He touched Maria's face; it was cold. He had only left for a little more than a day, and now this!
'Go get drunk now, Billy,' Maria whispered to him. 'But don't forget my children.
Please talk about me when you see them. Give them your memories. Tell them how I danced and laughed, when I was young and pretty ...' 'Mary, you're still young and pretty,' Billy Williams told her. It took his breath away to think that after all these years, Maria was going.
He would be lost; he wouldn't know what to do.
Maria raised up and gave him a kiss and tugged at his hair for a moment. He still had the long hair of the mountain man.
'Go on, Billy. Go get drunk,' Maria whispered, again.
'Oh, Mary ...' Billy sighed.
He wanted to talk more--he wanted to say things he had never said to her. But Maria's eyes were tired and sad.
'You go on ... obey me,' Maria told him, quietly, but in a tone that he knew better than to argue with.
'Well ... didn't I always?' he asked.
Lorena wanted the old man to go. She saw the dying woman looking at her, and she knew what Maria wanted to ask. She wanted the old man to go; yet, maybe he had been to Maria what Pea Eye was to her. It was not her place to rush him in his last moments with his love.
Billy Williams rose, looked at Maria once more, and stumbled outside.
Lorena knelt and felt Maria's pulse; it was barely there. That the woman was alive at all was a wonder. But then, it was a wonder that Call still lived. Pea Eye was outside, tied to his horse and in great pain. She wanted to lift him down and bring him in, but she had to hear Maria's request first.
'Would you take them?' Maria asked, with a movement of her head, first toward Rafael and then toward Teresa.
'Yes, I'll take them,' Lorena said firmly. She wanted to relieve the woman's deep doubt. Maria had made the request she herself would have had to make to Clara, if things had gone differently. And she might not have even gotten to speak it--she might have had to trust that Clara would receive it in her heart, and respond.
'I've got my husband back now, and I'll take them. I expect we can take care of all the children that come along,' Lorena told her. She meant it too; she was firm. She had Pea Eye back, and together they could take care of all the children that came along.
Maria smiled. She looked at Rafael and put her trembling hand on Teresa's face.
'I've got to get my husband in. He's hurt. I'll be right back,' Lorena said, softly.
She found Billy Williams outside, crying.
'I just went off for two days,' he choked, 'and now this.' 'It was the wrong two days, but you couldn't know that,' Lorena said. 'Help me get Pea off, will you? He's hurting.' They lifted Pea Eye down, carried him into the small house, and put him down beside Call.
'There's not too many more places left to lay sick people or dead people in this house,' Billy Williams mumbled. There were Joey and Maria, Call, and now Pea Eye.
Lorena went to Maria and saw that she was gone.
'The count's even now,' she said quietly to Billy. 'It's two that's sick, and two that's dead.' 'Oh, Mary,' Billy said, when he looked at her. He sat down on the floor and put his head in his arms.
Lorena made Pea Eye as comfortable as she could. He was unconscious, but he would live.
On the ride back, despite his pain, Pea talked and talked, asking questions about their children. The fact that his children were in Nebraska kept slipping from his tired mind. Finally, to satisfy him, Lorena made up little stories about the children and what they were doing.
Then, when she had made her husband as comfortable as she could make him, Lorena went back across the small room, covered Maria, and sat with her two new children, the little girl who had no sight, and the large boy with the empty mind.
In the morning, the vaqueros came back with a photographer they had found in Presidio. They wanted to have their pictures taken with the famous bandit they had killed. They had drunk tequila all night, telling stories about the great battle they'd had with the young killer. They had forgotten the butcher and the mother entirely; in their minds, there had been a great gun battle by the Rio Grande, and the famous bandit had finally fallen to their guns.
Billy Williams had obeyed Maria's last order: he drank all night, sitting outside the room where Maria lay. But the whiskey hadn't touched him, and when the vaqueros came straggling up from the river with the photographer and his heavy camera, loaded on a donkey--he planned to take many pictures and sell them to the Yankee magazines and make his fortune-- Billy Williams went into a deadly rage.
'You goddamn goat ropers had better leave!' he yelled, grabbing his rifle. The vaqueros were startled into immediate sobriety by the wild look in the old mountain man's eyes.
Billy Williams began to fire his rifle, and the vaqueros felt the bullets whiz past them like angry bees, causing them to flee. The photographer, a small man from Missouri named Mullins, fled too--but he could not persuade the donkey to flee. George Mullins stopped fifty yards away and watched Billy Williams cut the cameras off the donkey and hack them to kindling with an axe.
George Mullins had invested every cent he had in the world in those cameras. He had even borrowed money to buy the latest equipment--but in a moment, he was bankrupt. There would be no sales to Yankee magazines, and there would be no fortune.
George Mullins had ridden across the river, feeling like a coming man; he walked back to Texas owning nothing but a donkey.
