Wayman's dead brother. . . .'
'Or what?' Catlett said.
'Answer to me,' the cowboy said. 'Are you armed? You aren't, you better get yourself a pistol.'
'You want to shoot me,' Catlett said, ' 'cause I went to Cuba and you didn't.'
The cowboy was shaking his head. ' 'Cause you lied. Have you got a pistol or not?'
Catlett said, 'You calling me out, huh? You want us to fight a duel?'
'Less you apologize. Else get a pistol.'
'But if I'm the one being called out, I have my choice of weapons, don't I? That's how I seen it work, twenty- four years in the U. S. Army in two wars. You hear what I'm saying?'
The cowboy was frowning now beneath his hat brim, squinting up at Bo Catlett. He said, 'Pistols, it's what you use.'
Catlett nodded. 'If I say so.'
'Well, what else is there?'
Confused and getting a mean look.
Catlett slipped his hand into the upright end of his bedroll and began to tug at something inside--the cowboy watching, the Circle-Eye riders in the street watching, the desk clerk and manager in the doorway and several hotel guests near them who had come out to the porch, all watching as Catlett drew a sword from the bedroll, a cavalry saber, the curved blade flashing as it caught the sunlight. He came past the people watching and down off the porch toward the cowboy in his hat and boots fixed with spurs that chinged as he turned to face Catlett, shorter than Catlett, appearing confused again holding the six-shooter at his side.
'If I choose to use sabers,' Catlett said, 'is that agreeable with you?'
'I don't have no saber. '
Meanness showing now in his eyes.
'Well, you best get one.'
'I never even had a sword in my hand.'
Irritated. Drunk, too, his eyes not focusing as they should. Now he was looking over his shoulder at the Circle-Eye riders, maybe wanting them to tell him what to do. One of them, not Wayman but one of the others, called out, 'You got your .44 in your hand, ain't you? What're you waiting on?'
Catlett raised the saber to lay the tip against Macon's breastbone, saying to him, 'You use your pistol and I use steel? All right, if that's how you want it. See if you can shoot me 'fore this blade is sticking out your back. You game? . . . Speak up, boy.'
IN THE HOTEL dining room having a cup of coffee, Catlett heard the noise outside, the cheering that meant Capt. Early had arrived. Catlett waited. He wished one of the waitresses would refill his cup, but they weren't around now, nobody was. A half hour passed before Capt. Early entered the dining room and came over to the table, leaving the people he was with. Catlett rose and they embraced, the hotel people and guests watching. It was while they stood this way that Bren saw, over Catlett's shoulder, the saber lying on the table, the curved steel on white linen. Catlett sat down. Bren looked closely at the saber's hilt. He picked it up and there was applause from the people watching. The captain bowed to them and sat down with the sergeant major.
'You went up the hill with this?'
'Somebody had to.'
'I'm being recommended for a medal. 'For courage and pluck in continuing to advance under fire on the Spanish fortified position at the battle of Las Guasimas, Cuba, June twenty-fourth, 1898.' '
Catlett nodded. After a moment he said, 'Will you tell me something? What was that war about?'
'You mean why'd we fight the dons?'
'Yeah, tell me.'
'To free the oppressed Cuban people. Relieve them of Spanish domination.'
'That's what I thought.'
'You didn't know why you went to war?'
'I guess I knew,' Catlett said. 'I just wasn't sure.'
The Tonto Woman
A TIME WOULD COME, within a few years, when Ruben Vega would go to the church in Benson, kneel in the confessional, and say to the priest, 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty-seven years since my last confession. . . . Since then I have fornicated with many women, maybe eight hundred. No, not that many, considering my work. Maybe six hundred only.' And the priest would say, 'Do you mean bad women or good women?' And Ruben Vega would say, 'They are all good, Father.' He would tell the priest he had stolen, in that time, about twenty thousand head of cattle but only maybe fifteen horses. The priest would ask him if he had committed murder. Ruben Vega would say no.
'All that stealing you've done,' the priest would say, 'you've never killed anyone?' And Ruben Vega would say, 'Yes, of course, but it was not to commit murder. You understand the distinction? Not to kill someone to take a life, but only to save my own.'
Even in this time to come, concerned with dying in a state of sin, he would be confident. Ruben Vega knew himself, when he was right, when he was wrong.
NOW, IN A TIME before, with no thought of dying, but with the same confidence and caution that kept him alive, he watched a woman bathe. Watched from a mesquite thicket on the high bank of a wash.
She bathed at the pump that stood in the yard of the adobe, the woman pumping and then stooping to scoop the water from the basin of the irrigation ditch that led off to a vegetable patch of corn and beans. Her dark hair was pinned up in a swirl, piled on top of her head. She was bare to her gray skirt, her upper body pale white, glistening wet in the late afternoon sunlight. Her arms were very thin, her breasts small, but there they were with the rosy blossoms on the tips and Ruben Vega watched them as she bathed, as she raised one arm and her hand rubbed soap under the arm and down over her ribs. Ruben Vega could almost feel those ribs, she was so thin. He felt sorry for her, for all the women like her, stick women drying up in the desert, waiting for a husband to ride in smelling of horse and sweat and leather, lice living in his hair.
There was a stock tank and rickety windmill off in the pasture, but it was empty graze, all dust and scrub. So the man of the house had moved his cows to grass somewhere and would be coming home soon, maybe with his sons. The woman appeared old enough to have young sons. Maybe there was a little girl in the house. The chimney appeared cold. Animals stood in a mesquite-pole corral off to one side of the house, a cow and a calf and a dun- colored horse, that was all. There were a few chickens. No buckboard or wagon. No clothes drying on the line. A lone woman here at day's end.
From fifty yards he watched her. She stood looking this way now, into the red sun, her face raised. There was something strange about her face. Like shadow marks on it, though there was nothing near enough to her to cast shadows.
He waited until she finished bathing and returned to the house before he mounted his bay and came down the wash to the pasture.
Now as he crossed the yard, walking his horse, she would watch him from the darkness of the house and make a judgment about him.
When she appeared again it might be with a rifle, depending on how she saw him.
Ruben Vega said to himself, Look, I'm a kind person. I'm not going to hurt nobody.
She would see a bearded man in a cracked straw hat with the brim bent to his eyes. Black beard, with a revolver on his hip and another beneath the leather vest. But look at my eyes, Ruben Vega thought. Let me get close enough so you can see my eyes.
Stepping down from the bay he ignored the house, let the horse drink from the basin of the irrigation ditch as he pumped water and knelt to the wooden platform and put his mouth to the rusted pump spout. Yes, she was watching him. Looking up now at the doorway he could see part of her: a coarse shirt with sleeves too long and the
