climb into one of them. They’ll search all the cars on the train but we hide back in the corners behind the carcasses, underneath. They won’t take much time to search—they can’t hold an ice car open for long, everything’d melt. Middle of the night, they’ll be tired out by then anyway. They won’t find us as long as everybody keeps quiet. We’re going to freeze our asses but we’ll make it. Soon as the train pulls out of Yuma we pitch the ice out and get ourselves thawed out. We jump off when she slows down at some town up the line and we lay belly-flat in the scrub until she’s gone by. Then we shanks-mare into town and saw off these irons after dark, and get horses under us.”

Mike Shelby said, “You’ve got it all worked out.”

“I’ve had twenty-eight years for it.” He looked them over with icy contempt. “Everybody hear me the first time?”

Lee Roy’s jaw was set. “You got short brains, Zach. They bound to get aholt of us.”

“Like hell they are. Don’t be a farmer.”

Lee Roy was rubbing his arm where Provo had squeezed it. Provo said, “You can do this with your teeth or without them. Which way you want, Lee Roy?”

Lee Roy licked his upper lip. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d just as soon go it alone, you don’t mind.”

“I mind,” Provo said, flat. “Nobody busts loose now, Lee Roy. Not after you’ve heard the plan. We go in together and we stick together—like flies on flypaper.”

“Why? One less man, make it that much easier for you, Zach.”

“I can’t have you wandering into a posse and yapping to the law what we’re doing. Understand? Now you go ahead and walk away from here if you’re still a mind to, Lee Roy. But it’ll take you all the rest of your life to walk two steps. Hear?”

Lee Roy scuffed his feet and scowled and didn’t argue.

With a tongue dipped in vitriol, Provo snapped at them all: “I was born a few minutes ahead of the rest of you fools—just remember that. Come on, Menendez.” He turned on his heel and walked west, toward the river. The loose ends of the chains whacked him around the ankles but he didn’t slow down.

When he looked back the rest of them were following. Menendez, with the riot gun, was herding them.

It was stinking hot in the arrowweed rushes. The late afternoon sun beat down on the muddy surface of the river. They could still hear the dogs baying, going away upriver on the far bank, probably tracking the Alcorn bunch on the trail to Quartzsite. He had planned it like that.

Menendez said, “Sonoma bitch, it’s gonna work.”

“We’re not out yet.”

“Bot it’s gonna work. Seguro que sí.” The cruel fox-thin face smiled. “What’s that song you humming?”

“Owl Song.”

“Hey?”

“They sing it on the Reservation in hard times,” Provo said. “Owl’s a tough bird.”