That was part of it: the knowing what he was thinking. That and the feeling that she had known him a long time; as if he were a boy she had gone to school with in Willcox and had been close to and had seen every day and was now seeing again after a lapse of six or seven years. But, she had never laid eyes on him before a month ago and even now she did not know his name. This was the first time he had been brought to Pinaleño with the supply detail.

Now she watched Renda walking off after the wagon, seeing, beyond him, the wagon pulling up in front of the open shed.

She could feel the rider with the Winchester looking at her, but she did not raise her eyes to him. Her father had said that his name was Brazil-Renda’s head guard. And her father had said he was a gunman; a man paid purely and simply for his gun and probably deserved to be wearing a straw hat and numbered pants as much as any convict in the camp.

The driver was standing in the wagon bed now, his head even with the shed roof. He would stoop under it, into the straight-line shade of it to take the sacks of flour and dried beans and salt that the two men who had been on the end gate handed up to him. He would drag the sacks to the front of the wagon and stack them, taking his time, as if trying to make this last as long as possible. Now and again he would glance at Karla.

She noticed this, but most of the time her eyes remained on the convict wearing number 18.

His sleeves were cut off at the shoulders and she had never seen a man’s arms burned such a deep brown. Black copper, she thought. And in the shadow of his hatbrim his face seemed even darker. It went through the girl’s mind that with shoulder-length hair and features that were coarse he could pass for a San Carlos Apache. Still, even though she had never seen him without the straw hat, she knew his hair was sand colored, just as she knew his eyes would be blue.