vaqueros who had killed Ted Plunkert, in which case he would be easy pickings. His hip was paining him terribly, and he couldn't walk. Running him to ground would be an easy thing. He cocked the big shotgun, got out his pistol, and put his rifle near at hand. Of course, the horses had been rather far away; perhaps they would pass him by. But he had to be ready, in case they didn't. Famous Shoes had promised to go tell Lorena where he was, but Famous Shoes was not entirely to be counted on.
When he drove off Joey Garza, Pea Eye had felt elated. The odds looked good that he would live to see his wife and children again. But, in the long nights and long days, his confidence had slowly ebbed. He could scarcely move, and he had lost considerable blood. He had nothing to bandage himself with, and no way to go toward Lorena.
He could only wait and hope; and as he waited, feeling weaker by the hour, his hope began to fail.
He tried to hold up--after all, he was alive and he had driven off the young bandit--but despite himself, deep fears assailed him. It might be that in leaving home to come with the Captain, he had made a mistake that was too serious to correct. He had left his family, and the penalty for that might be a bitter end. He might have to die without speaking to them again. His deepest wish was to be able to make his feelings into words, words that could travel across the distances into the minds of his wife and his children. He wanted them to know his regret. If there was some way they could know how he felt, then dying would not be as bad. But he couldn't do that. The regret was with him, and the distances were real and they were great.
Pea Eye pulled a piece of horsemeat out of his shirt and began to gnaw on it. Several times in the days since Famous Shoes left, he had begun to give up and then had pulled himself back from giving up. He must not give up; Lorena would expect better of him than that. It was hard to choke the dry horsemeat down, but he had to try. He had to take what nourishment he could, to give himself the best chance if there was another fight.
Pea put the strip of horsemeat down for a moment in order to ease himself a little farther back against the creek bank. His hip pained him so that he dreaded any movement. The horses had come quite near. He only heard two. Their slow hoofbeats gave him the feeling that he was being hunted. He had the shotgun tilted upward. When he tried to sit up straighter, his hip hurt so badly that he passed out for a few seconds. He had done that once before on his long walk in Montana. He had passed out from hunger and fatigue, even as he kept walking.
As he walked, he had the sense that Deets, the black cowboy, had come back from the dead to guide him. This time, though, he was not walking--he was only hoping to sit up straighter so as to get off a good shot at whoever approached, in case they were enemies. He took one hand off the gun for a second to pick up the piece of horsemeat and put it back in his shirt. It was no time to be eating, but he didn't want to waste the food, either.
Listening hard, Pea determined that there were four horses coming, not two. That was a bad sign, and it frightened him. He got the strong sense that the horsemen were hunters and that he was the hunted.
Then, before he could even stick the meat back inside his shirt, he saw Lorena, his wife, standing not ten feet from him. It was a miracle--it was as if the sky had opened up and dropped her into the little creek. It was Lorena, not a ghost. It was his wife.
'Why, honey, you found me,' he said. He rarely called Lorena by such sweet names; only on her birthday sometimes, or maybe Christmas.
Lorena walked over and took the heavy gun from Pea Eye's hand.
'Would you take this?' she said, handing the gun to Billy Williams, who was only a step behind her.
'You came all this way and found me ... and it's winter, too,' Pea said to her, astonished as he always was that Lorena cared to bother with him.
Lorena had paused in the creek a moment, watching Pea Eye, before he saw her. The big gun was cocked, and she was afraid that if she startled him he might accidentally shoot her.
Pea looked bad. One side of his face was caked with blood, though probably he had just scratched himself with a bloody hand. He looked very thin, and his face was twisted in pain. The bad hip wound hurt him with every movement, she could see.
But here was her husband, and he was alive.
'Why wouldn't I--we're married!' Lorena replied. Then she took the awful piece of meat out of his hand, knelt close to him, being careful not to bump his bad hip, and took him into her arms. It was the luckiest thing in her life, that she found him in time. The children would not be without him, and neither would she.
'We're taking you home, Pea,' Lorena said. 'There won't be no more of this fighting, not for you.' 'No, I'm done with it, somebody else will have to do it,' Pea Eye replied.
Joey rode back almost to Ojinaga before he stopped to hide. His wounds had begun to hurt, and he knew they would only hurt worse, unless he could find someone to dig out the shot. He could not do it himself, for all his wounds were on his back and legs.
He had pellets in his neck and pellets all the way to his calves. He had carefully cleaned out the deputies' camp; there might be medicine in the saddlebags. But he had had to abandon it all when the old deputy came running at him with the big shotgun.
Joey hated the old deputy. It was absurd that a man so old would attack him. He should have shot him and the other deputy long before with his rifle, when they had been traveling on the plain. He could have done it easily, and he should have. Killing their animals, scaring them, and trying to drive them into the desert to starve had all been foolish actions.
He should have just killed them. But he had never supposed that one of them would be crazy enough to charge him; even the great Captain Call himself had not charged him. Neither had he supposed that he himself would be so stupid as to overlook a loaded gun.
During all his months as a robber, he had been careful and had made no mistakes. The fact that he made no mistakes added to his reputation-- it terrified people. They thought of Joey Garza as the bandit who made no mistakes.
But then he had made one, and a bad one. The old deputy had looked a fool, and he had looked incompetent. But he had not been a fool or incompetent. The shotgun had been the deputy's only chance, and he had remembered it and used it. The pellets making poison in his blood were his payment for being foolish. He had underestimated the old man. The Apaches rarely underestimated anyone. They knew that any living man might be dangerous if desperate enough.
Joey felt rage at the deputy, but he also felt rage at himself. Three or four more steps and the lawman would
