Such road as it was soon ceased to be road at all. Where it first left the river it was the width of a wagon or more and had in recent times been scraped or graded with a fresno and the brush cut back yet once clear of the town the heart seemed to have gone out of this enterprise and they found themselves on a common footpath following the course of a dry arroyo up into the hills. At just dark they came upon a small holding, a clutch of pole huts staked out upon a trinchera or terrace shored up with rock. They made their camp just above this place on the next level ground and hobbled the horses and made a fire. Below them through the scrub pine and juniper they could see a yellow houselamp. A little later as they were boiling their pail of beans a man came up the road carrying a lantern. He called to them from the road and Billy stepped to where the shotgun stood leaning against a tree and called back for him to approach. He came to the fire and stood. He looked at the dog.
Buenas noches, he said.
Buenas noches.
Son Americanos?
Sí.
He held the lantern up. He looked at the shapes of the horses in the dark beyond the fire.
Dónde está el caballero,
No hay otro caballero más que nosotros, Billy said.
The man’s eyes wandered over their meager possessions. Billy knew that he’d been sent to invite them to the house but he did not do so. They spoke briefly of nothing at all and then he took his leave. He walked back out to the road and through the trees they saw him raise the lamp to his face and lift the glass in its bail and blow out the flame. Then he walked back down to the house in the dark.
The day following their way led them into the mountains shutting in the Bavispe River Valley under the western slope.
The trail grew more wretched yet with washouts where the riders were obliged to dismount and lead the horses clambering along the narrow floor of the arroyo and up along the switchbacks and there were places where the track diverged and where separate schools of thought wandered off through the pine and scrub oak. They camped that night in an old burn among the bones of trees and among the shapes of boulders that had broken open in the earthquake half a century before and slid down the mountain on the face of their cleavings and grinding stone on stone had struck the fire with which they’d burnt the woods alive. The trunks of the pollarded and broken trees stood at every angle pale and dead in the twilight and in the twilight small owls flew in utter silence hither and yon about the darkening glade.
They sat by the fire and cooked and ate the last of their bacon with beans and tortillas and they slept on the ground in their blankets and the wind in the dead gray pilings about them made no sound and the owls when they called in the night called with soft watery calls like the calls of doves.
They rode for two days through the high country. A fine rain fell. It was cold and they rode with their blankets about them and the dog trotted ahead like some mute and mindless bellwether and the breath from the horses’ nostrils plumed whitely in the thin air. Billy offered that they take turn about riding the saddled horse but Boyd said that he would ride the Keno horse by preference saddle or no. When Billy then offered to swap the saddle to the other horse Boyd only shook his head and booted the bareback horse forward.
They rode through the ruins of old sawmills and they rode through a mountain meadow dotted with the dark stumps of trees. Across a valley in the evening with the sun on it they could see the tailings of an old silvermine and camped in withy huts among the rusted shapes of antique machinery a family of gypsy miners working the abandoned shaft who now stood aligned all sizes of them before the evening cookfire watching the riders pass along the opposing slope and shading their eves against the sun with their hands like some encampment of ragged and deranged militants at review. That same evening he shot a rabbit and they halted in the long mountain light and made a fire and cooked the rabbit and ate it and fed the guts to the dog and then the bones and when they were done they sat gazing into the coals.
You reckon the horses know where we’re at? Boyd said.
What do you mean?
He looked up from the fire. I mean do you reckon they know where we’re at.
What the hell kind of question is that?
Well. I reckon it’s a question about horses and what they know about where they’re at.
Hell, they dont know nothin. They’re just in some mountains somewheres. You mean do they know they’re in Mexico?
No. But if we was up in the Peloncillos or somewheres they’d know where they was at. They could find their way back if you turned em out.
Are you askin me if they could find their way back from here if you cut em loose?
I dont know.
Well what are you askin.
I’m askin if they know where they’re at.