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He exhaled slowly, dropping his eyes from the gleam up on the slanting wall, and let his gaze drift up ahead through the narrowness, the way it would naturally. But his fists remained tight around the reins. He muttered to himself, “You damn fool.” Cover was behind, a hundred feet or more, and a rifle can do a lot of pecking in a hundred feet.

The boy doesn’t see it, he thought. Else he would have been shooting by now. And then other words followed in his mind. Why do you think the boy’s any dumber than you are?

He shifted his hip in the saddle and turned his head halfway around. Dave Fallis was a few paces behind him and to the side. He was looking at his hands on the flat dinner-plate saddle horn, deep in thought.

Patman drew tobacco and paper from his side coat pocket and held his mount in until the boy came abreast of him.

“Don’t look up too quick and don’t make a sudden move,” Patman said. He passed the paper along the tip of his tongue, then shaped it expertly in his bony, freckly fingers. He wasn’t looking at the boy, but he could sense his head come up fast. “What did I just tell you?”

He struck a match and held it to the brown paper cigarette. His eyes were on the match and he half-mumbled with the cigarette in his mouth, “Dave, hold on to your nerve. There’s a rifle pointing at us. Maybe two hundred feet ahead and almost to the top of the slope.” He handed the makings across. “Build yourself one like it was Sunday afternoon on the front porch.”

Their horses moved at a slow walk close to the left side that was smooth rock and almost straight up. Here, and as far as you could see ahead, the right side slanted steeply up, gravel, rock and brush thrown violently together, to finally climb into dense pines overhead. Here and there the pines straggled down the slope. Patman watched the boy put the twisted cigarette between his lips and light it, the hand steady, up close to his face.

“When you get a chance,” Patman said, “look about halfway up the slope, just this side of that hollow. You’ll see a dab of yellow that’s prickly pear, then go above to that rock jam and tell me what you see.”

Fallis pulled his hat closer to his eyes and looked up-canyon before dragging his gaze to the slope. His face registered nothing, not even a squint with the hat brim resting on his eyebrows. A hard-boned face, tight through the cheeks and red-brown from the sun, but young and with a good mouth that looked as if it smiled most of the time, though it wasn’t smiling now. His gaze lowered to the pass and he drew on the cigarette.

“Something shining up there, but I don’t make out what it is,” he said.

“It’s a rifle, all right. We’ll take for granted somebody’s behind it.”

“Indian?”

“Not if the piece is so clean it shines,” Patman answered. “Just keep going, and watch me. We’ll gamble that it’s a white man—and gamble that he acts like one.”

Fallis tried to keep his voice even. “What if he just shoots?” The question was hoarse with excitement. Maybe the boy’s not as scared as I am, Patman thought. Young and too eager to be afraid. You get old and take too damn much time doing what kept you alive when you were young. Why keep thinking of him, he thought, you got a hide too, you know.

Patman answered, “If he shoots, we’ll know where we stand and you can do the first thing that comes to your mind.”

“Then I might let go at you,” Fallis smiled, “for leading us into this jackpot.”

Patman’s narrow face looked stone-hard with its sad smile beneath the full mustache. “If you want to make jokes,” he said, “go find someone else.”

“What’re we going to do, Virg?” Fallis was dead serious. It made his face look tough when he didn’t smile, with the heavy cheekbones and the hard jawline beneath.

“We don’t have a hell of a lot of choices,” Patman said. “If we kick into a run or turn too fast, we’re likely to get a bullet. You don’t want to take a chance on that gent up there being the nervous type. And if we just start shooting, we haven’t got anything to hide behind when he shoots back.”

He heard the boy say, “We can