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 want to go to bed with me? Is that what you're saying, why you bring a gift?'
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 moment he 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'll walk nine miles to shade.'
There was no argument, little discussion, a few grumbling words.
The Tonto woman was still Mrs. Isham. Bonnet rode away with his young hands and a new silence came over the yard.
Ruben Vega said, 'He believes you'd shoot his horse.' The woman said, 'He believes I'd cut steaks, and eat it too. It's how I'm seen after twelve years of that other life.'
Ruben Vega began to smile. The woman looked at him and in a few moments she began to smile with him. She shook her head then, but continued to smile. He said to her, 'You could have a good time if you want to.'
She said, 'How, scaring people?' He said, 'If you feel like it.' He said, 'Get the present I brought you and open it.'
HE CAME BACK for her the next day in a Concord buggy, wearing his new willow-root straw and a cutaway coat over his revolvers, the coat he'd rented at a funeral parlor. Mrs. Isham wore the pale blue-andwhite lace- trimmed dress he'd bought at Weiss's store, sat primly on the bustle, and held the parasol against the afternoon sun all the way to Benson, ten miles, and up the main street to the Charles Crooker Hotel where the drummers and cattlemen and railroad men sitting in their front-porch rockers stared and stared.
They walked past the manager and into the dining room before Ruben Vega removed his hat and pointed to the table he liked, one against the wall between two windows. The waitress in her starched uniform was wide-eyed taking them over and getting them seated. It was early and the dining room was not half filled.
'The place for a quiet dinner,' Ruben Vega said. 'You see how quiet it is?'
'Everybody's looking at me,' Sarah Isham said to the menu in front of her.
Ruben Vega said, 'I thought they were looking at me. All right, soon they'll be used to it.'
She glanced up and said, 'People are leaving.'
He said, 'That's what you do when you finish eating, you leave.'
She looked at him, staring, and said, 'Who are you?'
'I told you.'
'Only your name.'
'You want me to tell you the truth, why I came here?'
