Valdez’s eyes shifted to the man, hung there, and returned to Tanner. His hand gripped the Remington lightly, feeling the weight of the gun, the sawed-off barrel hanging at his knee.

Tanner turned his head slowly to the left, to the three men standing off from him, then to the right, to R. L. Davis and the two men beyond him.

“I’m going to give the word,” Tanner said.

“Wait a minute!” R. L. Davis said. “I’m no part of this.” He saw Tanner looking at him as he edged back a few steps, bumping against his horse and pushing it. “I don’t even have a gun.”

“I give you mine,” the segundo said.

“I don’t want one!” Davis was edging back, taking himself out of the group, his eyes holding on the Remington at Valdez’s side. “I don’t have any fight with him.”

In Spanish, the segundo said to the young Mexican on Tanner’s left, “Tomas, go home. This isn’t yours.”

The young man wasn’t sure. “I work for him,” he said.

“Not anymore. I let you go.”

Tanner’s head jerked toward the segundo. “What’re you telling him?”

“That she’s your woman,” the segundo said easily. “A man holds his woman or he doesn’t. It’s up to him, a personal thing between him and the man who took the woman. All these men are thinking, What have we got to do with it?”

“You do what I tell you. That’s what you’ve got to do with it.” Tanner glanced both ways and said, “I’m talking to everybody present. Everybody hears me and I’m telling you now to shoot him. Now!”

He looked at his men again, not believing it, seeing them standing watching him, none of them ready to make a move.

“You hear me – I said shoot him!”

Valdez waited in the silence that followed. He waited as Tanner looked at his men, from one to the next. He drew on the cigarette, finishing it, and dropped it and said, “Hey.”

As Tanner turned to him, Valdez said, “I got an idea, Frank,” and waited another moment. “You have a gun in your hand. Why don’t you shoot me?”

Tanner faced him, the Colt revolver at his side. He stared at Valdez and said nothing, eyes sunken in the shadow of his hat brim, dusty and beard stubbled, still looking like he was made of gristle and hard to kill.

But he’s not looking at himself, Valdez was thinking, and it isn’t an easy thing to raise and fire a Colt at someone. So he jabbed at Tanner saying, “See if your gun is as good as mine. What do you think of something like that? You and I, that’s all, uh? What do you need anybody else for?”

Tanner stood stiffly, no part of him moving.

“Let me say it to you this way,” Valdez said. “You give me money for the Lipan woman whose husband was killed or you use the gun. One or the other, right now. Make up your mind.”

Tanner’s hand tightened on the Colt and his thumb lifted to the hammer. He could feel the move he would make and he was looking squarely at Valdez twenty feet away from him, looking at him dead center where the cartridge belt crossed his chest. The moment was there, now, but his gaze flickered to the stubby barrel of the Remington and lingered there and the moment was past. His thumb came off the hammer.

“Not today,” Tanner said. “Another time.”

Valdez shook his head slowly. “No, that was your time. You get one time, mister, to prove who you are.”

“I should have killed you three days ago,” Tanner said. “I should have killed you, but I let you go.”

“No” – the segundo started past him toward the horses, pausing to take the Colt from Tanner’s hand – “three days ago you should have started for Mexico.”

“Or paid the Lipan woman,” Valdez said. “It wouldn’t have cost you so much.”