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The night of the sixth day we were sitting out on the porch talking and smoking, like we’d been doing every evening, and I remember saying something about working up energy to go to bed, when Terry’s hand touched my arm. He said, “Somebody’s standing between those two buildings across the street.”

I looked hard, but all I saw was the narrow deep shadow between the two adobes. And I was about to tell Terry he was mistaken when this figure appeared out of the shadows. He stood there for a minute close to one of the adobes, then started across the street, walking slowly.

He came to the steps and hesitated; but when Terry stood up and said, “Regalo,” softly, the boy came up on the porch.

Deelie turned the lamp up as we went inside and I heard Terry asking the boy if he was hungry. The boy shook his head. Then we all just stood there not knowing what to say, trying not to stare at the boy. He was wearing the torn red shirt and looking at Terry like he had something to tell him but didn’t know the right words.

Then he reached into his shirt, suddenly starting to talk in Spanish. He pulled something out wrapped in buckskin, still talking, and handed it to Terry. Then he stopped and just watched as Terry, looking embarrassed, unwrapped the little square of buckskin.

Terry looked at the boy and then at me, his eyes about to pop out of his head, and I saw what he was holding…a raw gold nugget.

It must have been the size of two shot glasses; way, way bigger than any I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing. Terry put it on the counter, stepped back, and looked at it like he was beholding the palace of the king of China.

He just stared, and the boy started talking again in that rapid-fire Spanish like he was trying to say everything at once. Terry looked at the boy and he stared some more until the boy stopped talking.

“What’d he say?” I asked him.

Terry took a minute to look over at me. “He says this is mine and that he’ll show me a lot more. A place nobody knows about…”

I could believe that. You don’t find nuggets that size out in the road. And it made sense the boy might know of a mine. It was common talk that any Apache could be a rich man, the way he knew the country—the whereabouts of mines worked by the Spanish two and three hundred years ago. Sure Indians knew about them, but they weren’t going to tell whites and be crowded off their land quicker than it was already happening. In three years with Chiricahuas, Regalo could have learned plenty.

I said, “Terrence, you and that red shirt have made a valuable friendship.”

TERRY WAS STILL about three feet off the ground. He said then, “But he claims he wants to live with me!” “Well, taking him in is the least you can do, considering—”

“But I can’t—”

He stopped there. I turned around to see what Terry was looking at and there was Max Repper in the doorway, with his Henry. Max was grinning, which he hadn’t done in a month, and he came forward keeping the barrel trained at Terry.

“I knew he’d show,” Repper said, “soon as I saw you hanging around. I came for two things. Him”—he swung the barrel to indicate the boy—“and my nugget.”

“Yours?” I said.

“The boy stole it from me.”

“You never saw it before you peeked in that window.”

“That’s your say,” Repper answered.

Terry said, “What do you want with the boy?”

“I got work for him till the reservation people take him away.”

“He doesn’t belong on a reservation,” Terry said.

“That’s not my worry.” Repper shrugged. “That’s what they’re saying at Dos Fuegos will happen to him.”

Terry shook his head slowly, saying, “That wouldn’t be right.”

Repper lifted the Henry a little higher. “Just hand me the nugget.”

Terry hesitated. Then he said, “You come and take it.”

“I can do that too,” Repper said. He was concentrating on Terry and started to move toward him. His eyes went to the nugget momentarily, two seconds at best, and as they did the boy went for him. He was at Repper’s throat in one lunge, dragging him down. Terry moved then, pushing the rifle barrel up and against Repper’s face. Repper