Valdez Is Coming

“Not if I’m already out,” Valdez said. His face went to the window before he looked at her again. “Listen, if you want to take something with you, get it now.”

A woman who belonged to one of Ta

“Go on,” Ta

“They went to the yard of the church,” the woman said to Ta

While this was taking place, the woman of Mr. Ta

“Did she say anything to him?” Ta

“Not that I heard,” the woman said.

They left through the alley next to the church. The woman waited until they were in the alley and followed, but by the time she reached the back of the church they were gone.

“Could you hear them?” Ta

“I think going toward the river,” the woman said.

“To reach cover,” the segundo said. He was sitting his horse close to Frank Ta

“How long ago?” asked Ta

The woman thought about it and said, “Not long. They would be maybe two or three miles away only. Or a little more if they ran their horses.”

“You know what to do,” Ta

“In the dark,” the segundo said, “how do we see them?”

“You listen,” Ta

The segundo waited, about to speak, but looked at Ta

But in the morning the freight wagons stood empty, and Frank Ta

These three who came along the street single file, one of them facedown over his saddle, were the segundo’s best hunters and trackers. They had been in the Army and had lived through the campaigns against the Apache. But now one was dead and another would soon be dead.

Ta

With the first light this morning they had found tracks, fresh prints of two horses that showed the horses were walking. They weren’t sure of this man they were following; he didn’t try to keep to rocky ground or cover his tracks, and he walked the horses, maybe thinking he had enough time. Still, when they came to the flat open stretch with the trees in the distance, they were careful, knowing he could be waiting for them in the trees. So they made a plan as they crossed the flat stretch: they would spread out before they got to the cover and come up from three sides and if he was in there they’d have him. But they never got to the trees.

“Listen, it was flat open,” the man with the shattered arm said, “out to the sides as far as you could see and a mile in front of us. There was no cover near, hardly any brush to speak of. So it was like he rose up out of the ground behind us. He says, ‘Throw down your guns and come around.’ This voice out there in the middle of nothing. We stop and come around, keeping our iron though, and there he is standing there. I swear to God there was nothing for him to hide behind, yet we’d come over the ground he was standing on just a moment before.

“He says, ‘Go back and tell Mr. Ta

He looked toward the dead man and the man who was lying on the ground shot through the lungs. “They went for theirs with the sound of his piece, and he brings up this little scatter gun in his left hand and lets go both barrels and them two boys take it square. This here boy partly in front of the other, a little closer, and it killed him in his boots.

“Then he says to me, ‘You tell him, he wants his woman, come out here with five hundred dollars.’

“I say to him, ‘Well, where’s Mr. Ta

The man with the shattered arm, standing by the loading platform, turned half around and raised his right arm, his finger extended; he moved it gradually southwest.

“There, you can see it,” the man said, “though it was closer where we were at and you could see it better – twin peaks, the one a little higher than the other. He says for you to point to them and he’ll get in touch with you.

“I say to him, ‘Well, what if Mr. Ta

“And he says, standing there with the shotgun and the Colt gun, ‘Then I kill his woman.’ ”

Frank Ta

The segundo stayed; he was the only one. He waited awhile, getting the words straight in his mind. When he was ready he said, “You go after him, we don’t make the trip.”

He waited, giving Mr. Ta