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.”
6
Most of the day the woman, Gay Erin, rode behind Valdez as they climbed out of the flatland and across sloping meadows that stretched toward pine timber, in the open sunlight all morning and into the afternoon, until they reached the deep shade of the forest. She noticed that Valdez seldom looked back now. When they had stopped to rest and he stood waiting as the horses grazed, he would look north sometimes, the way they had come, but he stood relaxed and could be looking at nothing more than the view.
Earlier this morning, once it was light, he had looked back. He stopped and looked back for some time as they were crossing flat, open country. When they reached the trees he made her dismount and tied their horses to a dead trunk that had fallen. She watched him walk out of the trees, out across the flats until he was a small figure in the distance. She watched him squat or kneel by a low brush clump and then she didn’t see him again, not for more than an hour, not until the three riders appeared and she heard the gunfire. He came back carrying his shotgun; they mounted again and continued on. She asked him, “Did you kill them?” And he answered, “One. Maybe another.” She asked, “Why didn’t you tie me? I could have run away.” He said to her, “Where would you go?”
They spoke little after that. They stopped to rest in a high meadow and she asked him where they were going. “Up there,” he answered, nodding toward the rock slopes above them.
Another time she said to him, “Maybe you don’t have a natural call to do certain things, but I do.” He smiled a little and told her to go ahead, he wouldn’t look. She stayed on the off side of her horse and didn’t know if he looked or not.
At first she wondered about him, and there were questions she wanted to ask; but she followed him in silence, watching the slope of his shoulders, the easy way he sat his saddle. In time the pain began to creep down her back and into her thighs; she held on to the saddle horn, following the movement of the horse and not thinking or wondering about him after a while, wanting this to be over but knowing he wasn’t going to stop until he was ready.
When they reached the edge of the pine timber he dismounted. Gay Erin went to the ground and stretched out on her back in the shade. She could feel her lips cracked and hard and dirt in the corners of her eyes. She wanted water, to drink and to bathe in, but more than water she wanted to stretch the stiffness from her body and sleep.
She heard Valdez say, “We’re going to move. Not far, over a little bit.” Looking up at the pine branches she closed her eyes and thought, He’ll have to drag me or carry me. She could hear him moving in the pine needles and could hear the horses. She waited for him to come over and tell her to get up or kick her or pull her to her feet, but after a while there was no sound, and in the silence she fell asleep.
When she opened her eyes she wasn’t sure where she was and wondered if he had moved her. The trees above were a different color now, darker, and she could barely see the sky through the branches. She stretched, feeling the stiffness, and rolled to her side. Valdez was sitting on the ground a few feet away smoking a cigarette, watching her. She pushed herself to a sitting position. “I thought we were moving.”
“It’s waiting for you,” Valdez said.
He led her on foot along the dark-shadowed edge of the timber. Off from them, in the open, dusk was settling over the hills. They walked for several minutes, until she smelled wood burning and saw the horses picketed close below them in the meadow. The camp was just inside the timber, in a cutbank that came down through the pines like a narrow road, widening where it reached the meadow and dropping into the valley below.