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other.”
    “Like Republicans and Dem—”
    “Ah, stow it, cork it, and shove it,” Grantham said bluntly. He looked at the western hills, and the light put blood on his great lion’s head. “Pretty natural thing, that symbiosis. Lot of it around.”
    He began to talk again, rapidly, with, now and again, a quick glance at the darkling west. “Six months, seven, maybe, I collected around here. No trouble with Miguel. He collected a bunch of weeds and sticks, but once in a while he earned his keep, retroactively. The old lady kept her hands off. The kid spent every day with me. I guess I had the area pretty well sieved in four months, but I went out every day anyhow.”
    “I remember,” I said.
    “Yes, yes, I didn’t send so many specimens. Later, none. I know. I said I was sor—”
    For the first time I barked at him. “Go on with your story.”
    “Where—oh. The moth. The moth that won’t go near anything but a yucca.”
    I thought he had forgotten me. “Hey,” I said.
    “She danced,” he said, examining his hands carefully in the dim light, “any time it occurred to her, for a long time or a little. Or at night. At night,” he said clearly, heaving himself upright and not looking at me, “the petals open and the moths fly. They were a cloud around her head.”
    I waited. He said, “It’s only the truth. And once in the late sunset, still some light, and me close to her, I saw a moth crawl into herear. I got scared, I—put out my hand to do something, pluck it out, shake her, do
something
. She didn’t exactly push me away. She looked up at me and raised her hand, slowly—or it seemed to be slowly, but it was there before my hand was. She just stood, still as a tree, waiting, and the moth came out again.”
    I didn’t say anything. Not anything at all. We sat watching the western mountains.
    “I went away,” said Grantham, his words stark and clear against the heat inside him. “To get more specimens, you understand.”
    “Some more came,” I said.
    “I was away for three months. A long time. Too long. Then I had no business back in Kofa but I went back anyway—oh, in case I’d left anything there or something. I was supposed to go back to the Institute, I guess. Mm.
    “The first face I saw in Kofa that I knew was Miguel’s. I fell over him. He was standing like a brown statue on the duckboards near the saloon and I tripped and knocked his hat off. I pulled him to his feet and asked him
Com’ esta?
    “
Malo, muy malo
and a flood of north-Mex is all I could get. I guess I looked a little foolish. Why is it when you talk to someone who doesn’t know your language, you holler at him? Finally I got impatient and ran him into the bar. I asked Big Horn what Miguel was trying to tell me.
    “The general idea was that the little ones had died. I never did find out how many, two or three. Miguel shrugged at this, took off his hat, raised his eyes and his eyebrows, in that order, at the ceiling. I gather he felt no responsibility over this; such matters were out of his hands, but one could always make more. What bothered Miguel, Big Horn told me, was the loss of his wife, who had broken her leg, gotten a bone infection, and died
muy rapido
. She had been, it seemed, a very hard worker.
    “The girl? He didn’t know. He didn’t know any more after I got excited and tried to shake it out of him. Big Horn was over the bar with his bung-starter before I could pull myself together. He never minded anybody getting rough at his bar providing both parties were enjoying it. He pointed out to me that Miguel had come in herepeaceably even if I hadn’t. Then he sat Miguel down and questioned him quietly while I fumed, and then he told Miguel to go, which he did much faster than usual.
    “ ‘He says,’ Big Horn told me, ‘that the girl just wandered away. He says she always spent more nights out in the yucca forest than home anyhow. She went away and she just didn’t come back. He says he went