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today. She doesn’t look like a murderer to me.”
    “She isn’t,” Red said, slowly backing away from Trinity, his gun still leveled at him.
    “It is better that you not say what you heard in front of the vaqueros” Perez advised. “They take it bad.”
    “You mean they’re all as convinced as Red here she’s innocent?”
    “How can you have seen her and ask such a damned fool question?” Red demanded. “Could an angel kill anyone, even a drunken sot who didn’t have the sense to know what he’d got?”
    “I don’t know as much about the situation as you.”
    “Then make sure you learn more before you go shooting off your mouth again,” Red said, stepping back and holstering his gun. “We don’t allow nobody to slight Miss Victoria. There’s people who could vouch for that if they could talk.”
    “That’s not likely, them being far away and understanding how we feel about the senorita” Perez added. He said nothing more, but Trinity couldn’t mistake the warning directed to Red.
    Trinity knew then that at least one man had died in his attempt to take Victoria back to Texas.
    “What happened when they went to Texas?” Trinity asked. “Mr. Davidge told me Buc broke Victoria out of jail.”
    “We all go” Perez said. “We mean to burn town if we have to.”
    “Don’t pull your gun on me for asking,” Trinity said to Red, “but why were all of you ready to take such a risk?”
    “You have to know Senor Grant and his brother, the senorita’s papa,” Perez said. “Some of us come from Texas with Senor Grant. Not Red. He is too young. I know Senorita Davidge as a girl. She can not kill anybody, not if she loves them.”
    “Are you certain she loved her husband?” Trinity asked.
    “Are you saying she’d marry a man because of his money?” Red challenged.
    Tm just asking,” Trinity said. “A man can’t help being curious.”
    “Better to leave questions unasked than be dead,” Red advised. “People around here don’t take kindly to questions about Miss Victoria. Any kind of questions.”
    Apparently convinced that any threat to Victoria’s safety had passed, and that any question about her reputation had been settled, Red launched into a paean of praise that bespoke of a young man in the throes of love with a woman he considered so far above him as to be completely out of his reach.
    Perez didn’t look nearly so certain. He didn’t watch Trinity directly, but Trinity realized he was being closely observed.
    Trinity soon managed to get Red’s mind off Victoria. Later they swapped yarns. Perez proved to have an inexhaustible supply, but Trinity got the feeling the man’s thoughts were never entirely off their earlier conversation.
    He would do well to keep his eyes on the old man.

    “I hope you don’t mind going with me today,” Victoria said when Trinity had finished his breakfast next morning. “Uncle Grant says following me about while I work on my survey is the perfect way to get to know the ranch.”
    Trinity didn’t get a chance to answer before Buc burst out with an objection.
    “I still don’t trust him. How do we know he’s not one of Judge Blazer’s men?”
    “It’s been more than five years, Buc,” Grant said. “Surely Blazer has given up by now.”
    “Are you afraid Trinity will overpower me?” Victoria asked.
    “No, but—”
    “Or do you suspect he’ll talk me into something I don’t want to do?”
    “Good God, no, but—”
    “Then what’s your objection?” Grant asked.
    “I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him,” Buc stated bluntly. “He could be a bounty hunter.”
    A faint shadow passed across Victoria’s face.
    “Nonsense,” Grant said. “Bounty hunters are known.”
    “Not all of them. There’s one who uses a different name every time. Nobody knows much about him, but they say he’s hanged more than a dozen men.”
    “Where’s he from?” Trinity asked. He couldn’t just stand there and let Buc accuse him of being a