Valdez Is Coming Read Online Free Page A

“It isn’t your fault this has happened. I mean, you are made to suffer and yet you did nothing to cause it. You understand?”
    The woman nodded slightly, looking into the fire now. “All right, we can’t give him back to you, but we should give you something. You take something from a person, then you have to pay for it. We have to pay. We have to pay you for taking your husband. You see that?”
    The woman did not move or speak.
    “I don’t know how much you pay a woman for killing her husband, but we’ll think of something, all right? There were many men there; I don’t know them all. But the ones I know I go to and ask them to give me something for you. A hundred dollars. No, five hundred dollars we get and give it to you so you can do what you want with it. Have your baby and go home, wherever your home is, or stay here. Buy some, I don’t know, something to grow, and a cow and maybe some goats, uh? You know goats?”
    Christ, let her buy what she wants. Get it done .
    “Look,” Valdez said then. “We get in the wagon and go back to town. I see the men and talk to them — you stay in town also. I find a place for you, all right?”
    The woman’s gaze rose from the fire, her dark face glistening in the light, the shapeless, flat-faced Lipan Apache woman looking at him. A person, but Christ, barely a person.
    Why did Rincón choose this one? Valdez thought. He smiled then. “How does that sound? You stay in town, sleep in a bed. You don’t have to worry or think about it. We pay for everything.”
    A Maricopa rider came into De Spain’s, where Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson were playing poker with another gentleman and the house man, and told them it was the goddamnedest thing he’d seen in a while: Bob Valdez walking into the Republic Hotel with that blown-up Indian woman.
    R. L. Davis came over from the bar and said, “What about the Indian woman? Hell, I could have knocked her flat if I’d wanted. Nobody believes that then they never seen me shoot.”
    Mr. Malson told him to shut up and said to the Maricopa rider, “What’s this about Bob Valdez?”
    “He’s in the Republic registering that nigger’s squaw,” the rider said. “I saw them come up in the team and go inside, so I stuck my head in.”
    Mr. Beaudry was squinting in his cigar smoke. “What’d the clerk do?”
    “I guess he didn’t know what to do,” the rider said. “He went and got the manager, and him and Bob Valdez were talking over the counter, but I couldn’t hear them.”
    Mr. Malson, the manager of Maricopa, looked at Mr. Beaudry, the government land agent, and Mr. Beaudry said, “I never heard of anything like that before.”
    Mr. Malson shook his head. “They won’t give her a room. Christ Almighty.”
    Mr. Beaudry shook his head too. “I don’t know,” he said. “Bob Valdez. You sure it was Bob?”
    “Yes sir,” the Maricopa rider said. He waited a minute while the men at the poker table thought about it, then went over to the bar and got himself a glass of whiskey.
    Next to him, R. L. Davis said, “Were you out there today?” The rider shook his head, but said he’d heard all about it. R. L. Davis told him how he had taken the Winchester and put four good ones right behind the woman when she came out for water and one smack in the door as she went back inside. “Hell,” R. L. Davis said, “I’d wanted to hit her I’d have hit her square.”
    The Maricopa rider said, “God dam , I guess she’s a big enough something to shoot at for anybody.”
    “I was two hundred yards off!” R. L. Davis stiffened up and his face was tight. “I put them shots right where I aimed!”
    The Maricopa rider said, “All right, I believe you.” He was tired and didn’t feel like arguing with some stringy drunk who was liable to make something out of nothing.
    For a Saturday night there was only a fair crowd in De Spain’s, the riders and a few town merchants lined up and lounged at the bar and some others played