“This should not have happened,” he said. “Your husband had done nothing. It was a mistake.” He leaned closer to see her clearly in the firelight. “I did it to him, but I didn’t want to. He didn’t understand and he was going to kill me.”

Christ, if you can’t say anything, Valdez thought, quit talking.

He said, “It isn’t your fault this has happened. I mean, you are made to suffer and yet you did nothing to cause it. You understand?”

The woman nodded slightly, looking into the fire now. “All right, we can’t give him back to you, but we should give you something. You take something from a person, then you have to pay for it. We have to pay. We have to pay you for taking your husband. You see that?”

The woman did not move or speak.

“I don’t know how much you pay a woman for killing her husband, but we’ll think of something, all right? There were many men there; I don’t know them all. But the ones I know I go to and ask them to give me something for you. A hundred dollars. No, five hundred dollars we get and give it to you so you can do what you want with it. Have your baby and go home, wherever your home is, or stay here. Buy some, I don’t know, something to grow, and a cow and maybe some goats, uh? You know goats?”

Christ, let her buy what she wants. Get it done.

“Look,” Valdez said then. “We get in the wagon and go back to town. I see the men and talk to them – you stay in town also. I find a place for you, all right?”

The woman’s gaze rose from the fire, her dark face glistening in the light, the shapeless, flat-faced Lipan Apache woman looking at him. A person, but Christ, barely a person.

Why did Rincon choose this one? Valdez thought. He smiled then. “How does that sound? You stay in town, sleep in a bed. You don’t have to worry or think about it. We pay for everything.”

A Maricopa rider came into De Spain’s, where Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson were playing poker with another gentleman and the house man, and told them it was the goddamnedest thing he’d seen in a while: Bob Valdez walking into the Republic Hotel with that blown-up Indian woman.