Valdez Is Coming

Next to him, sitting in their saddles, their legs almost touching, she said again, “Whatever you want to do.”

“We’ll go,” he said, reaching back and flicking the rope that trailed from his saddle to R. L. Davis’s sorrel horse.

They left the trail and started up across the slope on an angle, moving through the owl clover and around the cholla bushes that were like dwarf trees, Valdez leading, aware of the woman behind him, wanting to turn to look at her, but only glancing at her as his gaze swept the hillside and back the way they had come.

Roberto Valdez kept watch up the slope and Bob Valdez, inside him, pictured the woman coming out of an adobe into the front yard: a place like Diego Luz’s, alone in the high country, but larger than Diego’s, with glass in the windows and a plank front porch beneath the ramada. The woman in a white dress open at the throat and her hair hanging below her shoulders, her hair shining in the sunlight. He would be coming up from the horse pasture and see her and she would raise her arm to wave. God, he would like to ride up to her, twisting out of the saddle, and take hold of her with her arm still raised, his hands moving under her arms and around her and hold her as tightly as a man can hold a woman without injuring her. But he would stop at the pump and have a drink of water and wash himself and then go to the yard, walking his horse, because he would have the rest of his life to do this.

As Bob Valdez pictured this, finally reaching the yard and the woman, Roberto Valdez saw the riders far below them starting across the slope in single file. Six of them and three horses in a string.

Valdez took the field glasses from his saddlebag. He picked out Frank Ta

Come on, Valdez thought, as they spread apart now and spurred their horses up through the brush. When you get here we’ll be gone. But still watching them, counting them again, he thought, If Ta

Emilio Avilar watched from above, from the shadowed edge of the timber.

They had the man almost in their sights, Valdez coming across the slope through the scrub oak, leading the horse and the woman behind him, coming at a walk and angling directly toward them, walking into their guns, and now Ta

God, the man would have been dead in a moment, shot out of his saddle, but now with the woman behind him, kicking their mounts straight up the grade, Valdez had reached the top of the slope and was entering the timber. Not here, where the segundo had waited with his two Americans for almost an hour, but more than a hundred yards away: a last glimpse of Valdez and the woman disappearing into the trees.

The segundo had scouted the timber and the canyon beyond, studying the canyon and the narrow defile at the end of it, and known at once Valdez was coming here. Where else? This man knew the ground and the water sinks and fought like an Apache. Sure Valdez was coming here: to escape through the defile or to stand in it and shoot them one at a time as they came for him.

Don’t let him get in the canyon, the segundo had thought. Don’t take a chance with him. Wait for him at the canyon mouth and shoot him as he enters. But Valdez would be coming through the cover of the trees and maybe his nose or his ears would tell him something, warn him, and he would run off another way. You have to think of him as you would a mountain lion, the segundo thought. Trap him in the open, away from cover.

So the segundo had gone back through the timber to the edge overlooking the slope and had told his two men very carefully what they would do: how they would watch for him, then study his angle of approach from the cover of the trees, and be waiting for him to walk into it, waiting until he was close to the trees but still in the open, and kill him before he saw them.

But now Valdez was already in the timber. The segundo had told his men to be quiet and keep their horses quiet and listen.

One of them said, “You know he’s going for the canyon.”

“He reached it, that’s all,” the other one said. “Once he gets in the hole ain’t nobody going in after him.”

“Not this child,” the first man said. “Ta

Christ Jesus, the segundo said to himself. “Will you be quiet!”

They listened.

“I don’t hear him,” one of them said. “I don’t hear a sound.”

The segundo drew the two men closer to him, listening, and they listened with him. “Do you know why?” he said. “Because he’s not moving, he’s listening. He knows we’re in here with him.”

“He didn’t see us.”

“When are you going to know him?” the segundo said. “He doesn’t have to see you.”

“He’s got to move sometime,” one of them said.

The segundo nodded. “Before Ta

There were open patches where sunlight streaked through the pine branches a hundred feet above, and there were thickets of scrub oak and dense brush. There was an occasional sound close to them, a small scurrying sound in the brush, and there were the shrill faraway cries of unseen birds in the treetops. The birds would stop and in the shadowed forest, high in the Santa Ritas, a silence would settle.

They moved deep into the trees from the open slope before Valdez brought them up to listen. And as he listened he thought, You should have kept going and taken the chance. You don’t have time to wait.

He heard the sound through the trees, a twig snapping, then silence. In a moment he heard it again and the sound of movement in dead leaves.

He was right, some of them were already in the trees. But it did no good to be right this time. They should have kept going and not stopped. They weren’t going to sneak through and keep ru

He said to the woman, “The last time we run. Are you ready?”

She nodded once, up and down. Both of her hands were on her saddle horn, but she didn’t seem tense or to be holding on.

“I go first,” Valdez said. He nodded in the direction. “That way. You come behind me. Don’t go another way around the trees, keep behind me. If you see them in front of us, stay close to me, as close as you can. At the end of the canyon you’ll see the opening. You go in first. Don’t get off, ride in – it’s wide enough – and I’ll come in after you.”

She nodded again. “All right.”

He smiled at her. “Just a little ride, it’s over.”

She nodded again and tried to smile and now he saw she was afraid.

Valdez dismounted. He untied the sorrel, moving it aside, holding the bridle under the horse’s muzzle. As soon as Ta

“Now,” Valdez said.

They were moving, ru