“We go out there and look for him,” the segundo said. “Sure, we find him, but maybe it take us a few days, a week, if he knows what he’s doing. We’re out there, we’re not in Sonora giving the man the things he’s paying for. How much is he paying?” The segundo waited again. He said then, “He pay plenty, but nobody pay you to go up in those mountains.”

The segundo stood in the sun waiting for Mr. Tanner to say something. He could stand here all day and this son of a bitch Mr. Tanner might never say anything. The segundo was hot and thirsty. He’d like a nice glass of mescal and some meat and peppers, but he was standing here waiting for this son of a bitch Americano to make up his mind.

So he said, smiling a little, “Hey, what if you don’t go out? You let him kill her.” His smile broadened and he gestured as if to say, Do you see how simple it is? He said, “Then what? You get another woman.”

Frank Tanner, sitting in the rocker, looked at his segundo. He said, “If you were up here I’d bust your face open. And if you wanted any more I’d give you that too. Do you see the way it is?”

The segundo had killed five men in his life that he knew of and had probably killed more if some of them died later or if he wanted to count Apaches. He had hanged a man he caught stealing his horses. He had killed a man with a knife in a cantina. He had shot a man who once worked for him and insulted him and drew his revolver. He had killed two Federales when the soldiers set an ambush to take the goods they were delivering in Sonora. And with others he had wiped out an Apache rancheria, shooting or knifing every living person they found, including the old people and the children. But the segundo was also a practical man. He had a wife in this village and two or three more wives in villages south of here, in Sonoita and Naco and Nogales. He had nine children that he knew of. Maybe he had eleven or twelve. Maybe he had fifteen. He had not wanted to kill the Apache children, but they were Apache. He also liked mescal and good horses and accurate rifles and revolving pistols. He was number two and Mr. Tanner was number one. He was thinking, Shit. But he smiled at Mr. Tanner and said, “Why didn’t you say so? You want to get this man, we go get him for you.”

Frank Tanner nodded, thinking about the woman.

The time he was in Yuma he thought about women every day. He’d thought about women before that, but not the same way he did in that stone prison overlooking the river. He remembered how the men smelled at Yuma, breaking rocks for twelve hours in the sun, working on the road, and coming back in to eat the slop. That’s when they’d start talking about women. Frank Tanner would think, They don’t know a real woman if they see one, except for some whore who’d smile and laugh and give them everything and rot their insides. No, when he was at Yuma he pictured a blond-haired girl, real long hair and a pretty face and big round breasts, though she wouldn’t be too big in the gut or the hips. The hips could be more than a handful, but she’d have to have a nice sucked-in white gut. That’s the one he pictured at Yuma, after he and Carlisle Baylor got caught with the goddam branded cows they were running into old Mexico without any bill of sale. Three years picturing the blond golden-haired woman. Two years more raising money and buying stock to sell across the border, buying and selling horses and cattle and dynamite and about anything he could lay his hands on they didn’t have down there. He’d bought twenty-five-year-old Confederate muskets and sold them. He bought a few old Whitworth field pieces and sold them too. He’d made money and met people who knew people and pretty soon he was even selling remounts to the United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca. And that was where he saw the woman, the girl or woman or however you wanted to think of her, there at Huachuca, married to the drunk-ass sutler, who never went a day without a quart of whiskey or a bottle of mescal or even corn beer if he couldn’t get any mescal. There she was, the one he’d seen every day at Yuma and about every day since, the blond golden-haired girl who was built for the kind of man he was, sitting in their place talking to the drunk-ass sutler and looking at the woman every chance he got. A year of that; a little more than a year. Talking to her when he wasn’t around and trying to find out things about her, about them. Trying to find out if she felt anything for the drunk or not. She felt something when he beat her – sometimes you could see the bruises on her face she couldn’t hide with powder – but maybe she liked it. You could never tell about women.

He would have taken her away from the drunk alive, and once he was dead there wasn’t anything else to think over. He took her and she came with him. He would marry her, too, but he had things to do and she’d have to wait on that; but in the meantime there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t live as husband and wife. She saw that and agreed, and she was better than he ever imagined in Yuma she would be. She was real now and she was his, and there wasn’t any goddam broken-down Mexican nigger-loving town constable going to run off with her into the hills and threaten to kill her. Valdez, or whatever his name, was a dead man and he could roll over right now and save everybody a lot of time.

Tanner was looking off at the hills that climbed into the Santa Ritas and the twin peaks, far away against the hot sky.

“What’s up there?” he said to the segundo.

“Nothing,” the segundo answered.

“Why would he want us to track up there?”

“I don’t know,” the segundo said. “Maybe he’s got a place somewhere.”

“What kind of place?”

“An Apache camp he’s been to,” the segundo said. “He knows the Apache – the thing he did to the three of them in the open country, hiding where there’s no place to hide.”

“He didn’t seem like much,” Frank Tanner said.

“Maybe,” the segundo said. “But he knows the Apache.”

R. L. Davis got drunk trying to work up nerve to tell what he did to Bob Valdez and never did tell it. He went over to Inez’s, but they wouldn’t let him in. Then he didn’t remember anything after that. He woke up in the Maricopa bunkhouse when a hand came in and poured water all over him. God, he felt awful. So it was afternoon by the time he got out to Mimbreno.

There seemed to be more activity than the time he was here before, more men in the village sitting around waiting for something, and more horses and more noise. He rode up the street not looking around too much, but not missing anything either. He hoped Mr. Tanner would be outside, and he was, the same place he was the last time, up on the loading platform. The problem was to tell him before Mr. Tanner gave any orders to have him run off or tied to a cross or whatever he might do; so he kept his eyes on Mr. Tanner and the second he saw Mr. Tanner’s gaze land on him, R. L. Davis yelled out, “I know where he is!”

They looked at him, all the people standing around there, and let him ride over toward the platform where Mr. Tanner was waiting.

“I think I know where he is,” R. L. Davis said to Mr. Tanner.

“You think so or you know so,” Tanner said.

“I’d bet a year’s wage on it.”

“Where?”

“A place up in the mountains.”

“I asked you where.”

“I was thinking,” R. L. Davis said. “Let me ride along and I can show you. Take you right to it.”

Tanner kept looking at him deciding something, but showing nothing in his face. Finally he said, “Step down and water your horse.”