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Ross Corsen smiled at the Apache’s greeting and studied the broad, ugly face. “Now you call me brother,” he said in Spanish. “You must want something.” He had not seen the Mescalero in almost a year, not since the four-day chase down to the border, and a glimpse of Bonito far off, not running any longer because he was safely in Mexico. Bonito had killed two Coyotero policemen during a tulapai drunk. That had started it. On the run for the border, he killed two more men, plus four horses that didn’t belong to him. Now he was back and Corsen studied him, wondering why.

The Apache spoke a slow, guttural Spanish and said, as if in the middle of his thoughts, “We have suffered unfairly from your hand; all of us have”—he used the Apache word tinneh, which meant all of the people and in its meaning described the blood tie which bound them together—“and from the other man, the one who directs you. You think only of yourselves.”

“And when did you begin thinking of others?” Corsen said.

“Those are my people at Pinaleño,” Bonito answered him.

Corsen shrugged. “I won’t argue with you. What you do now is no concern of mine. I can’t do a thing to you or for you, but maybe suggest you go home and get drunk, which is what you’ll probably do anyway.”

“And where is our home, Cor-sen?”

“You know as well as I do.”

“At San Carlos, where there is little to eat?”

Corsen nodded to the Maynard carbine across the Apache’s lap. “Maybe in Mexico. You can’t have one of those at San Carlos.”

“Yes, in Sonora and Chihuahua where it is a business of profit to take the hair of the Apache, the government paying for our scalps.”

Corsen shook his head. “Look, I no longer am in charge of the Pinaleño Reservation. The government man has discharged me.” He thought for words that would explain it clearly to the Apache. “He is the one, Mr. Sellers, who has taken your guns and decided that you live on government beef.”

“Some of the government beef,” Bonito corrected. “He sells most of it to others for his own profit.”

“That is not true of all reservations. You know I treated your people fairly.”

“But you are no longer there and soon it will be true of all reservations.”

The words were familiar to Corsen. No, not so much the words as the idea: he had argued this very thing with Sellers three days before, straining his patience to explain to the Bureau of Indian Affairs supervisor exactly what an Apache is. What kind of thinking animal he is. How much abuse he will take before all the peace talks in the world will not stop him. And he had lost the argument because, even if reason was not on Sellers’s side, authority was. He threw it in Sellers’s face, accusing him of selling government rations for his own profit, and Sellers laughed, daring him to prove it—then fired him. He would have quit. You can’t go on working for a man like that. He decided that he didn’t care anyway.

For that matter it was strange that he should. Ross Corsen knew Apaches because he had fought them. He had been in charge of the Coyotero trackers at Fort Thomas for four years. And after that, for three years—until the day before yesterday—he had been in charge of the Mescalero Subagency at Pinaleño, thirty miles south of Thomas.

He didn’t care. The hell with it. That’s what he told himself. Still he kept wondering what had brought Bonito back. He thought: Leave him alone. If he came back to help his people, let him work it out his own Apache way. You tried. But instead he asked carefully, “Why would a warrior of Bonito’s stature return now to a reservation? They haven’t forgotten what you did. If you’re caught, they’ll hang you.”

“Then I would die—which the people are doing now on the reservation, under Bil-Clin who calls himself their chief.” Bonito’s eyes half closed and he went on. “Let me tell you a story, Cor-sen, which happened long ago. There was a young man of the Mescalero, who was a great hunter and slayer of his enemies. From raids to Mexico he would return to his rancheria with countless ponies and often with women who would then do his bidding.