Samantha knew that Maria wouldn’t be far behind, and she actually welcomed the confrontation. Get everything out in the open!

  But Slocum quickly hissed, “Jorgé’s in love with you. I’d take that to heart if I was you.”

  Jorgé made a grab for Samantha, pulled her back into his muscular chest protectively, and said, “What the hell you think you are doing, Slocum?”

  More people streamed out the door behind them, probably hoping for a good fight, and along with them came Maria. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and the devil was in her eyes.

  Quite suddenly, Samantha was actually frightened.

  Slocum took a deep breath. This might cost him everything, but Samantha had pushed it, and now Jorgé had pushed it farther.

  He said, “Jorgé, Samantha is yours. Always has been, in my mind.”

  Well, at least, some fella’s besides his. Any fella’s! And before Samantha had a chance to open her mouth—which he could tell she was just aching to—he added, “Everybody knows I came here to see Maria. Wouldn’t have taken this job if I couldn’t have seen her, too.”

  That part was more truth than convenient lie; he’d had another offer of work up in Montana but had decided on Jaguar Hole for the dark-eyed reason standing just a few feet away, tapping her toe.

  He turned back toward the working girl Jorgé held against his chest. “Isn’t that true, Samantha?”

  For once, she was silent. At the wrong time.

  “Isn’t it?”

  At long last, she gave a tiny snort and said, “Yes. Of course. My heart belongs to Jorgé.”

  “Then what is everybody so excited about?” asked Jorgé, his tone once again jovial. “Come, let us eat the fine meal Maria Anna Lopez has prepared.”

  The crowd moved back inside.

  Jorgé pushed Samantha in ahead of him and whispered grimly, “We need to talk, amigo.”

  “Later,” Slocum replied under his breath, then followed Jorgé inside.

  What was taking Slocum so long? Maria paced the room, her blue silk robe trailing on the floorboards behind her, swishing around her ankles when she turned and paced back to the window again.

  She knew he wasn’t with that little tramp. She had watched Samantha go into the hotel with her own eyes, watched her light the lamp in her room, watched her sitting there, staring down at the street.

  Apparently, Jorgé was with Slocum.

  Wherever they were.

  She had closed the cantina early for this? For an empty bed? For an absent Slocum?

  Bah!

  She slipped her feet into her sandals, cinched the waist tie of her robe, and went out the door and down the stairs in search of him.

  Jorgé sat on a bale of straw at the stable, his head in his hands. Across from him stood Slocum, prepared for anything from a fistfight to the sounds of manly wailing.

  When Jorgé finally looked up at him, he said, “Es verdad. I knew she could not have come here for me. She did not know I was here. I should kill you, amigo, but I have chopped many posts today, and I am tired.”

  “You can do it another time,” Slocum replied.

  Jorgé actually grinned. “Ah, you are funny, my friend. And maybe I will kill you. Or won’t,” he added with a shrug. “These things are hard to tell. Right now, I only wish to go to bed.”

  “Samantha’s waitin’.”

  “Do not remind me.” Jorgé stood up and stretched his arms. “Tonight, I think I sleep with the horses. Alone, except for my Zorro.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sí. Unless there is room for three in that nice bed of Maria’s?”

  Slocum’s eyes narrowed. “And just when did you see her bed, Jorgé?”

  The man barked out a laugh and said, “You see? Now the boot, she is on the other foot.”

  Slocum grinned, and bit off his annoyance. Jorgé deserved to get one in, and Slocum let it go by. “All right, you old owlhoot. Me, I’m gonna hike back up to Maria’s and hit the sack.”

  He left Jorgé laying out his blankets on a mound of straw in an empty stall.

  Walking up the street in the quiet night, he couldn’t help but do a little silent fuming about Samantha. Damn her anyway! Since when did a girl like that think she could just chase him down, appear in his life all over again, and . . .

  He shook his head. He’d slept with her, all right. He’d had a good time. And he had paid her.

  But now, it seemed as if he was paying for it twice over.

  Maybe she was crazy! Yes, that was it. He couldn’t imagine any sane whore pulling that little stunt she’d just pulled. What on earth could she have been thinking?

  If she was thinking at all.

  He doubted it.

  He was ambling along, staring at the ground and muttering under his breath, when suddenly a pair of sandal-clad feet appeared in front of him. And stopped stock-still.

  His gaze traveled from the sandals and up a long, dark stretch of fabric to Maria’s face. Her hair hung down about her shoulders like a cowl.

  He said, “Mad at me, baby?”

  Maria said, “Should I be? Was there anything to it? To her intentions, I mean. Did you lead her to believe you wanted her here?”

  “No. To all of it.”

  Maria regarded him in silence for a moment. Then, smiling softly, she said, “Come to bed, my poor Slocum. I have been waiting for you.”

  12

  The next morning found Juan and Carlito up at dawn and checking out of the hotel shortly thereafter. Juan had been gone half the night, but Carlito was too proud to let him know that he’d noticed. They popped into the cantina, thinking to find Jorgé there, but only Maria stood behind the bar.

  “You are early,” she said. “We do not open for an hour.”

  “Pardon, señorita,” said Juan, and tipped his hat.

  “You have seen Jorgé Rodriguez today?” inquired Carlito somewhat churlishly. He wasn’t about to move until she answered.

  But she kept at her work, polishing glasses methodically. “No,” she said, putting down the last shot glass and picking up a new one. The bar towel went to work. “Slocum says Jorgé slept in the livery stable, though. You might look there.”

  “Gracias,” both of the men mumbled, and they took their leave.

  “Why would Jorgé spend the night in the barn, with that pretty señorita waiting for him at the hotel?” Juan asked as he scratched the back of his neck.

  Carlito, who had seen everything Juan had seen and heard everything Juan had heard the night before, had come up with his own explanation. “Sometimes, Juan,” he said, “you are too stupid to live.”

  “But I only asked—” Juan began.

  “Silencio,” Carlito hissed, cutting him off. “We go now to find the great Jorgé.”

  Down the empty street they walked, their boots scuffing up puffs of low dust. Juan said, “Why you call him ‘the great’ Jorgé, Carlito? Why you always call him that behind his back and not in front of his face?”

  Carlito shook his head. “Do not make me shoot you so early in the morning, Juan.”

  “But Carlito . . . ?”

  “It is el sarcasmo, Juan, the sarcasm. Do not ask me again.”

  They were nearly to the front of the livery before Juan said, “But what do you mean, ‘sarcasm’?”

  Carlito shot him a dirty look, that was all, but suddenly it was as if a lamp had suddenly been turned up in Juan’s mind.

  “Ah! It is like those times when you tell Señor Valdez that he looks very handsome today, or what a fine horse-man he is, is it not?”

  “Something like that.” Carlito took hold of the rope handle on the livery door.

  Juan was smiling. “I see. It is a polite lie, then, this sarcasm? When you say the opposite of what you mean in your heart?”

  “Who’s that!” came Jorgé’s grumbling voice the moment Carlito swung open the cracked and creaking door. “Who’s out there?”

  “It is us, Carlito and Juan, Jorgé,” Carlito announced. “Do not shoot.”

  “Wouldn’t shoot you,” came the answer as Carlito and Juan peered all around for the source of Jorgé’s voice. Suddenly he stood up behind the boards of a stall. “I ought to knock the both of you silly for calling me from my sleep so early, though.”

  He tossed his blankets over the top rail of the half-height wall and stepped out into the main part of the barn, brushing straw from his arms and britches.

  “Well?” he said, looking from Carlito to Juan and back again. “What you want?”

  Juan shrugged. “It is morning,” he said flatly, as if no other reason were needed.

  “By your order, we have a fence to build,” Carlito stated, putting the emphasis on your order.

  “Why did you not sleep in the hotel last night?” asked Juan. “The señorita, she cries half the night. We heard her through the wall.”

  Jorgé’s eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t have listened, Juan.”

  “We go now to the cantina,” Carlito said before anything could actually get ugly. He was hungry and preferred to eat breakfast before there was any gunplay. “We will meet you there?”

  “Yes, fine,” Jorgé said, distracted by the blankets he was folding. “Just go.”

  Carlito and Juan muttered an overlapping “Sí” and stepped outside again.

  Once outside with the door closed between themselves and Jorgé, Carlito grabbed Juan by his shirtfront and cruelly yanked him close. “You will not speak of the weeping señorita again. Verdad?” he breathed into the man’s startled face.

  Visibly shaken, Juan freed himself, moved off a few feet, and muttered, “Santa vaca! Es verdad, Carlito. No more señorita.”

  “Bueno,” Carlito replied curtly as, with a puzzled Juan following in his wake, he headed back up the street toward Cantina Lopez and its promise of a good breakfast. Sooner or later.

  “Fresh-squeezed juice of the orange, Slocum,” Maria said, and he opened his eyes.

  She sat beside him, smiling and holding a tray.

  “Breakfast in bed?” he said. “What did I do to deserve this?”

  She laughed a little. “You know very well, my big, handsome hombre. Come. Scootch up a little.”

  He moved back on the sheets until he was half sitting, and she placed the bed tray across his lap. It was a feast fit for a king! Eggs, probably five or six, scrambled with peppers and onions and cheese; a huge, fried ham steak, still sizzling; three thick slices of Texas-style toast with a pot of cactus jelly and another of extra butter; a big mug of coffee, and a tall glass of orange juice.

  “My cousin, she sends me two crates every year. From California,” she said proudly.

  Hoping she meant the oranges, Slocum picked up the glass and took a long drink. He smacked his lips. “Say! That’s good!” He took another drink. “This is livin’ the life of luxury!”

  Maria smiled and backed away. “I am bringing this to keep you distracted, you know. Come down when you are finished. Carlito and Juan, they are already here, and I expect Jorgé at any minute.”

  “Well, feed ’em a good, big breakfast, honey. I hope they’re gonna need it.”

  She paused and turned, her hand on the door’s latch. “If your wire comes in today, you mean.”

  “Yeah,” he said, between bites of egg and ham. “Baby, you are one good cook and a half.”

  She winked at him and was gone.

  He focused on the food, but he couldn’t help wondering why the hell they were downstairs so early! The freight wagon wasn’t supposed to pull in until eleven. He supposed he’d need to talk to the fellow at the livery, see about renting one of his buckboards to haul all that wire out to the place they’d left the posts.

  He’d need to drop into the mercantile or the hardware, too, if Jaguar Hole had such a thing. They’d need tools with which to put up the wire, and seeing as how Valdez had supplied the muscle and the axes and saws, he thought that his side—meaning MacCorkendale—ought to supply the rest of the stuff they needed.

  He sure wished MacCorkendale would send a man or two, though. It would be a help.

  He ran out of orange juice before he was ready but managed to wash down the rest of his meal with coffee.

  He really supposed he ought to have a little talk with Samantha, too, although he wasn’t sure just how to fit it in. Just because she was loco, that didn’t give him any call to be rude to her.

  And rude was what he suspected she thought he was.

  Breakfast finished, he took a long and satisfying piss out the rear window, then dressed for the day. He wondered just how it would go today with Juan and Carlito.

  There shouldn’t have been any “ito” on the end of Carlito’s name. There was nothing diminutive about him, and he looked as if he didn’t have to bother to butcher out a steer; he could probably just pick one up, on the hoof, and take a bite out of it.

  And that Juan—he was a big boy, too, but he looked reasonably cowed by Carlito. And Jorgé. Jorgé cowed everybody.

  Except him.

  He strapped on his gun belt, checked his guns, slapped his hat on his head, then picked up the tray. Maria had carried it all the way up here. No reason for her to carry it down, too.

  When he went downstairs, there sat his three cohorts, in the same chairs they’d occupied the evening before. Jorgé was the only one to greet him. “Hola, Slocum,” he called with a wave of his hand.

  Then Jorgé’s eyes flicked to the tray, and he grinned wide. “You are the waiter now?”

  Slocum grinned back as he slid the pillaged tray on the bar top. They were still the only customers in the place. It was only 6:45, after all.

  “Just tryin’ to get into shape for all that wire stretchin’ we’re gonna be doin’,” he said.

  He caught Maria’s eye and added, “Mornin’, darlin’. That orange juice sure hit the spot. Don’t suppose I could have another glass?”

  “Sí,” she said, smiling. “I bring it to your table, Slocum.” Chuckling softly, she motioned at him. “Go on, now. Shoo!”

  She was beautiful. Simply beautiful.

  He suddenly hoped the fence would take a very long time to build.

  The freight wagon pulled in just before noon, and Slocum was waiting for it, along with Jorgé, Carlito, and Juan, and a buckboard he’d rented at the livery.

  They loaded bale after bale of wire, the barbs sometimes puncturing their heavy gloves to leave bloody dots on their clothing and curses on their lips. Slocum had ordered what he thought they’d need to string a double row for ten or twelve miles, and it turned out to be more in person than what he’d pictured in his head when he’d ordered it.

  The buckboard was piled high by the time they were finished.

  They all sat down on the edge of the boardwalk in front of the freight station when they were loaded up, and assessed the damage to flesh and fabric.

  Well, Slocum sat down to have a smoke as much as anything else.

  Jorgé took off his gloves in disgust. “I forgot how much I hate the damned barbed wire. I have punctures in my puncture wounds.”

  “It’ll be over soon, amigo,” Slocum said as he put the smoke between his lips. He was punched full of little holes, too, and didn’t like the wire any more than Jorgé did.

  “I suppose it is a necessary evil,” Jorgé said with a sigh.

  Slocum nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Why?” said a new voice—Carlito. “I was hired to work the cattle, not hurt myself and them by sticking them with this stupid wire.”

  “You watch your tone, amigo,” snapped Jorgé, and the way he said it made Slocum a little frightened, too.

  However, Slocum recovered and said, “Carlito, nobody likes barbwire. But when two men own land that butts up together, and neither of ’em want to abide by the laws of free range, somethin’s gotta be done. This is the only way Jorgé and I could see to do it without startin’ another Mexican War.”

  Carlito scowled. “We call it the Gringo War.”

  “Suppose it all depends on which side you were on,” said Slocum. “Like the War of Northern Aggression or the War to Free the Slaves.”

  “You have a point,” Jorgé said, and stood up. “Let us gather our mounts and get on our way.”

  “I’m with you,” Slocum said, and stood up, too. Anything to get away from talking to Carlito. He had enough problems without a cranky, fussbudget hand.

  As he ambled over to the rail where Concho was tethered, he chanced a glance up at the hotel.

  Furtively, Samantha peeked at him from behind her curtains.

  Shit.

  13

  Pablo Valdez sat alone in his study, smoking his postdinner cigar and staring at the portrait of his wife, Salma. It hung opposite him, over the now-cold hearth, at the other end of the long room.

  The portrait had been painted by one of Mexico City’s finest artists, just before their marriage. Salma was not like he considered himself—a mongrel of Indian slaves and cold-hearted conquistadores—but half French and half Spanish, both lines pure. She was fair and copper-haired and had eyes the color of the sea—alternating between blue and green—and how beautiful she was!

  Or had been. She was much younger than he, but their union had not produced any offspring. And she had grown fat. But still, he loved her.

  He loved the sound of her voice, and the smell of her, and everything she said or thought or did.

  Everything he did, he did for her.

  Every move he made, he made with her future in mind. She was younger. She would be a widow someday, without his hand to guide her and see to her every need. Therefore, he had determined to be the best shepherd he could in this life.

  He rolled his cigar ash into the crystal tray at his side. If they had made children together, perhaps things would have been different. It was not to be, though. Ten years of trying, ten years of praying, and nothing. He felt as if his loins were dust, unable to plant a seed.

  It was not as if they hadn’t tried. They had made love almost every night since their wedding day, in fact. Sometimes, more than once. In the beginning, much more.