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“You hired me,” Bob Valdez said, standing alone above them. He was serious but he shrugged and smiled a little to take the edge off the words. “What did you hire me for?”

“Well,” Mr. Beaudry said, acting it out, looking past Bob Valdez and along the road both ways, “I was to see some drunk Mexicans I’d point them out.”

A person can be in two different places and he will be two different people. Maybe if you think of some more places the person will be more people, but don’t take it too far. This is Bob Valdez standing by himself with the shotgun and having only the shotgun to hold on to. This is one Bob Valdez. About twenty years old. Mr. Beaudry and others could try and think of a time when Bob Valdez might have drunk too much or swaggered or had a certain smart look on his face, but they would never recall such a time. This Bob Valdez was all right.

Another Bob Valdez inside the Bob Valdez at the pasture that day worked for the army one time and was a guide when Crook chased Chato and Chihuahua down into the Madres. He was seventeen then, with a Springfield and Apache moccasins that came up to his knees. He would sit at night with the Apache scouts from San Carlos, eating with them and talking some as he learned Chiricahua. He would keep up with them all day and shoot the Springfield one hell of a lot better than any of them could shoot. He came home with a scalp but never showed it to anyone and had thrown it away by the time he went to work for Maricopa. Shortly after that he was named town constable at twenty-five dollars a month, getting the job because he got along with people: the Mexicans in town who drank too much on Saturday night liked him and that was the main thing.

The men with the whiskey bottle had forgotten Valdez. They stayed in the hollow where the shade was cool watching the line shack and waiting for the army deserter to realize it was all up with him. He would realize it and open the door and be cut down as he came outside. It was a matter of time only.

Bob Valdez stayed on the open part of the slope that was turning to shade, sitting now like an Apache and every once in a while making a cigarette and smoking it slowly as he thought about himself and Mr. Tanner and the others, then thinking about the army deserter.

Diego Luz came and squatted next to him, his arms on his knees and his big hands that he used for breaking horses hanging in front of him.

“Stay near if they want you for something,” Valdez said. He was watching Beaudry tilt the bottle up. Diego Luz said nothing.

“One of them bends over,” Bob Valdez said then, “you kiss it, uh?”

Diego Luz looked at him, patient about it. Not mad or even stirred up. “Why don’t you go home?”

“He says Get me a bottle, you run.”

“I get it. I don’t run.”

“Smile and hold your hat, uh?”

“And don’t talk so much.”

“Not unless they talk to you first.”

“You better go home,” Diego said.

Bob Valdez said, “That’s why you hit the horses.”

“Listen,” Diego Luz said, scowling a bit now. “They pay me to break horses. They pay you to talk to drunks on Saturday night and keep them from killing somebody. They don’t pay you for what you think or how you feel, so if you take their money, keep your mouth shut. All right?”

Diego Luz got up and walked away, down toward the hollow. The hell with this kid, he was thinking. He’ll learn or he won’t learn, but the hell with him. He was also thinking that maybe he could get a drink from that bottle. Maybe there’d be a half inch left nobody wanted and Mr. Malsom would tell him to kill it.

But it was already finished. R. L. Davis was playing with the bottle, holding it by the neck and flipping it up and catching it as it came down. Beaudry was saying, “What about after dark?” Looking at Mr. Tanner, who was thinking about something else and didn’t notice. R L. Davis stopped flipping the bottle. He said, “Put some men on the rise right above the hut; he comes out, bust him.”

“Well, they should get the men over there,” Mr. Beaudry said, looking at the sky. “It won’t be long