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struck up a conversation with me over supper. She had married four times and outlived them all. Her sister, Jamie’s wife, had died some years before; but she had a liking for Jamie, so she’d stopped for a visit on her way to San Francisco.
    Eliza insisted on introducing me to him, and it was that very day he had learned that Byron Cox had succumbed to a fever. Cox was a horse breeder, Jamie explained, with a ranch called Mockingbird Spring. Near the cuevas, he said, as if I knew where that was.
    I was still not myself and didn’t say much, except that I was a widow with a small estate and on my way to San Antonio. Jamie, quick as he always was, discerned that nothing much awaited me in Texas. He had a silver tongue, Jamie did; and he loved the valley with a passion contagious as the pox. He could have stood on a street corner in St. Louis and sweet-talked six folk out of ten into packing up, crossing the country and settling here. He cajoled, coaxed and coerced until I thought buying the Cox ranch a brilliant thing to do.
    It would have to be done quickly, he said, before the hands up and left. The foreman, he assured me, was one of the best. Perhaps Jamie turned my head when he said the valley had too few handsome, clever women. No one had paid me a compliment in nigh onto four years. When he mentioned that in a half-dozen years I could sell the ranch for twice what I paid I realized that kind of money would be enough to see me settled back East. And I confess the name Mockingbird Spring struck a wry chord; I felt a kinship with the bird that imitates others and pretends to be something it is not.
    999
    Jamie fixed me with his bright blue eyes as I slid into the chair next to his desk. The aroma of ink was thick and pungent. I pulled my skirt close about my legs, sitting primly, mindful of the smudges that lurked everywhere and wondering how Jamie always stayed so tidy.
    “If you don’t have the prettiest eyes I ever did see. Not blue, are they?”
    “Grey,” I said. Jamie’s head was ear-to-ear with blarney, but he had something about him that made you believe he had your best interests at heart. In addition to his string tie and what was likely the only set of clean male fingernails in the valley, he also sported a black-and-white sense of right and wrong.
    Jamie was determined to put the Mesilla Valley on the map. He had come here as land agent five or six years before, soon after the Gadsden Purchase had transferred thousands of miles of land west of the Rio Grande to the United States.
    The way he told it, people weren’t real pleased about the Purchase or about a land agent. Right after the war with Mexico, a lot of folks had up and moved from nearby communities to Mesilla. In the war, their hometowns had been lost to the U.S., but Mesilla still belonged to Mexico, which meant it was eligible for land grant. They had just secured one when Gadsden cut their new home away from Mexico and patched it neatly into New Mexico Territory. Now it was necessary to buy the land, which was where Jamie came in.
    He was a charmer, all right. He managed to reshuffle so many papers that no one paid much. After that, there was hardly a soul within thirty miles who didn’t dote on Jamie. Late last year he had decided that a thriving village needed a newspaper and launched the Mesilla Times.
    “Confederate or Yank?” he growled at me, then grinned. His face was pink and smooth and shiny as a baby’s, except for the bushy eyebrows. Greyish-brown wisps of hair clustered around his ears but had long ago deserted the top of his head. There was nothing Jamie loved so much as a good argument. Since he had printed the paper’s first issue last fall, he had warmed to the task of making his opinions known. His tirades were good as any preacher’s, and I’d never known him to hold a grudge against those who disagreed. He just marked them as needing a bit more instruction.
    “Do I have to be one or the other?” My father had been