Doroteo said, “Let’s go find somebody.”

Doroteo’s gaze roved over the small adobe houses scattered at random, the outdoor ovens and the guinea fowl rushing about with cocky pecking gestures, the running children. He searched out the pens where Rosillo peeled off the harness from his sweating horses. A tiny chapel the size of a chicken house stood in a space by itself, guarded by saints. White plastered walls written upon by mesquite-leaf shadows in a delicate calligraphy. Women in bright clothes hurried from place to place. The little settlement resounded with talk and loud calls, the bumping noise of arriving carretas, horses snorting, the endless slapping of women making tortillas.

They picked up their baggage, walked out into the village.

Doro said, “About twenty horses in the pens. Saddles in the tack shed. Every saddle has a scabbard on it.”

“Who lives here?” Simon hooked both thumbs in his belt and looked around.

Rosillo was suddenly standing beside them. He said, “Used to be a remount station for the stagecoach from San Antonio to Fort Brown. But everybody steal the horses. And they stole the feed too.” He began to strip off his shirt; a thick gray cake of soap was in his hand.

“Isn’t there anybody to stop them?” asked Damon. “You would think.”

“Not down here. You send a guard of troops, you got to send food for them too. After a while you run out of supplies.”

“Go get more,” said Damon. “A simple but elegant solution.”

“Corpus Christi is twenty-three miles away. Maybe you won’t make it back with what you bought.” Rosillo smiled. His thin-skinned pale face was deeply weathered and when he smiled, creases like knife scars formed around his mouth. He strolled away to the river to join other men in the water, behind the grapevines, soaping themselves, shaving, their rifles leaning against the trees.

A girl carrying an overflowing basket of shelled corn walked out of the shade of a storage building. Doroteo swept off his hat and bowed to her. She refused to look at him. She stalked past without speaking and went on to an encampment of one carreta and an awning; a pleasant encampment by the river, under sabal palms, two old people laughing together in the shade. Doroteo spoke to her but she did not turn.

Chapter Seventeen

Solomon Bradford walked up and down the little one-room adobe. Outside the window his daughter and three other girls shook out tablecloths, laughing, talking, greeting new arrivals. Fires were building, great heaps of burning mesquite that would soon become firebeds of coals for roasting. In the pens a calf shrieked and then was silent. Men in worn leather chaps made jokes about its agony. The children imitated it. Everywhere there were people gossiping and working among the scattered mesquites and sabal palms, setting up tables in the shade of adobe buildings in the bare bones of a country where rivers came to slow down and turn greasy and snake uneasily through dry brush country toward the Gulf. And now in this unaccountably rainy year there were coneflowers and Indian blanket in orange and yellow, the verbena bloomed purple, people seemed hale, quick, shiny with water and fruit.

“Yes, yes, I have a great deal of land here and there,” the old man said. “But there’s people that want it and they want to make off with my only daughter. This is why they are carrying on so out there.” The old man gestured toward the window. There was no glass in it. The wooden frame was silvery gray and around it small pieces of adobe had fallen out and from one of these holes a scorpion crawled out with its tail in a high hook. It saw there was company and so it darted in again. “And you, fiddler, you’re going around the world walking up and down in it looking for a gal, too. You are. You have the look of a man like that.”

“Yes, sir, that may be,” said Simon. “But I was asking about the land up on the Red River. The old Peters Colony.” He had brought his fiddle in its case for no other reason than he felt it was safer in his hand.

“Music is devilment. It makes you believe things you wouldn’t ordinarily believe. You’re a sorry lot, you and that whistle player and that guitar man. What’s his name? He’s from around here.”

“Is he?”

“I said so, didn’t I?” Solomon Bradford swung around to stare at him. “Listen once in a while. What did you have to offer the world anyhow? You just went and learned a fiddle. That’s a lazy way of making a living.”

Simon wondered who it was the old man had confused him with. But it made no difference. He watched Bradford’s eyes turn from himself, Simon, to the window and then to the open door, as if seeking a clear place in which to rest his gaze and he found none. He waited for the old man’s mind to turn some other way as well, also seeking a clear place. When he fell into silence for a moment Simon said,

“I’ve been told that you might sell that land up on the Red.”

“I sell a lot of land. I buy a lot of land. I can’t even see what land I sell and buy anymore. It’s all light, light, blazing at me from the morning until the sun goes down. I’ll never see that land up there again, even if they haul me there in an excursion wagon. What do I want it for? Son, you are useless as tits on a boar but if you would listen here for a bit I’ll tell you about some land I have for sale up on Mineral Creek in the Red River Valley.”

There was a blanket hanging at the open door of the adobe building but it didn’t go all the way to the floor and under its fringed edge a chicken appeared and made a slow, drawn-out inquisitive sound, creepily lifting one foot, setting it down, lifting the other foot.

“I’d like to hear about it,” Simon said. He wondered how long the old man was going to be able to hold a thought in his mind and then also remember that he held it. Or what the thought was. “Tell me about it.”

“Is that a Goddamned chicken?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, for the love of God throw something at it.”

Simon saw a corn cob near his chair, picked it up, and threw it. The chicken squawked and fled.

“They shit everywhere,” the old man said. “And here I am getting my Lisia married tomorrow. You had better be prepared to play a decent varsoviana, young man, polkas, jigs. Fiddlers are thieves.”

Simon flushed; he could feel it in his face and neck. He said, with determination and in a thin voice, “I would like to hear about the land up near the Red River.”

“Goddammit, is that all you can talk about? As soon as you walked in here it was Grayson County, Grayson County, shit man, that’s four hundred miles from here!”

Simon looked down at the warped and splintered floor boards. This house and the chapel were probably the only places in this entire little settlement that had wooden floors. He tried to think his way out of the situation. They had already gotten their money. There was that. Getting to San Antonio was more problematic. Even more problematic was any sort of financial conclusion concerning the piece of land in the old Peters Colony. If any agreement he made would stand scrutiny. Signed by a madman, paid by a thieving fiddler. The words burned in his head. He was furious. He had never stolen anything in his life. The old man was demented with age but still. Simon paused in a few seconds of silence, drew it around himself.

Finally he said into the gleaming-hot September air, into the noise outside and the yelling men, the chattering girls,

“Mr. Bradford, where are you from?”

The old man stopped in the middle of the floor and lifted one hand palm open in front of his face. He inspected the palm and then said, “Well, now it’s called West Virginia.” His voice became lower and less harsh. “That’s what they are calling it now. I was born there in 1784. We finally came down the Ohio after much aggravation from neighbors. We just left them to their own devices. There’s some people you just can’t get along with. Tighter than the bark on a tree and wouldn’t pay a farthin’ to see a piss-ant eat a stook of hay. Then I come here and bought a lot of land before Texas became a state and it’s still good, every bit of paper I hold is good.” He lifted his hand again and regarded it. “I can see my hand very well. In 1799 I turned fifteen years of age and I left Virginia for the world out there, whatever it might be. I could see whatever I looked at then.”