Then she grinned at us like a child who had thought of some playful dodge that the grown-ups would have trouble coming up with an objection to.

Soon she had stripped to her birthday suit and made a bundle of her clothes—she had a fine young figure, too.

I thought Billy Bone might die from embarrassment without so much as dipping a toe in the Rio Grande—but if Katie Garza felt the least confusion, she didn’t show it. Her only problem was what to do about her boots, which didn’t fit in the convenient bundle she had made of her clothes.

“Wet boots are worse than wet clothes,” she said, mounting. She managed to squeeze the boots in between herself and the saddle horn, balancing the bundle of clothes on top of them.

“Now, come on, Billy, strip off,” Katie said, grinning. “There’ll be no one to see you but me and Mr. Yankee, and we won’t tattle.”

Then she rode into the brown river. Soon the white mare was swimming, the water flowing over Katie Garza’s legs. Katie’s long black hair hung down her back, the ends almost in the water.

“Ain’t she a peach?” Billy said.

He looked a good deal more comfortable now that the object of his awe was out of hearing.

In the middle of the river, Katie turned to beckon us—we saw the white flash of her smile.

It didn’t strip Billy of his clothes, but it did remove some of his caution.

“She’s just a peach!” he said. “Let’s go, Sippy.”

I may have looked startled. Fear had had such a grip on him only a moment before that I doubted anything—even a glimpse of a naked woman—could dispel it.

“They’ll shoot me down anyway, let’s go see the world,” he said, urging Chip toward the river.

Rosy rolled her eyes in annoyance when she took the water, but once in she swam like a shark. Five minutes later we were shaking the water off ourselves in sunlit Mexico.

PART III

On the Pecos Stream

1.

So Billy and Katie Garza fell in love in San Isidro—and in the same dusty town, by the same slow river, under the same soft moonlight, I slid into despair.

Why? Well, I can’t say why. I have not the penetration it would take to dig down to the roots of the sadness I felt in those weeks.

I suppose the sere tree of my sadness might have sprouted from the fact that I had forever missed my chance to kiss Kate Molloy, our lively parlormaid. Some might think it a small lapse, or no lapse at all; and yet it did seem to give life rather a downward tilt, for Kate was very winning and I was swiftly aging. No such fine nature might welcome my kiss again.