“And,” Karla said, “you were sentenced to Yuma.”
“Seven years each.”
“You needed a good lawyer,” Karla said thoughtfully.
“We needed more than that.”
“You needed a lawyer like Mr. Martz, the Hatch & Hodges attorney. He’s in Prescott. He’s-” She stopped abruptly, looking up at Bowen.
Bowen shook his head. “The trial’s over.”
“But if he could prove you didn’t know anything about it-”
“He’d be awful good.” Bowen reined the mare around. “I hope I can pay you back for this.”
“Don’t worry about that now.”
He looked down at her and seemed reluctant to leave, then said, “Goodbye, Karla.” That was all.
She watched him circle the corral and disappear into the pines and only then did it occur to her that he knew her name. He could have heard Renda say it-that was it. But he remembered it-that was the important thing.
Salvaje, sergeant of Apache police, waited. His eyes, beneath the broad hatbrim, were fixed on the dark rise of pines miles to the east-the hillcrest that overlooked the Pinaleño station. He had sent one of his Mimbres there within minutes of being told of the escape. It was something he always did; for invariably the sign led to Pinaleño. With the rest of his trackers he had followed the escaped man’s trail to this point. If the signal did not come from the pines, they would continue. Sometimes it took a complete day to bring back an escaped man, but seldom longer than that.
And sometimes it was almost too easy. At least this one had not tried to cover his trail. Some of them used devices that only wasted their time: back-tracking and stream-wading tricks that even a reservation child could understand. Doing this even when their objective was almost always Pinaleño and a horse.