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quill pens. Douglas was busy recruiting; a queue formed quickly enough and grew until it extended almost to the door. Douglas was studying the face of each volunteer and every now and then he would shake his head and say a few curt words, and the applicant would curse him or go slack-jawed or simply shrug and turn away. Charley went to the bar, where Woods waited with a half-amused expression on his seamed-leather face and a beer mug in his fist, and Charley regarded the anxious line of volunteers with troubled uncertainty. He said to Woods, “What does Crabb get out of this? I don’t figure him for the kind to settle for a gold mine or a ranch he’d have to work.”
    â€œHe’s the leader,” Woods said. “He’ll be the top man of us—in Mexico he’ll be able to speak for all of us. Some men need that kind of power. Besides, his wife’s an Ainsa.”
    â€œWhat of it?”
    â€œYou know the Ainsa family?”
    â€œRich crowd up in San Francisco, aren’t they?”
    â€œThey are now,” Woods said. “They used to be a lot richer, when they was in Sonora.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œPolitics,” Woods said. He had a time-weathered face and a way of chewing periodically on an imaginary cud. “When the new bunch grabbed the governorship down there, and the revolution ended, the Ainsa family got kicked out of Mexico. The government confiscated all their property. Crabb’s made a deal with Pesquiera to get all that stuff back for his wife’s family. Happens Pesquiera’s related to them.”
    â€œHow’d you find this out?”
    Woods shrugged. “I don’t expect it’s any big secret. Besides, when you run a saloon as long as I have, you develop a pretty good ear for news.”
    Charley looked across the room at Douglas. Woods said, “Want a beer?”
    â€œNo.” Tobacco smoke was strong in his nostrils. “One thing rubs me. What if Pesquiera doesn’t win? What if Gandara keeps control?”
    â€œThat’s a fact,” Woods murmured. “Think about this, too. What if Pesquiera wins the fight and then, decides he don’t need us any more?”
    â€œSure enough,” Charley murmured. He looked at the diminishing line of men enlisting at Norval Douglas’s table. Douglas’s eyes came up idly and met Charley’s, as if by accident; Douglas’s eyebrows lifted questioningly, but Charley made no response of any kind. He turned and walked thoughtfully out the door and up the street. A long-slanting beam of sunlight cut through the western clouds to splash a faint redness on the town; in the quickening dusk, Charley looked up into an indigo sky and filled his chest with air.

CHAPTER 4
    Coronel Señor Don José Maria Giron was troubled. He did not have the heart of a true revolucionario . He was a soldier, not a dealer in intrigues. And what troubled him even more was that today he and his detachment must guard from the enemy the person of Ignacio Pesquiera himself. The whole of the matter played on Giron’s nerves.
    Pesquiera was not very old, but his long beard already had a stringy and gray look to it. It was his fierce eyes that held you, that made you know that he was a man born to lead. Today he sat upon a round-smooth rock, his legs drawn up and long arms wrapped around his knees, and looked down through the trees at the wooded course of the river, the Rio de la Concepcion. The way he held his head and the way his eyes flashed indicated to Giron that the man might as well have been sitting upon the throne in the Governor’s Palace at Ures. Pesquiera would be there soon, too. Nothing was able to stop him. Giron watched him and felt an immense respect for Pesquiera’s leadership, for his strength and courage, for his wisdom. To Giron, a simple soldier, the man was great.
    Scattered around through the trees, alert and armed, were the men of Giron’s