“Jed Foster took those rifles from a wagon train that I commanded. He killed men who rode with me. He killed a friend of mine. I want to kill the son of a bitch. I aim to kill the son of a bitch. The son of a bitch was once a friend of mine. What’s more, the man is a traitor. He’s evil. I was ordered here. That’s the truth. My commander told me that I had to get those guns back, and that’s what I aim to do. If I can’t get them back, I will make sure that Negro, that Crooked Nose’s Apaches, and that Muncie’s crazy followers don’t get them, either. And no matter what happens, I will see Jed Foster dead. So the Army, my Army, sent me here. But I was coming here anyway, somehow, some way. And I came here to kill Jed Foster.”

  He leaned back. and poured himself a glass from the bottle next to the bigger gringo soldier.

  “Do you hate this gringo with the rifles as much as your friend does?” she asked the one called Masterson.

  The big man shrugged. “No. I can’t say I do. I don’t like him. But I don’t like nobody.”

  “So why did you come?”

  “It wasn’t for revenge.” He raised his glass. “I had the option. I could come down here to most likely get killed. Or I could go to prison and rot. I’d rather fight.” He drank his tequila.

  She rose. “Sleep well tonight. I will meet you outside in the street at daybreak. I will take you to El Cañon de Los Dolores. And there I will leave you. There you will find new sorrows. There everyone finds sorrows. There, most find death.”

  CHAPTER 61

  In the Apache camp, Badger Killer was drunk. And Crooked Nose, the leader of his ever-dwindling party of Apaches, knew that nothing good ever happened to his people when Badger Killer was drunk.

  “With the weapons the pale eyes promise us, we will return to the mountains north,” the young warrior bellowed to the other warriors too young to remember what Cochise and even before Cochise, old Mangas Coloradas, were like. They knew only of men like Geronimo and, now, Badger Killer. “We will drive the pale eyes out of our country. Then we will be free to sweep down here and kill Mexicans whenever we are in the mood to kill Mexicans or whenever we need a slave to make our life easier.”

  Crooked Nose stepped out of his wickiup. It wasn’t like he could sleep with all that shouting going on anyway.

  Badger Killer was pleased that Crooked Nose had stepped into the night. He beamed and hooked his thumb at the Chiricahua Apache leader.

  “Crooked Nose,” Badger Killer said, “does not want to take the weapons from the pale eyes.”

  The eyes of the young warriors turned from the tall, raven-haired Badger Killer to old, gray-haired Crooked Nose.

  “We are few,” Crooked Nose said. “The pale eyes are many.”

  “Once, a few Chiricahua warriors were all that was needed,” the young man boasted.

  “Once,” Crooked Nose said, nodding sadly. “In those years, we needed only a few warriors . . . because the pale eyes were few. Now there are many.”

  “You speak like a squaw.”

  “The Bluecoat With Golden Hair Longer Than The Hair On Some Pale-Eyes Squaws,” Crooked Nose said, “is selling the long guns. We have not enough pale eyes money to buy what he sells. The Pale Eyes In Gray Who Once Fought And Still Hates Our Enemy will likely buy those weapons.”

  Badger Killer shook his head and spit into the fire. “So that is your answer? We let those pale eyes who wear gray take long guns we could use?”

  “The Mexicans might take the guns. But I believe the Mexicans have less money for long guns than we do.”

  The young brave leaned his head back and laughed. He pointed at Crooked Nose and shook his head again. “This is what the great Crooked Nose thinks. He thinks since we have no gold to make the pale eyes happy that we should just run deeper into these hills where we hide from the men who seek our scalps, from the Mexican soldiers who want to have us join our long-dead warriors. I remember when we took what we wanted. I say we take what we want again. I—” He stopped.

  Crooked Nose was nodding.

  “I say we take the long guns, too.”

  The eyes of the young warriors left Badger Killer and focused on the old man in front of the domed wickiup.

  “If the Pale Eyes In Gray Who Once Fought And Still Hates Our Enemy leave The Canyon of The Sorrows with the long guns, we will take the long guns from them. They are old, too. They lost their war with the pale eyes who wear the blue coats and carry the long knives. They raid farmers and villages for their money and their food. They are no longer fighters. Taking long guns from them will be easy.” He spoke softly but firmly, and the young men seemed to listen to him.

  “And,” Crooked Nose said, “if the Mexicans leave The Canyon of The Sorrows with the long guns, that will be much easier for us. We have never had a problem taking anything from the Mexicans.”

  Badger Killer had to walk to the squaw who held the jug of tizwin. He jerked it from her grasp and took several greedy swallows before tossing the jug to the nearest warrior. Most likely, Crooked Nose figured, the young warrior needed his followers to get drunk. It was hard to get drunk on tizwin. At least, it was hard for men like Crooked Nose to get drunk. These young warriors, well, they seemed to be able to get drunk on corn before it had fermented into a sticky, weak type of Indian liquor.

  “Why don’t we take it from the pale eyes?” Badger Killer roared.

  Crooked Nose shook his head. “You are not that young, Badger Killer. You remember when we lived in the mountains north of here. You were just a boy, but you remember our leaders. You remember our country. You remember the times before we were few, before we had to hide in these hills.”

  “Yes.” Badger Killer banged his chest with his fist. “I remember that. I remember everything. I remember when we were men and when our chiefs were men.”

  Crooked Nose smiled. “And do you remember who drove us out of that country? Do you remember that? The pale eyes drove us out. With weapons like the one they promise to sell to whoever has more gold. The pale eyes are like sand. You scoop out a handful of sand in the desert, and sand fills the hole. We kill pale eyes and we kill pale eyes, and more pale eyes come to replace what we have killed. No. We leave those pale eyes alone. We kill the Mexicans. We kill the pale eyes who wear gray. Then we learn a better way to fight the pale eyes.”

  “You want to fight the weakest dog,” Badger Killer said. “I want to fight the meanest dog. That is the way of an Apache. We will take the guns from the pale eyes. We will not take them gold and have them laugh in our face. We will take what we want. For we are still, and we will always be, Apaches. Who rides with Badger Killer? Who stays with the women and Crooked Nose?”

  It was bound to come to this, Crooked Nose thought as he watched eight of his young men stand and follow Badger Killer to the pony herd. Two young men who remained behind, but they were very young, and the four old men who had known Crooked Nose before his nose was so bent, watched the nine men ride away.

  Maybe they would come back. Perhaps they would even return victorious, with rifles and bullets and tales of glory. Maybe Badger Killer would return and demand that Crooked Nose leave the camp, that he was too old, and Badger Killer was taking over because he had proved he was worthy by gaining the biggest victory for his people since Cochise had made the pale eyes suffer.

  Maybe. Who was to tell? For the moment, though, Badger Killer was gone. The night would turn quiet again. And Crooked Nose could sleep undisturbed.

  CHAPTER 62

  “I do not do this for my health,” Soledad Tadeo told Grat Holden.

  The shavetail lieutenant felt mesmerized by the Mexican girl’s beauty and her audacity. He kept staring at her, and could not take his eyes off the bruise on her cheek and nose. She kept touching it. Holden found a handkerchief in his pocket, dipped an end in the glass of tequila in front of him and gently brought it to her face.

  She watched him, eyes burning but not blinking, and did not move as he touched the cut with the alcohol. Soledad Tadeo grimaced slightly but let him slide the wet rag across the cut Jed Foster had given her.

  “Who did this?” Holden asked.

  “It does not matter,” she said.

  He brought the rag down her nose and over her lip, wiping away the darkened, dried stains of blood that had spilled from her nostrils. She stopped him, took the rag out of his hand, and dabbed the bruises and the scratches herself. Then she wadded up the piece of cotton and tossed it in front of the norteamericano.

  She couldn’t do that bit of doctoring the way the young gringo had. When she touched the cuts, the tequila felt like fire. When the man named Holden did it, it felt soothing, almost cool. She did not like anyone doing anything better than she did. She did not like this Yanqui, even if he was pleasing to the eye, even if he had a gentle touch, even if he was everything that Amonte Negro could never be.

  “I said,” she told him, “that I do not do this—”

  “For your health.” Holden nodded. “Yes. I know. We will pay you.”

  “How much?”

  “Name your price,” he told her.

  “One hundred pesos.”

  He smiled and drank his tequila. “This is a mighty poor country.”

  “A hundred pesos,” she said, “and I take you to The Canyon of The Sorrows. That is all I do. I show you the canyon. I leave you to find your own sorrowful end. I do not fight. I do not die. It is not that I am afraid to do either. It’s just that I pick who I fight and I will pick where I will die. Do you understand?”

  “Completely.”

  “Then I will take my hundred pesos now.”

  He had to stand to reach inside his trousers. He was fairly tall. The hand disappeared into a pocket and came out with a leather pouch. Sitting down again, he pulled on the drawstring, turned the pouch over, and dumped out a few gold coins. Not pesos. Yanqui double eagles. They rolled on the table and eventually toppled and lay still.

  “That should cover your troubles.”

  “I cannot make change.”

  “I did not ask you to.”

  She glared at him. “All you get is a trip to The Canyon of The Sorrows.”

  “Understood.”

  He frustrated her. She couldn’t figure him out. She raked the coins into her lap, picked them up, and dropped them in the leather bag she carried over her shoulder. He refilled a glass with tequila, but not his glass. Not her glass, either. He filled the glass of the big man with the two revolvers in his sash, the man called Masterson.

  “How long have you known Sam Florence?” Holden asked her.

  She adjusted the leather bag, pushed it behind her back, and looked at the gringo named Holden.

  “Who?”

  “Sam Florence. The old man. The scout. The fellow who brought us here.”

  “Oh. Is that his name?”

  “Yes. Well, it’s what he calls himself.”

  “He never told me his name.”

  “How long has he been coming here?”

  She shrugged. She had to think. “I cannot remember when he was not here,” she said after minutes of long, deep thoughts.

  When she was a child, when her mother still lived, the gringo had come on what must have been an infrequent basis. Not always there. Rarely there, but she had these distant memories of seeing him, maybe from afar. And after her mother had died, when she had just turned fifteen, when the bad things happened, he came more often. At least it seemed that way. Rarely had he talked to her, though, but his presence always made her feel more confident, and more safe.

  “Not always, of course, but he always returns.”

  What she could not figure out was why he would come. Nobody came to Rancho Los Cielos unless they were running from something, unless they had to hide from the policía or soldados norteamericanos. Certainly, no one came for the food, the whiskey, and the old man—whose name she had just learned was Sam Florence—did not come for female companionship.

  “Well, he’s not going with us,” the man named Masterson said.

  “Bueno,” she said. Good for Sam Florence. She did not want to think of him dead.

  CHAPTER 63

  She rose and crossed the floor at Mariscos, stopping at the shattered glass that had been destroyed in one of the many outbursts of violence. From there, she had a good view of The Cantina That Has No Name. The gringo named Sam Florence would be there. That’s where he went. That’s where he drank. Sometimes, he would go to the cemetery on the hill that overlooked the town. Sometimes he would go to the corral and groom the horses, just to do something to kill the time. Usually, he took his supper and sipped his whiskey. Then, at some point, he would leave.

  Most gringos—most men—tried to bed her, but not the old man. When they talked, they talked of trivial things. They joked. He was a comfortable man, comfortable with himself, comfortable with his surroundings—wherever they were—but not one comfortable talking too much.

  She had been talking to him for at least six years, probably longer, and she could not remember anything he had ever told her. Then again, he had never told her his name. Come to think of it, she did not remember ever telling him her name. But he knew it. She must have told him at some point. Still, it did not matter.

  She knew that he worked for the soldados who wore the blue. She knew he came into Mexico even when soldiers could not, chasing Apaches or trying to find out where they were hiding and when they might be planning an attack on the northern side of the border. Maybe seeing if any of the bandits or men like Amonte Negro planned to try some sort of raid in a town like Douglas or Tucson or Lordsburg . . . places she had heard of, but had never seen, and, truthfully, had no interest in visiting.

  The man named Sam Florence sat somewhere inside that dirty little adobe hut across the street. It was the same dirty little adobe hut where Soledad Tadeo spent most of her time, where she cooked and sometimes cleaned and where the owner of the place let her sleep.

  She had not been to the place where her mother had lived, where she, Soledad Tadeo, had lived for years. Until . . . that day.

  He would be sitting across the street now, drinking, but not getting drunk. Or not drinking at all. Many times, he had arrived in Rancho Los Cielos to drink coffee, to abstain from liquor at all. She had never seen him drunk. He knew that a man in control was a man who could control. On a night like that one, he would not be drinking. He would be sitting, thinking.

  Once, she had asked him, “What do you do when you just sit there, old man?”

  “I remember,” he had said.

  “What is worth remembering?” she had asked.

  “Not a hell of a lot,” he had told her. “But when you find something worth remembering, it feels good to remember. When you find someone worth remembering, that feels even better. Mostly.”

  That made absolutely no sense to her.

  So he would not be drinking tequila. Not tonight. The man who called himself Sam Florence would be eating, but just enough so he would not be hungry.

  It was foolish, silly, and childish to stand there and look outside and across the dark street to wonder about an old gringo she did not really know. Soledad Tadeo returned to the table where the gringo named Grat Holden looked at old maps he had rolled out in front of him, and where the bigger man named Masterson stared at her and smiled and drank.

  “Sam Florence says that he doesn’t know the way to The Canyon of The Sorrows,” Masterson said. He refilled his glass of tequila and poured one for Soledad Tadeo. “Is that true?”

  She slid the glass away from him.

  “I do not know, but if the Yanqui says he does not know, then I would not doubt his word.”

  “It just strikes me odd,” Masterson said, “that a scout who has been in this part of the country for so long wouldn’t know a place like that. I’ve been hearing about The Canyon of The Sorrows since the Army sent me to Arizona. And I’ve been in Arizona for a damned long time.”

  “Then why do you not go there yourself?” she said.

  Grat Holden chuckled, although he did not look up from the map that interested him so much. Even Masterson grinned.

  “Well,” Masterson swished the tequila around in his glass, probably to wash away more dust, “for one thing, it is in Mexico. The Army didn’t let us cross the border very often. But I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has ever been there. Well, I’ve never met anyone who went there and lived to tell about it.”

  She found the tequila and killed it in one shot.

  “But you’ve been there,” Masterson said. “And you’re still alive.”

  The man named Holden stopped studying the map. That had been a waste of time, Tadeo knew, for he likely was trying to find out where The Canyon of The Sorrows was located. El Cañon de Los Dolores could not be found on any map. It might be on a good map, probably was, but not by that name. Most likely, the mapmakers and the passersby and wayfarers had called it something else.

  A place like that held only sorrow for those who had gone there, but not to pass through.

  “Yes,” she told the two gringos. “I have been to El Cañon de Los Dolores. But I cannot say that I am still alive.”

  CHAPTER 64

  The Confederate battle jack flapped in the desert wind as Colonel Will Muncie refreshed his cup of coffee at the camp they had made between Rancho Los Cielos and his plantation on what was not much of a river. The coffee was not New Orleans chicory, but it did the job. He heard the men griping, but he did not rebuke them.

  It was good for soldiers of the Confederacy to complain. They had turned back, having lost a good man, a fast gun, a man with backbone loyal to the South, to Robert E. Lee’s sacred memory, and loyal to Colonel Will Muncie. They had seen him shot dead by a bluebelly with a smirk on his face and a damned Yankee accent. They had turned tail and fled. Retreated. Oh, in orderly fashion, but they had gone to that miserable little flyspeck of a town to win a battle, the first battle in what would surely become a noble endeavor and a glorious cause to all white Southern men. They had slunk away with their heads low, their necks burning in humiliation, and their tails tucked between their legs like a whipped hound dog.