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come fill his goddamn ranks while he decimates them on the parade grounds. Crazy sonovabitch."
    "You never saw the worst of it, though, Bell."
    "I saw Mexico City."
    "That was plenty bad, I grant you. But the worst was the guerrillas. I was with a supply train, as I say. Hart was a drover. We saw plenty of those sons of bitches and we saw what they did. First they'd steal you blind and then just kill you for the pleasure of it. Cut a man's heart out and tongue out and rip his pecker off and string 'em from the limb of a tree with his body propped up beneath it. Supposed to scare the hell out of you and believe me, it did."
    We had what we judged was enough dry juniper and brush for the fire so we began gathering the stones with which to bank it.
    "Care to hear a story? About Hart back then?"
    "Sure."
    I was as curious about Hart as I'd ever been. He was still a mystery to me. I knew a little about Mother. He'd come from Missouri, never married and his father was a Presbyterian preacher of Scots-Irish ancestry — long dead from the bottle. His sister and two brothers remained back east. All Hart would say was he'd been around here and there. On Hart any light shed was welcome.
    "Well, this was a couple months before we met and I heard about it a while before then.
    "Hart's herding cattle and a wagon full of salt beef and hardtack through an arroyo, few miles north of Puebla. He's hired on for three dollars a day, pretty good money, right? The leader's a fella named Charles Berry — he was the one that told me all about this so you got to know it's not some made-up story — fella from Rhode Island, of an entrepreneurial nature you might say, who figures to make himself a tidy bit of money courtesy of the U.S. Cavalry. There's two other drovers beside Hart and fifty head of beef.
    "So this Mex rides down into the arroyo. Small fella dressed to beat the band — high boots with big silver spurs, big white sombrero, buckskin breeches, white shirt, red silk sash around his waist, bridle and saddle both covered with studded silver— and he rides up smiling on this fine chestnut stallion and Berry's thinking, can't be no trouble here, this Mex has got landowner written all over him. So he pulls up the wagon and they commence to chattin'.
    "Hart's working the cattle and watching and pretty soon he sees that the Mex ain't smiling anymore and he's pointing up the arroyo. He sees Berry look in that direction so he looks too and sure enough, there are seven or eight men up there pointing army-issue carbines down at them. They talk a little more but not so casual this time and Berry gets down off the wagon and strolls on over.
    "'Boys,' he says, 'they're taking our goods and cattle and I don't see how we can stop 'em. What we're going to do now I guess is just ride off a ways and that means we get to keep on living. Hart, I'll ride with you.' Hart gives him a hand up onto his horse and off they go — and Berry's feeling lucky to still have a tongue and a pecker on him, never mind the beef.
    "When it gets toward evening they're oh, maybe half a mile away. Country's like this is here, half prairie, half scrub. They find water for the horses and settle in for the night, figuring to make Puebla by early afternoon. And then Hart comes up with his proposal.
    "He's been thinking it over he says and if Berry will part with fifteen dollars over his three dollar a day salary he'll bring him back his herd and the wagonload of salt beef and hardtack to boot. All they've got to do is stay where they are for three, maybe four nights. Just stay put and wait on him. Well sure, says Berry. So Hart borrows a double-barrel shotgun from one of the other drovers, loads it with sixteen buckshot, saddles his horse and rides back the way they come."
    We arranged the rocks in a tight wide circle and Mother adjusted them to his liking and then started piling on the tinder and wood inside.
    "It's after midnight by the time he finds the herd. They're settled down