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He looked at her with disappointment, an expression of weariness. But then he dropped the store box and took her to him gently, placing his hands on her shoulders, feeling her small bones in his grasp as he brought her in against him and his arms went around her.

He said, “You’re gonna die here. Dry up and blow away.”

She said, “Please…” Her voice hushed against him.

“They wanted only to mark your chin,” Ruben Vega said, “in the custom of those people. But you wanted your own marks, didn’t you? Your marks, not like anyone else. …Well, you got them.” After a momenthe said to her, very quietly, “Tell me what you want.”

The hushed voice close to him said, “I don’t know.”

He said, “Think about it and remember something. There is no one else in the world like you.”

HE REINED THE BAY to move out and saw the dust trail rising out of the old pasture, three riders coming, and heard the woman say, “I told you. Now it’s too late.”

A man on a claybank and two young riders eating his dust, finally separating to come in abreast, reined to a walk as they reached the pump and the irrigation ditch. The woman, walking from the corral to the house, said to them, “What do you want? I don’t need anything, Mr. Bonnet.”

So this would be the Circle-Eye foreman on the claybank. The man ignored her, his gaze holding on Ruben Vega with a solemn expression, showing he was going to be dead serious. A chew formed a lump in his jaw. He wore army suspenders and sleeve garters, his shirt buttoned up at the neck. As old as you are, Ruben Vega thought, a man who likes a tight feel of security and is serious about his business.

Bonnet said to him finally, “You made a mistake.”

“I don’t know the rules,” Ruben Vega said.

“She told you to leave her be. That’s the only rule there is. But you bought yourself a dandy new hat and come back here.”

“That’s some hat,” one of the young riders said. This one held a single-shot Springfield across his pommel. The foreman, Bonnet, turned in his saddle and said something to the other rider, who unhitched his rope and began shaking out a loop, hanging it nearly to the ground.

It’s a show, Ruben Vega thought. He said to Bonnet, “I was leaving.”

Bonnet said, “Yes, indeed, you are. On the off end of a rope. We’re gonna drag you so you’ll know the ground and never cross this land again.”

The rider with the Springfield said, “Gimme your hat, mister, so’s you don’t get it dirty.”

At this point Ruben Vega nudged his bay and began moving in on the foreman, who straightened, looking over at the roper, and said, “Well, tie on to him.”

But Ruben Vega was close to the foreman now, the bay taller than the claybank, and would move the claybank if the man on his back told him to. Ruben Vega watched the foreman’s eyes moving and knew the roper was coming around behind him. Now the foreman turned his head to spit and let go a stream that spattered the hard-pack close to the bay’s forelegs.

“Stand still,” Bonnet said, “and we’ll get her done easy. Or you can run and get snubbed out of your chair. Either way.”

Ruben Vega was thinking that he could drink with this ramrod and they’d tell each other stories until they were drunk. The man had thought it would be easy: chase off a Mexican gunnysacker who’d come sniffing the boss’s wife. A kid who was good with a rope and another one who could shoot cans off the fence with an old Springfield should be enough.

Ruben Vega said to Bonnet, “Do you know who I am?”

“Tell us,” Bonnet said, “so we’ll know what the cat drug in and we drug out.”

And Ruben Vega said, because he had no choice, “I hear the rope in the air, the one with the rifle is dead. Then you. Then the roper.”

His words drew silence because there was nothing more to be said. In the moments that Ruben Vega and the one named Bonnet stared at each other, the woman came out to them holding a revolver, an old Navy Colt, which she raised and laid the barrel against the muzzle of the foreman’s claybank.

She said, “Leave now, Mr. Bonnet, or you