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By Root 723 0

pieces of the guns on a sheet of newspaper; he sat crosslegged on the floor like an Indian and wiped each bolt and spring and cam with an oily scrap of cloth. The room seemed to grow larger and quieter. In his mind he tried to reconstruct a portrait of Zach Provo. It had been twenty-eight years and the image was difficult to resurrect. Perhaps the man had lost his hair, although that wasn’t common among Navajos. But then Provo wasn’t fullblooded. Perhaps he had gone to fat—but that was hard to credit. The face had been bladed like a hatchet. Hard sinister eyes like two holes burned into a hide. Skin the hue of tarnished copper. It was coming back: the long jaw you could scratch a match on, the heavy black eyebrows, the lean slightly hunched body with its tense quickness of long-corded musculature. A man like that, how much would he change in twenty-eight years? Had prison collapsed the mouth, faded the eyes, thinned the hair, made the hard brown body flabby? Changed the tough, taut, commanding pressure into flaccid weakness? It wasn’t possible. Not Provo. A man like that, hardship wouldn’t grind down; it would only polish him up, like hard steel against a grindstone.

But maybe that was just a hope. Maybe he wanted Provo to be faster and tougher than ever. To increase the challenge.

I’m going to nail him, Sam Burgade thought, but he felt a little ashamed. He didn’t hate Zach Provo; he didn’t really care one way or the other about Provo. It was only that Provo gave him something to think about besides lonely old age.

I hope they don’t get him before I get a crack at him.

Three

Provo stood in the open door of the laborer’s shack watching the lights of Gila Bend, waiting for Menendez to return. There was always the chance Menendez wouldn’t come back at all, would just light out and keep going. But he didn’t think so. He’d put a bug in Menendez’s ear about that Santa Fe gold cache up on the Mogollon and he had a feeling Menendez would stick to him like a saddlebur until Menendez got near that money.

The two Mexican laborers who occupied the shack had showed up just after dark. Provo had let them come inside and then jumped them. Portugee had wanted to kill them with their own knives but Provo had called him off: leave a trail of corpses and they’d only bring more trouble down on their heads—Pinkertons, the Army. The laborers lay back in a corner, trussed with their own belts and ripped-up shirts, gagged, sweating their terror into the stifling suffocation of the hot overcrowded room.

It was a long wait and Provo got uneasy. But somewhere around midnight Menendez came from town, riding a horse at a skittish walk. There was a heaped bundle tied on behind the saddle. For a moment Provo wasn’t sure—he kept inside the dark doorway with his riot gun ready—but it was Menendez all right.

Menendez drew rein by the door. Up close in the starlight Provo could see he was wearing range clothes, Levi’s and a plaid shirt, and his ankle irons and chains were gone. Menendez’s waistline bulged with four or five gunbelts and holstered handguns.

Provo said, “Can’t you hold that horse still?”

Taco Riva squeezed out through the door past him. “Let me have him.” Taco’s passion was horses. He spoke soothingly and rubbed the horse’s face before he took a gentle grip on the bridle.

Menendez dismounted. “Damn town’s crawling with law.”

“We’ve got to expect that.” Provo helped carry the heavy poncho-wrapped booty inside. “You did fine.”

“Bet your ass I did. I hit the es-smithy first. Got us three hacksaws and all the spare blades I could ef-find. I had to cot my chains off before I could move on—sonoma-bitches was making enough racket to wake the dead, and there’s a focking deputy on every damn corner in town. That there bondle’s clothes, shirts and pants. Took ’em out of the storeroom behind the dry-goods. Got these gons there too—only ones I could ef-find. I din’ dare go near the gonsmith es-shop, there was a deputy right out ef-front.” He chuckled. “This town goeen to be plenty pozzled in the morning.”

There was an hour of cursing