The girl came in with a crock bowl of hot water. I got up and she put the water on the chair and a broken mirror on the wardrobe.
“Bath before long,” she said, and went back into the other room.
She had a way of knocking out all the words except the most essential ones, but she spoke pretty good English.
I went over to the wardrobe and inspected my face in the mirror. It gave me quite a shock at first, partly because I hadn't seen my face in quite a while, and partly because of the dirt and beard and the sunken places around the cheeks and eyes. It didn't look like my face at all.
It didn't look like the face of a kid who still wasn't quite twenty years old. The eyes had something to do with it, and the tightness around the mouth. I studied those eyes carefully because they reminded me of some other eyes I had seen, but I couldn't place them at first.
They had a quick look about them, even when they weren't moving. They didn't seem to focus completely on anything.
Then I remembered one time when I was just a sprout in Texas. I had been hunting and the dogs had jumped a wolf near the arroyo on our place, and after a long chase they had cornered him in the bend of a dry wash. As I came up to where the dogs were barking I could see the wolf snarling and snapping at them, but all the time those eyes of his were casting around to find a way to get out of there.
And he did get out, finally. He was a big gray lobo, as vicious as they come. He ripped the throat of one of my dogs and blasted his way out and disappeared down the arroyo. But I heard later that another pack of dogs caught him and killed him.
“What's wrong?”
The girl came in with a kettle of hot water and poured it into the tub.
“Nothing,” I said, and began lathering my face.
I started to leave my mustache on, thinking that it might keep people from recognizing me, but when I got the rest of my face shaved my upper lip looked like hell. It was just some scraggly pink fuzz and I couldn't fool anybody with that. The girl poured some cold water in the tub on top of the hot, and filled it about halfway to the top.
“Ready,” she said. “Give me clothes.”
“Nothing doing. I take a bath in private or I don't take one at all.”
“To wash,” she added.
These Mexicans must be crazy, I thought. Why anybody would want to take a saddle tramp in and take care of him I didn't know. But it was all right with me, if that was the way she wanted it.
“All right,” I said. “You get in the other room and I'll throw them through the door.”
She stood with her hands on her hips, grinning. “Gringos!” But she went in the other room and I began to strip off. When I threw the things in the other room she picked them up and went outside.
I must have soaked for an hour or more there in the tub, twisting and turning and scrubbing every inch of myself that I could reach. It was dark outside, and the only light in the house came from the fireplace in the other room.
“Say,” I called, “are those clothes dry yet?”
“Pretty soon,” she said. Her voice was so close it made me jump. Instinctively, I made a grab for my pistols, which I had put on the chair and pulled up beside the tub, but she laughed and I stopped the grab in mid-air.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said.
She was leaning against the wardrobe laughing at me, and with the red light from the fireplace playing on her face. She must have found my tobacco and corn-shuck papers in my shirt, because there was a thin brown cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth. That shook me, because I had never seen a woman smoke before, except for the fancy girls in Abilene or Dodge or one of the other trail towns.
I saw that she wasn't going to get out until she got good and ready. I couldn't figure her out. One minute she seemed to be a simple Mexican girl, almost a child, with a straightforward eagerness to help a stranger out; and the next minute she was voluptuous and cynical and as wise as Eve. I didn't know enough about women to know what to do with her. I had looked into big-eyed muzzles of .44's without feeling as helpless as I did when I looked at her.
“All right,” I said, “you've looked. Now how about getting my clothes?”
She dragged deep on the cigarette and let it drop to the packed clay floor. “Sure, gringo.”
She went into the other room and threw my pants through the doorway. They were still damp, but I didn't care. I put them on. She came in with my shirt, threw it at me, and leaned against the wardrobe again.
“You look better after shave.”
“I feel better.”
She must have brushed her hair or combed it while I was taking the bath. It shone as black as the devil's heart in the red light of the fire, and it was pulled back tight away from her face and rolled in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her mouth was ripe and red and those eyes of hers seemed to be laughing at something.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
“I thought you was man,” she said. “With beard gone you're just boy.”
I thought quickly that maybe I should have left the mustache on. Maybe I should have left the beard on too. “I'll grow up,” I said. I fished in my pocket and found a silver dollar and flipped it at her. “That's for the bath and shave.”
I had my shirt and boots on now, and was buckling on my guns. I didn't know where I was going exactly. I just wanted to go out and look at people and see if I couldn't get to feel like a human being again. I picked up my rifle and got as far as the door.“Adios,” she said. “Adios.”
“I hope you shoot good,” she said. “It is bad to die young.”
That stopped me. “What are you talking about?”
“The man in the street, by your horse,” she said calmly. “I think maybe he shoot you. If you don't shoot first.”
I felt my stomach flip over. Could it be possible that the federal marshals had trailed me all the way from Texas? I went out the back door, across the walled-in yard, and through the gate. There was a lot of singing somewhere, and some drunken yelling and laughing. Fiesta was still going on. The adobe huts seemed jammed closer together in the darkness, but the Mexicans had a bonfire going out in the street, so I could see enough to pick my way between them. A dog barked. Somewhere in the night a girl giggled and a man made soft crooning noises. After a while I could stand in the shadows and see my horse across the street. Sure enough, a man was there.
He wasn't Mexican and he wasn't anybody I had ever seen before. He was a big man with flabby features and he didn't seem to be much interested in the fiesta or anything else, except that big black horse of mine. Then somebody came up behind me. It was the girl. “Who is he?” I said. “I never saw him before.” She seemed surprised. She seemed suddenly to scrap all the opinions that she had formed about me and start making brand-new ones. “You sure?” she asked after a pause.
“I tell you I never laid eyes on him before. What is he, somebody's hired gunny?”
She did some quick thinking. “I think Marta make big mistake,” she said.