It was all Tyler had to hear. He pulled a. 44 Russian and put it in the bearded face.

"What do you want done with him?"

"Shoot him," Fuentes said, "what do you think?"

Tyler took a step toward the man and felt the train begin to roll, felt that jolt and heard couplings bang together. Two more steps, holding the man's gaze, Tyler pressed the muzzle of the. 44 into the man's belly.

"You're getting off," Tyler said.

The man still seemed at ease. He gestured. "The train is moving."

"Get off or get shot, partner."

"What are you, a cowboy?"

Tyler hit him across the jaw with his gun barrel. No warning whacked Osma to let him know there was nothing to talk about, and again put the muzzle against his belly. Now he reached into the man's coat and lifted his Colt revolver. It had an ivory grip. Tyler handed it behind him and Fuentes reached out to take it, Fuentes saying, "Why don't you shoot him?

Then put him off?"

Osma had a hand to his face, touching his jaw. He looked at the blood on his thick palm and then at Tyler.

Tyler cocked the. 44.

Osma turned and walked down the aisle to the end of the car, Tyler a step behind him. Osma opened the door and the sound of the train picking up speed came in loud. Tyler gave him a shove, not hard, but it was enough to send him out the door. Osma grabbed the platform railing in one hand-couplings below him, between the cars-and came around to Tyler with a short-barrel pistol in his hand, firing as Tyler slashed the man's arm with his gun barrel, firing again as he went off the side of the platform, Tyler firing now, snapping two shots into the dusk, and knew he'd hit the man in midair before the man hit the ground.

Tyler leaned out to see Osma lying back there in the cinders and weeds; he looked done.

An oil lamp hung at the end of the car. Tyler brought it to where they were seated, hung it from a coat hook and used Amelia's matches to light it. He sat with her legs on his lap, his hand on a boot feeling her slender ankle in there. Tyler watched her, flushed and sick as she was, puffing on a Sweet Cap, the smoke rising to hang about the lamp that moved with the sway of the train. Fuentes was taking forever to undo the rope around the hammock.

There was worry in his voice as he spoke about Osma. Was he dead? The man deserved to be. Tyler said if he wasn't dead he was likely on his way. Fuentes said he should have shot him as he stood there, through the heart and be sure. Saying he hoped to God never to see Osma again. Tyler thinking if Osma was dead, my God, that would be how many? Eight men dead by his gun and he wasn't even a shootist, had never sought a man to kill him and never would. Shooting men was not something to be known for, not even in the Wild West anymore. Though Tavalera would come to mind whenever he thought of Charlie Burke, killed by that firing squad. Be best to have all this over with and get back to raising stock.

Maybe right here. It was something he thought about now and again, the idea of staying on after, wondering each time why this country seemed so familiar to him, like home.

Fuentes kept talking about Osma, telling how he had hunted runaway slaves, until Amelia said to him, "Victor, can't you untie that thing and talk at the same time?"

"I'm afraid of what we might find," Fuentes said, pulling the rope loose and laying the hammock on the seat next to him. "Or what we won't find." He let half the canvas unroll to the floor, felt in the part still on the seat and pulled out a pillowcase that had weight to it, irregular shapes inside, corners pressing against the cloth. He held up the pillowcase like a sack ofmwhat?

"For God's sake, Victor, will you please open it?" Amelia's spunk letting her say this in her weakened condition, barely moving her mouth.

Fuentes turned the pillowcase upside down and bank notes bound in money straps poured out to pile on the seat next to him. Fuentes grinning, and yet seemed surprised. "Count it," Amelia said.

Tyler watched her eyes hold on Fuentes as he riffled through several of the packets, counted to himself as he stacked them on the seat and said, "What you ask for, forty thousand American dollars, all there."

Tyler looked from the bank notes to Amelia, the flush of fever on her face, and saw her eyes shining.

The mulatta he called Isabela Catelica worked on Tavalera's wound for two hours, first cutting and shaving hair matted with blood to see the wound clearly, then cleansing it with diluted carbolic acid. She closed the wound with needle and thread in twelve individual stitches as he lay facedown across her bed. She asked why the wound was in the back of his head if he had been facing the enemy. She could ask him that in his weakened state, but got no answer. She finished her sewing before discovering he had passed out sometime while she worked, from the pain or loss of blood. The bed looked as though a woman had given birth in it. She put ice in a towel and placed it against his wound while he slept through the day. In the evening, when he opened his eyes and knew the day was gone, he said, "I failed."

She didn't know what he meant-failed at what?-but didn't ask. He wanted to know if Osma had returned and she shook her head. Now he was angry, wanting to blame her because Osma hadn't returned. She brought him whiskey. He sat up to drink it, but soon closed his eyes, telling her his head was spinning. She left him alone and he again fell asleep.

Isabela sat in the front room, leaving him alone in the bed, and fell asleep with her head resting on her arms on the surface of the table. Sometime during the night she awoke to the sound of a horse outside, approaching the house. She waited, but now there were no sounds, nothing. Finally she went to the door and opened it.

In the darka man was sitting his horse as though asleep, his back bent, head lowered, hands resting on the horn in front of him. She recognized the buckskin gelding and called in a low voice, "Osma?" She had to help him down and into the house. In the light of the lamp she saw his clothes, his face, his hands covered with blood. The sight lifted her spirit and she smiled.

Now she helped him into the bedroom, bringing the lamp and placed it on a stand next to Tavalera sitting up in bed asleep. She blew her breath in his face and he opened his eyes.

It took him several moments to recognize the man standing by the bed. He said, "Osma?"

Osma's head came up. He said, "They went to Las Villas."

They kept their voices low, barely above a whisper, while Amelia slept, lulled by the sound and sway of the train. Tyler had removed her boots and stockings and held her warm bare feet in his hands. He wanted to know if the quinine was working yet. Fuentes said it would take time. If she had yellow fever they would give her citrate of magnesia, castor oil in lime juice and the milk of green coconuts.

He said, "Is strange, but where we going the people don't get yellow fever. Perhaps because the city is on higher land than along the coast, and the air and the soil are dry." He said, "They suffer, of course, from consumption, malaria, dysentery, as people everywhere do, but not yellow fever. Or is because the water is clean. So we lucky to be going there-if that's what she has." He said, "The province is name Santa Clara and the city is Santa Clara, but everyone calls it Villa Clara or Las Villas."

Fuentes said this leaning toward Tyler in the seat across from him.

"Have you heard it call that?"

Tyler said, "Victor? Why don't you tell me where exactly we're going?"

"I just told you, Las Villas."

"We get off the trainmwhat if there're soldiers around?" "We come there it's still dark. Nobody see us."

"We're in Las Villas," Tyler said, "then where do we go?" "We take Amelia to see this doctor."