Henry found the boarding stable Ben Ambrose had recommended at the north end of the business district, a large tin-roofed adobe barn with a liver-medicine advertisement painted on the side. With a black iron bolt he rang a horseshoe hanging by the door, and then set to work unsaddling. In a moment a big shirtless man in bib overalls emerged. Ambrose had said his name was Budge Gorman. He wore a black Grand Army hat pulled so far down on his face that he bad to tip his head back to see Henry, which caused his mouth, innocent of upper teeth, to gape. He had long, hairy arms and a face like a hound.
Henry made arrangements for the horse.
He asked the stableman how to find Alice Gary’s place, and the big simple man took a hoof pick and squatted down in the hard-packed dirt. With deep, rasping scratches, he drew a map.
“This here’s Morley. Yonder’s Sonoyta. Walk straight up the hill and turn right. Top of the hill. You can’t miss it. Try to buy that bracelet from Allie. I ain’t never seen it off her wrist, and I swear to God it’s too big for me!”
“How big is she?”
“Size of a sparrow!” The laugh from Budge’s deep, hairy chest sounded like hee, hee, hee! About right for Allie.
The climb was steep. When Henry arrived. breathing deeply. a Mexican girl with a long shining braid but no English led him to a bedroom in the rear where his bags rested on the floor beside a cot with a white counterpane. She tried to explain something to him but finally giggled and went away.
The room was much more comfortable than he had expected, the walls covered with flocked cream-colored Wallpaper, the high ceiling of stamped tin painted gray. There was a flowered porcelain fixture on one wall like nothing he had ever seen—a little china tank with a faucet, and a matching bowl below it. The brass bed was narrow, and near the window stood a small desk and a fragile chair. A bowl and pitcher reminded him to take his quinine, and he measured the dose into a water glass, filled it from a pitcher, and bolted it. The bitter taste almost curled his hair. Gasping, he made terrible faces at the mirror until he could get the cork out of a pint bottle of whiskey and down a slug. As always, he gasped. “Great snakes!”
Recovering, he brushed aside a glass-bead curtain and gazed down into the almost treeless bowl that held the town. The near hillside fell by terraces that held rows of small homes. At the bottom, one- and two-story business houses lined the north- and south-running streets. Water towers on stilts rose above the railroad station.
The far hillside appeared to be covered with cave dwellings, pole sheds, hovels, and privies. Lines of wash flapped in the breeze. He saw Spanish bayonet and a few mesquite, but nothing a respectable horticulturist would honestly call a tree.
Downtown, the streets ran capriciously, meeting to form wedgelike comers two fat people could hardly stand on. It would be a surveyor’s nightmare, the only level land seeming to be where the railroad tracks lay like a basking snake between the hills. Yet, built though the town was of tin roofs and dirt, and completely undecorated, he liked it—the foreign smells, the lusty honking of a burro somewhere, and the cool, clean, cell-like room he stood in. It was completely free of clutter—exactly the kind of room a man needed who had some serious thinking to do. In fact, he realized, the room put him in mind of his little bedroom at Fort Bowie.
He studied himself in the mirror on the dresser. Was his skin a little more yellow? Definitely. Well, at least he had gotten this far without a spell of ague.
He stretched out on the white iron cot for his first real sleep in days, and sank into oblivion....
When he opened his eyes, the light in the room had faded. He lay still, enjoying the sounds of children’s voices calling in Spanish. He sniffed something that smelled like apple pie. An idea had come to him as he slept: that since Rip’s Uncle Hum was buried here, Rip’s widow probably would have had him buried in the same cemetery, if he were dead. Tomorrow he would talk to the county recorder, but this afternoon he could check the cemetery, if it was not too far away.
He hadn’t had time to think about Manion’s telegram. What did “advise caution” mean, exactly? At least it would be the part of wisdom to tell no one what he was doing here.
He found the bathroom, spruced up, and walked down a hall to a kitchen. A small, aproned woman was standing at a worktable with her back to him. He tapped on the doorjamb, and she turned, her hands white with flour.
“Well, Mr. Logan!” she said. “Did you have a nice rest?” She was dark-haired and pretty, and he spotted at once the huge gold bracelet on her left wrist, massive enough for a mule skinner.
“I slept like a dead man,” Henry said. “I need to ask about board, Mrs. Gary.”
She told him he could call her Allie, that room and board was fifteen dollars a month or five dollars a week, and that sheets were changed weekly. Henry paid a month’s board, using one of his gold pieces. She gave him some silver coins for change.
“We use Mexican pesos here,” she said. “They go for fifty cents.”
Henry liked the big cold coins’ honest heft on his palm, their slick feel and the fierce eagle on a cactus, a rattlesnake in its beak; he clinked them on his hand a couple of times before dropping them in his pocket.
“I have a question, Allie. Whereabouts would I find a cemetery?”
She tried to suppress her amusement but giggled. “Oh, now you don’t look that bad,” she said.
“I had malaria,” Henry said. “A friend thought I might feel better here, so—”
“You will, Henry, you surely will! I like to died in San Francisco—the damp. I had bronchitis. Here, I’m healthy as a horse. Will you be looking for work?”
“Depends on how I feel. First off, though, I’m looking for—”
“A cemetery. Well, if you walk south, you’ll soon be on Cemetery Hill. There’s also a lot of little houses where retired soldiers from Fort Huachuca have settled. And a bigger one where General Stockard and his wife, Emily, live. She’s going senile, poor thing. Tomorrow you’ll have time to visit the other cemeteries, if you’re a mind. Dinner’s at six and I ring the triangle on the porch. That’s funny,” she said. “Most people want to see where the Yaquis burned the buildings, or where the Maid of Caborca was captured. You must have a relative or friend ...?”
Henry recited what John Manion had told him. “I’m trying to help a lawyer friend in Kansas City. A client of his passed away a while back, and there was a small fund for perpetual care. I promised I’d make sure—”
Allie giggled. “Surely they didn’t send you to Arizona to count weeds on a grave?”
“Alice”—Henry chuckled—“there is no fooling you. The truth is, I’m with the Kansas City zoo, and I’m collecting roadrunners. They told me they’re thick in cemeteries.”
He heard her laughing as he went down the hall.
The houses on the west side of the street stood several feet higher than those on Allie’s side, all of them built of adobe, with peaked roofs and galleries running all around them like steamboats. On the walk to the cemetery, Henry saw some flowers growing by the road, and he picked a few lupines and Indian paintbrush for Humboldt Parrish’s grave. Finally he came to the cemetery, a small, tilted, bedraggled half acre inside a rusty barbed-wire fence. Here and there Spanish bayonet and scrub oak grew from the caliche soil. A black buggy stood near a wrought-iron gate, and a gray horse, stone-anchored, browsed on the yellow weeds. The rig had a funereal look, as though plumes should stand in the whip sockets. But what was fixed on the nigh side, he saw, was a rifle in a scabbard. He leaned down to study it, and pursed his lips.
Nice! Excellent piece of the gun maker’s art. The gun stock was of carved rosewood; the barrel, walls, and magazine of nickel steel. Looked like a Hotchkiss, what he could see of it, a gun Winchester had tried to sell the Army, so that a few officers got them. The weapon very much resembled his father’s carbine—the one that had disappeared in the raid, or been burned and melted down totally. He eased it halfway from the scabbard and confirmed that it was the same model, then looked for the fortunate owner.
There he was—she was!—sitting by a grave, reading a book as big as a Bible. He conjectured: Would it be polite to ask a lady in a cemetery where she had come by a weapon? (And, if he got past this hurdle, would she like to trade for a newer gun that held more cartridges?)
Nothing ventured, he decided.
A rusty hinge gave an iron squall as he opened the gate. The mourner, a young woman, sat on a folding stool on the central aisle; she did not look up, but as he started toward her he came to a shocked halt. Though he saw her face in profile, he was certain it was the woman in the wedding picture! She had the same arch way of holding her head; even the braid brought forward across one shoulder was that of the woman in the photograph. She wore a white shirtwaist with a high collar and a full tan skirt; a little straw hat lay on the ground beside her.
Holding his breath, he studied his cards.
As of the time Manion got her wire, Frances Parrish’s husband was missing.
Had he been found—and buried—in the few days since?
No, for the grave had settled completely
He decided there was one person could give him all the information he needed. The Widow Parrish.
As yet she had not seen him. She was writing furiously on one of those officers’ field desks. He saw her suddenly thrust her fingers into her hair, stare at her paper, seeming distracted—then, with a shake of her head, dip her pen and scribble on. What a fine, theatrical gesture, perfect for so vital-looking a woman as the doctor’s daughter. He sensed, however, that she would not appreciate being interrupted at her work.
So: He would stroll past, carrying his blue-and-red nosegay, and steal a glance at the marker. If not Rip’s grave, then whose? He would walk on, then, and find Hum Parrish’s grave. When she appeared to be finished with whatever she was writing, he could introduce himself.