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Sandal looked up, smiling. “This is no bad gun.”

Across the meadow two of Kergosen’s riders were moving the herd away from the stock tank. Treat watched them, turning his back to Sandal. There was time. These men would do as they pleased, whether he objected or not. Wait and say nothing, he thought. Wait and watch and keep track of the score.

He remembered a patrol out of Fort Thomas coming to a spring, and a Coyotero Apache guide whose name was Pesh-klitso. The guide had said to him in Spanish, “We followed the barbarian for ten days; two men died, three horses died; we have no food and we killed no barbarian. Yet we could have waited for them here. Our stomachs would be full, the two men and the horses would still be alive, and we would take them when they came.” He’d asked the Coyotero how he knew they would come, and the guide answered, “The land is not that broad. They would come sooner or later.” Which meant, if not today, then tomorrow; if not this year, then the next.

He had known many Pesh-klitsos at San Carlos, and at Tascosa, when they carried Sharps rifles and hunted buffalo—hunted them by waiting, then killed them. And the more patience you had the more you killed.

Treat waited and watched. He watched Grady go into the adobe and saw the left front window erupt with a spray of broken glass as a chair came through. He saw Sandal break off two of the chair legs with the heel of his boot, then walk into the adobe, and a moment later the Henry was firing again. With the reports, the ear-ringing din and the clicking cocking sound of the lever, he heard glass and china shattering, falling from the shelves. Then the sound of a Colt and a dull, clanging noise; sooty smoke billowed from the open doorway and he knew they had shot down the stove chimney.

Grady came out, fanning the smoke in front of him. He mounted his horse, sidestepped it to the ramada, fastened the loop of his rope to a support post, and spurred away. The post ripped out, bouncing, scraping a dust rise, and the mesquite-pole awning sagged partway to the ground. Sandal came out of the adobe, running, ducking his head. He watched Grady circle to come back, went to his own horse, fastened his rope to the other support post, and dragged it away. The ramada collapsed, swinging, smashing, against the adobe front, and the mesquite poles broke apart.

Watching Treat, Leo Pyke said, “You letting them get away with that? All this big talk about you, and you don’t even open your mouth.”

Grady and Sandal walked their horses in. Treat glanced at them, then back to Pyke. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Listen,” Pyke said. “I’ve put up with that closemouth cold-water way of yours a long time. I’ve watched men stand clear of you, afraid they’d step too close and you’d come to life. I watched Mr. Kergosen, then Ellis, won over to your sly ways. But all that time I was seeing through you—looking clean through, and there was nothing there to see. No backbone, no guts, no nothing.”

Sandal was grinning, leaning over his saddle horse. “Eat him up, Layo!”

Pyke’s eyes did not leave Treat. “If you were worth it, I’d take my gun off and beat hell out of you.”

Treat’s eyebrows raised slightly. “Would you, Leo?”

“You damn bet I would.”

Sandal said, “Go ahead, man. Do it.”

“Shut your mouth!” Pyke threw the words over his shoulder.

“The vision of being segundo returns with the return of the daughter,” Sandal said, grinning again. To Grady, next to him, he said, “How would you like to work for this one every day?”

Grady shook his head. “She can’t marry him now. And that’s the only way he’d get to be Number Two.”

“I think she married him,” Sandal said, nodding at Treat, “to escape this one.”

“I said shut up!” Pyke screamed, turning half around, but at once he looked back at Treat. “You ride out, right now. And if I ever see you this close again, I’ll talk to you with a gun. You hear me!”

NINE DAYS AFTER that, R. C. Hassett, the county deputy assigned to Dos Mesas, was told