“Yes, sir, the ladies come every morning for they daily food, they eggs, fresh, they tortillas if that’s what you eat, whatever fresh on offer, which in November now is the first of the winter gardens if they have them, some tomatoes, some eggplant or rat-tail peppers, yes, sir, every morning behind the cathedral.”

Simon went early in the morning to search for Doris and if not her, then Mercedes. The wagons opened their sideboards to stack melons and bottle gourds carved into dippers, candles and eggs, goat milk and hard cheeses and jerky. He did not know how to get a message to her safely; if it were found it would land her in serious trouble. He walked around the two plazas and then stood disconsolate, anxious. Maybe he should try to find Mercedes’s family; her last name was Bethancourt. He heard Damon inside the plaza, running through “Whiskey Before Breakfast” again and again and so turned to join him.

The next day a hailstorm drove down the narrow streets. Pressley said it was the rainiest year anybody ever remembered. Mud was splashed halfway up the sides of the buildings. On that day Simon walked across town toward the Alamo, then up Fourth Street.

The house was in the northern suburbs of the town. It was where the San Antonio River turned to the northeast. A man passing by, his head down against the rain, indicated the house to him. It was on the other side and it faced the river, so he found his way across the flooding San Antonio River by a small and shaky wooden bridge. He walked up Richmond Street in the rain because everyone would be inside and not notice him in his old Mexican War coat and his pulled-down rain-streaming hat. The lights of Colonel Webb’s house shone out into the downpour. He was spying on them. He must not be caught doing this. Webb, under martial law, as far as Simon knew, had the power to ask for his papers and to charge him with whatever he pleased.

Such a long way to come on the strength of having seen her twice, and of eight letters, half of them to a boy now dead. On the strength of his imagined home and an imagined wife. Of lying down in bed with her every night and waking up in the morning with her beside him. The Webb house was a two-story stone building with tall windows, a half-circle drive, a porte cochere. Sago palms and wisteria in front and a massive live oak, all vague in the dark rain. The colonel must be renting it; the rent must be high. Only the best for the executive officer of the Quartermaster Department. A covered buggy came across the bridge with a wet noise and a halo of rainwater springing up from each wheel. The little horse trotted doggedly. Simon stepped into a workman’s shed on the opposite side of the street. The rain thundered on the plank roof. The buggy stopped. The occupants came out, Doris Dillon in a dark cloak. She reached back and helped the girl down. Then came Mrs. Webb and then the colonel. They hurried up under the square porte cochere, where a woman threw the door open for them and Simon watched as Doris pulled off her bonnet to shake the water from it.

He felt an enormous relief and a weight lifted off his heart. It was as if she might not have been real or only a personage in a story he had heard tell of. But there she was, beating the raindrops from her bonnet, as present on this earth as himself. He stood in the dark rear of the shed. He felt like a beggar and a spy. He waited in the drumming noise until the rainstorm bled away and turned to drizzle, then started for Main Plaza.

Mr. Pressley asked them to take on a friend of his and said with anxious waving hand gestures that the man could play fiddle just fine. Could tap on a drum! Was trying the learn banjo! He had been thrown out of another outfit for drinking and general uncontrolled behavior, but he regretted his actions and was now looking for work.

“You related?” Damon squinted one eye at the manager.

“No, but he’s from where I’m from and anyhow he just needs a second chance at life. Now, another fiddle along with you two and we got some volume. You can hear y’all above all the carryings-on.”

“Where y’all from?”

“Pocahontas, Arkansas. Life has dealt badly with him. He just needs another chance. His daddy was hung by the neck until dead.”

Damon nodded. “Must have been on the wrong side. Whatever side that was.”

“No, his daddy killed a man with a rock for making off with a toolbox. He was judged guilty of homicide. So he was raised by his mother, who never said the word no to him in all his life.”

After listening to the man play in the empty saloon, Simon and Damon shook their heads. Lester Pruitt could play only one song on the fiddle with any facility. It was called “The Moonlight Waltz.” Then he promptly fell apart, with shrieking strings, on even the simplest jig. But he was decent with the bones and a bodhran, which he had learned from some Irishman, and they were desperate for rhythm. He was astonishingly profane in his speech, and in addition, downright filthy. His loud yellow-and-purple striped shirt was dotted with food. He had a brooding way about him, searching for trouble.

“Rhythm or nothing,” said Simon. “And clean up.”

By dark the two plazas were often crowded with freighters and visiting vaqueros from the ranches nearby. Often enough they heard gunfire, whether out of high spirits or serious conflict they did not know nor did they wish to inquire. Simon saw a man stumble out of the Old Stand Saloon next to the Plaza House, when he had come outside for a smoke and a moment of quiet. The man stepped in a bucket, fell down, and got up trying to pull a revolver out of his waistband, intent on shooting at somebody. A deputy knocked him down and he and a waiter sat on the man until he could be convinced that he had not been tripped but merely stepped in a bucket.

And so they rolled through their list of songs for three nights and they collected enough in tips for Simon to take five dollars to Mr. Twohig’s bank for his mortgage payment. It was in the French building at Soledad and Dolorosa. He watched carefully as the clerk wrote out the receipt for five dollars to Solomon Bradford’s account in payment on note for property.

The clerk gazed down at his signature and then blew on it.

“Well, Mr. Boudlin, we have had a communication from the Boatmen’s Bank in Paducah as to a possible settlement by the State of Kentucky concerning the destruction of Alexander property. Your guardian, David Alexander, asked that the monies from this settlement, if any, be directed to his nephew, Simon Boudlin. Mr. Twohig or I could, with your signature, put it straight into this land transaction.”

“I don’t reckon there will be a settlement,” said Simon. “Thank you anyway. Kentucky is broke, the South is broke. What’s done is done.” He went to the door and placed his hat on top of one fist and with the edge of the other hand he tapped the crease back into it.

The man smiled and lifted one hand. “You never know.”

“That’s the trouble, never knowing. But, ah, sir, I was wondering if would you know any people named Bethancourt?”

The man thought. “I think there’s a carpenter by that name up on Obraje Street, you could try there.”

That day he and Damon took the rest of their earnings and crossed to the secondhand clothing store that somebody had set up in the old Spanish governor’s palace. They held their money in their fists, their fists jammed in their pants pockets, gazing around carefully. Simon bought a pair of black lace-up boots, nearly new, that fit him well. Then he and Damon found cravats and a second shirt for each of them. Damon’s cravat was a shining plaid taffeta and after he wrapped it around his neck, he twirled his D whistle and knocked his hat up in back.

“‘Bring the bowl of which you boast,’” he said. “‘Fill it to the brim.’”

“Why were they always drinking from bowls?” said Simon. “Was that all they had?” He regarded the shining black toes of his boots. “Didn’t they have any cups at all?”

“I always wondered that myself,” said Damon. “I have no earthly idea.”

In the kitchen at the Plaza House Simon watched as Pruitt and Damon struggled into their performance clothes. He straightened Damon’s bright plaid cravat for him.

“Ready we are,” said Damon.

Chapter Twenty

On the following day, he saw her in the market. Or he thought it was her or he wished it were her. She and a maid walked among the wagons stacked with fruit and vegetables, where patient horses stared at the dirt in front of them and the vendors searched the crowds with indifferent eyes. Simon found her pausing in front of a wagon full of birdcages and the great single bell of San Fernando rang out eight in the morning. Its name was La Perla.

He circled around and ducked between a hay wagon and a little excursion wagon, the kind they called an ambulance, so that he could approach her from the front. He was very conscious that he was wearing his good white shirt under his coat and that he probably smelled of cigar smoke and whiskey from the night before at the Bull’s Head Saloon. He came straight to her without hesitating. He took off his hat and bowed.