“Whose house is this?” I said.
She stabbed herself with a finger. “My house.” Then she yelled,
The house had only two rooms. The first room had a fireplace and a charcoal brazier for cooking and a plank table and three leather-bottom chairs. In one corner there were some blankets rolled up, and I figured that was where Papacito slept when he was home. The other room had a mound of clay shaped up against one wall with some blankets on it, and that was the bed. A rough plank wardrobe and another leather-bottom chair completed the furniture.
“Wait here,” the girl said.
She went out and I heard her shaking up the coals in the fireplace, and pretty soon she came back lugging a big wooden tub. “For bath,” she said. On the next trip she brought a razor and a small piece of yellow lye soap. “For shave.”
I grinned. “I can't complain about the service.”
“You wait,” she said.
I was too tired to try to understand why she was going to so much trouble. Maybe that's the way Mexicans were. Maybe they liked to wait on the gringos. I was beginning to feel easy and comfortable for the first time since I had left Texas. I pulled off my boots, sat in the chair, and put my feet on the clay bed. I was beginning to like Arizona just fine.
“Say,” I called, “have you got anything to drink?”
She came in with a crock jug and handed it to me. “Wine,” she said.
I swigged from the neck and the stuff was sweet and warm as it hit my stomach. “Thanks,” I said. Then I had another go at the jug, and that was enough. I never took more than two drinks of anything.
That was partly Pappy Garret's teaching, but mostly it came from seeing foothills filled with gunmen who could shoot like forked lightning when they were sober, but when they forgot to set the bottle down they were just another notch in some ambitious punk's gun butt.
The girl came in with a crock bowl of hot water. I got up and she put the water on the chair and a broken mirror on the wardrobe.
“Bath before long,” she said, and went back into the other room.
She had a way of knocking out all the words except the most essential ones, but she spoke pretty good English.
I went over to the wardrobe and inspected my face in the mirror. It gave me quite a shock at first, partly because I hadn't seen my face in quite a while, and partly because of the dirt and beard and the sunken places around the cheeks and eyes. It didn't look like my face at all.
It didn't look like the face of a kid who still wasn't quite twenty years old. The eyes had something to do with it, and the tightness around the mouth. I studied those eyes carefully because they reminded me of some other eyes I had seen, but I couldn't place them at first.
They had a quick look about them, even when they weren't moving. They didn't seem to focus completely on anything.
Then I remembered one time when I was just a sprout in Texas. I had been hunting and the dogs had jumped a wolf near the arroyo on our place, and after a long chase they had cornered him in the bend of a dry wash. As I came up to where the dogs were barking I could see the wolf snarling and snapping at them, but all the time those eyes of his were casting around to find a way to get out of there.
And he did get out, finally. He was a big gray lobo, as vicious as they come. He ripped the throat of one of my dogs and blasted his way out and disappeared down the arroyo. But I heard later that another pack of dogs caught him and killed him.
“What's wrong?”
The girl came in with a kettle of hot water and poured it into the tub.
“Nothing,” I said, and began lathering my face.
I started to leave my mustache on, thinking that it might keep people from recognizing me, but when I got the rest of my face shaved my upper lip looked like hell. It was just some scraggly pink fuzz and I couldn't fool anybody with that. The girl poured some cold water in the tub on top of the hot, and filled it about halfway to the top.
“Ready,” she said. “Give me clothes.”
“Nothing doing. I take a bath in private or I don't take one at all.”
“To wash,” she added.
These Mexicans must be crazy, I thought. Why anybody would want to take a saddle tramp in and take care of him I didn't know. But it was all right with me, if that was the way she wanted it.
“All right,” I said. “You get in the other room and I'll throw them through the door.”
She stood with her hands on her hips, grinning. “Gringos!” But she went in the other room and I began to strip off. When I threw the things in the other room she picked them up and went outside.
I must have soaked for an hour or more there in the tub, twisting and turning and scrubbing every inch of myself that I could reach. It was dark outside, and the only light in the house came from the fireplace in the other room.
“Say,” I called, “are those clothes dry yet?”
“Pretty soon,” she said. Her voice was so close it made me jump. Instinctively, I made a grab for my pistols, which I had put on the chair and pulled up beside the tub, but she laughed and I stopped the grab in mid-air.
