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B., it’s a damn fool thing to be doing. But I got nothing else to do right now and I never expected to make old bones anyway.”
    The next morning the current took him into an eddy of rapids that smashed up his raft and almost drowned him and busted his leg wounds open all over again.

5
    The sun had both feet on his shoulders. Above the rock banks the desert winked and glittered with pyrites; heat haze wavered above the ground. When his head cleared he looked ahead across the long curve of rocks and pebbles. No reed bottoms here, it was all rock and then withered sand country above that. Nothing to build another raft with. The muddy flow of the river rushed through the sands.
    A single wagon stood sagging on the near bank just below the bend.
    Boag tied up his leg and started forward on one knee and both blistered hands, moving with the careless deliberation of half-drowned exhaustion.
    The effort sapped him less than halfway along and he had to lie down in the sun for a time; and that was when he heard something stir.
    He rolled over on his side and dug for the sharpened belt buckle in his pocket. His eyes swept the rocks in a steady arc.
    A flutter of brown movement drew his attention to the left. A ragged small figure emerged from the boulder and stared at him with large grave eyes: a scrawny little girl in a filthy sack of clothes.
    She spoke to Boag in Spanish, in a piping high voice: “ Quién es usted? ”
    The little girl came toward him without fear. Boag said in Spanish, “How many of you over there?”
    â€œThere is just me. And then there are the Mexicans.”
    â€œHow many?”
    â€œWho are you?” she said again.
    â€œ Corazon, ” he said, “I do not have time to fool with you. How many are the Mexicans?”
    â€œThe old man and the woman, that is all.” Her eyes were bottomless and held distrust but not fear. Her skin was the color of old copper; she had a narrow triangle of a face and black hair tangled with burrs. Anywhere from nine to thirteen years, she had. Boag said, “You’re Indian.”
    â€œI am Yaqui.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œYou are a ladrón ” she told him.
    He started to drag himself toward the wagon. The little girl buzzed around him like a horsefly. Finally Boag got to his feet slowly. It was the first time he’d stood up in several days and the blood fell from his head; he tightened his belly muscles and waited for the dizziness to pass. Finally he hobbled toward the wagon, putting very little weight on the bad leg. “You look like a stinking Gypsy to me.”
    â€œI am Yaqui,” she said angrily.
    She kept worrying close to his heels while he stumbled along the rock bank toward the wagon. “Don’t dog me,” he said.
    â€œWhy should I obey a ladrón negro? Have you killed many men?”
    Boag hobbled to the wagon. The old man and the fat woman sat in its narrow band of shade and the old man had a Spanish percussion rifle aimed at Boag.
    Boag stopped two paces from the rifle. “Put your rifle down, old man.”
    The old man looked sick; he was sitting still but his chest heaved with his breathing. His face was lined as though he had slept all his life with his face pressed against a screen of rabbit wire.
    Boag bent down, gripped the rifle and pulled it out of the old man’s limp grasp. It had not been cocked and it did not go off. Boag slung it across the bend of his elbow. “If you point a gun at a man it only makes good sense to cock it.”
    â€œWe have very little ammunition left,” said the old man. He sat against the wagon wheel and soon the sun would reach its midpoint and either the old man would have to suffer its rays or he would have to move underneath the wagon. He seemed to drift; his eyes kept closing slowly and popping open again. He wore dust-coated remnants of good Spanish clothing, old now, worn thin and patched.
    The fat woman said,