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Ruben Vega frowned. There was something he didn’t understand. He said, “Wait a minute—”

And Diego Luz said, “Don’t you know who her husband is? Mr. Isham himself, man, of the Circle-Eye. She comes home to find her husband a rich man. He don’t live in that hut no more. No, he owns a hundred miles of graze and a house it took them two years to build, the glass and bricks brought in by the Southern Pacific. Sure, the railroad comes and he’s a rich cattleman in only a few years.”

“He makes her live there alone?”

“She’s his wife, he provides for her. But that’s all. Once a month his segundo named Bonnet rides out there with supplies and has someone shoe her horse and look at the animals.”

“But to live in the desert,” Ruben Vega said, still frowning, thoughtful, “with a rusty pump…”

“Look at her,” Diego Luz said. “What choice does she have?”

IT WAS HOT DOWN in this scrub pasture, a place to wither and die. Ruben Vega loosened the new willow-root straw that did not yet conform to his head, though he had shaped the brim to curve down on one side and rise slightly on the other so that the brim slanted across the vision of his left eye. He held on his lap a nearly flat cardboard box that bore the name L. S. Weiss Mercantile Store.

The woman gazed up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. Finally she said, “You look different.”

“The beard began to itch,” Ruben Vega said, making no mention of the patches of gray he had studied in the hotel-room mirror. “So I shaved it off.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw and smoothed down the tips of his mustache that was still full and seemed to cover his mouth. When he stepped down from the bay and approached the woman standing by the stick-fence corral, she looked off into the distance and back again.

She said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

Ruben Vega said, “Your husband doesn’t want nobody to look at you. Is that it?” He held the store box, waiting for her to answer. “He has a big house with trees and the San Pedro River in his yard. Why doesn’t he hide you there?”

She looked off again and said, “If they find you here, they’ll shoot you.”

“They,” Ruben Vega said. “The ones who watch you bathe? Work for your husband and keep more than a close eye on you, and you’d like to hit them with something, wipe the grins from their faces.”

“You better leave,” the woman said.

The blue lines on her face were like claw marks, though not as wide as fingers: indelible lines of dye etched into her flesh with a cactus needle, the color worn and faded but still vivid against her skin, the blue matching her eyes.

He stepped close to her, raised his hand to her face, and touched the markings gently with the tips of his fingers, feeling nothing. He raised his eyes to hers. She was staring at him. He said, “You’re in there, aren’t you? Behind these little bars. They don’t seem like much. Not enough to hold you.”

She said nothing, but seemed to be waiting.

He said to her, “You should brush your hair. Brush it every day….”

“Why?” the woman said.

“To feel good. You need to wear a dress. A little parasol to match.”

“I’m asking you to leave,” the woman said. But didn’t move from his hand, with its yellowed, stained nails, that was like a fist made of old leather.

“I’ll tell you something if I can,” Ruben Vega said. “I know women all my life, all kinds of women in the way they look and dress, the way they adorn themselves according to custom. Women are always a wonder to me. When I’m not with a woman I think of them as all the same because I’m thinking of one thing. You understand?”

“Put a sack over their head,” the woman said.

“Well, I’m not thinking of what she looks like then, when I’m out in the mountains or somewhere,” Ruben Vega said. “That part of her doesn’t matter. But when I’m with the woman, ah, then I realize how they are all different. You say, of course. This isn’t a revelation to you. But maybe it is when you think about it some more.”

The woman’s eyes changed, turned cold. “You