THE L-SHAPED adobe building had once been the guardhouse for a Mexican Army outpost stationed here, and though a section of the flat roof had been demolished by a cannon during the recent war, the place still served as the ten-cell Agrytown jail. On the rough stone floor of one of the cells, over which the roof was firmly intact, the disillusioned ex-revolutionist and soldier of misfortune named Thomas MacGrail Buchanan came painfully back to his senses. The whole experience had a familiarity about it, as though Buchanan were reliving his life, and when he felt of his midsection it was just as it had been on several occasions during the past two years. The belt with its magnificent silver buckle was gone. The purse with its little gold fortune was gone. His body and face were just one long bruise and he was right back where he had started.
Something passed across his chest and scurried away.
“Hell!” Buchanan said fervently. “Even the same lousy rats!” Ache as it did to move his head, the big man made himself rise first to a kneeling position and then a full stand. Buchanan was not a delicate type, but he did prefer to be on his feet in the company of rats.
“Quien es aquí?” asked a quavering, sick-sounding young voice from the utter darkness.
“Who’s yourself?” growled Buchanan uncompanionably in English. “And keep your bloody distance.” This from previous experience in unlighted jails with many strange derelicts of humanity.
“I think you are the one who helped me tonight,” Juan del Cuervo said haltingly in Buchanan’s native tongue. Then, reverting emotionally to Spanish. “I am much obliged, friend.”
“Sure. Are you on a bed, or something?”
“No. On the ground — on the floor.”
“You better get up. Goddam rats’ll go for your throat.”
“I’ll try again,” Juan said, and as he struggled to rise Buchanan began to make out the slim figure on the opposite side of the little cell. He made his way there, reached down and got a hand under the younger man’s armpit.
“Please, no,” Juan said. “Por favor. I would do this thing myself.”
“Sure,” Buchanan said, thinking about these Mexicans and their posturing. Even Campos, the night he was gut-shot at Nuri, had snarled when Buchanan tried to help him remount. Proud, ugly bastard had to do it himself. But now, as he listened to this kid’s muffled groans, watched him get to one knee, Buchanan had an embarrassing revelation about himself. Not if he knew it would any man ever have to raise him to his feet. Now what the hell put a crazy thought like that in his head?
“I made it,” Juan said. “I think.”
“Good for you,” Buchanan said, made briefly surly by his feeling of guilt. He moved away then toward the third wall, out of memory, and felt for the bunk that should be there. It was.
“Come on over here,” he said. “At least there’s something to sit on.” He lowered himself gratefully onto the iron cot with its loose straw mattress and made room for Juan.
“Got any tobacco?”
“I don’t use it, señor.” There was great sorrow in Juan’s voice and Buchanan shifted uncomfortably.
“How come you’re in the calaboose?” he asked. “It was you getting the licking.”
“I killed a man tonight,” Juan said simply. “I am here for that.”
There it was again, Buchanan thought, with irritation. The dignity.
“With a knife?” he asked, his voice accusing.
“With a gun,” Juan said. “Very badly.”
“What do you meaan, badly?”
“There was an interruption. I did not let Agry draw — ”
“What Agry?”
“Roy, the son of Señor Simon.”
“Why, hell, he was drunk.”
The kid sighed. “I did not know,” he said unhappily. “Even so, it would have made no difference.”
“You must be a tiger for sure,” Buchanan said. “What’s your handle, anyhow?”
“Juan. Juan del Cuervo. What is your name?”
“Buchanan,” Buchanan said negligently. It was not so common a name, Del Cuervo, that you could hear it twice in one day and fail to make the connection. He even remembered this Juan now, the excited one who rode like a young don and took over the arrangements for getting the girl home. He had left the party soon after Juan joined it, taken advantage of a sharp curve in the trail to swing around and get back on the road that led out of Mexico.
“How’s the little girl?” he asked.
Juan’s head came up sharply. Now he was remembering. It was all so blurred, so unreal, but after they had finished with Buchanaan, after they had kicked and clubbed him beyond humanity, he had thought he recognized that hard and unconquerable face. Then they had turned to him, and the last he remembered was a wheezing voice, a vicious voice that shouted. “Keep him alive. Keep him alive for the rope!”
“My sister will recover,” Juan said quietly.
“What made you think it was this Agry did it?”
“Maria told me,” Juan said and Buchanan knew what the scratches on Roy Agry’s face had reminded him of. It appealed to his ironic sense of humor that he might have killed the buck himself and felt remorse. Seeing the girl again as he had come upon her, abused, naked and near death, he hoped that Agry had been sober enough to know he was paying his bill.
“You shouldn’t have gunshot him,” Buchanan said.
“I would do it again,” Juan answered with some heat. “I wouldn’t change anything. Except your trouble.”
“I mean it was too honest for a bastard like that,” Buchanan said. “It was too easy,” he added thoughtfully.
“What would you have done, Buchanan?”
Buchanan — old, thirty-year-old Buchanan — closed his eyes, ran his hands up along the sides of his unshaven face and dreamed he was lying full length in a trough of steaming hot water.
“What would you have done to Roy Agry?” Juan asked again.
“Johnny,” Buchanan said, “there are some things that are only for the doing. Not the talking.”
“Then in your eyes I managed this business badly?”
“Well, hell! You came all by your lonesome, didn’t you? The least you could of done was to bring somebody with you, boy. Somebody like that Gomez would have filled the bill.”
“No,” Juan said. “It was against my father’s orders that I rode at all.”
“How come?”
“It is a family thing,” Juan said. “My sister is to be married in the spring. Sebastian Diaz is — particular about a great many things. My parents thought it best to postpone justice until after the marriage.”
“Then kind of ease Mr. Agry out when nobody’s looking?”
“Yes.”
“But you lean more to Texas law?”
“Once I knew it was Roy Agry, a man who had courted Maria within our own house — ”
“You and me both, Johnny,” Buchanan said, slapping the younger man’s knee reassuringly. “Man, I sure wish you’d brought the makings. I could smoke up a storm.” He got up then and began pacing about the little cell restlessly.