He said, “Miss Moore and I have been turning over in our heads a major money-making scheme.”

Then he went on to explain that they’d decided to hold up a Mexican cantina located farther south between Silver City and Santa Rita in a town so small he forgot its name. The buildings there were only a half dozen or so and populated by mine laborers and immigrants and conquered people. But Eugenia had reconnoitered and counted more than three thousand dollars on the gambling tables on a typical Saturday night. “And here’s the bonus: the house cheats. A gang can grab the cash in five minutes and have almost everybody on their side; all we’d have to worry about is the few scrub Mexicans who want their two dollar winnings back. The only law around is Canty and Eugenia’s going to deal with him.”

There was silence as the others chewed the idea; then McElhanie proposed, “How about a ‘Hip hip hooray’?”

“Siddown,” said Blackface Charley Bryant.

The gang rode out of Silver City on Saturday afternoon. Miss Moore was not with us. We did not ride at all hard for it was still blazing hot in the desert and we wanted our animals rested. And we tied up in the town at dusk and sat on straw mats in a Chinese restaurant. We could hear the cantina music as we ate. McElhanie said, “The band has a rousing tempo, don’t it?” Nobody commented. Bob ordered five identical meals for the gang and none of us much complained, being somewhat fearful of Chinese cooking. It turned out to be clear celery soup with amber grease floating in it. Then we had something with bean sprouts and white roots and crumbly sheepshead fish still gritty from the river. We drank green tea until eight and then crossed the wide street of the mining town, our irons big under our slickers. We opened two wooden doors with leaded stained-glass windows. Inside, the cantina was long as an alley and blue with tobacco smoke, with waxed board floors and a green tin fleur-de-lis ceiling and a loud Mexican orchestra playing on the stage at the very end. At the mahogany bar were miners in soot-black clothes and cowboys with great mustaches and big-roweled spurs and sunburns up to their eyes. They each had a boot up on the brass foot rail.

The left and rear of the house were mahogany gambling tables at which were seated every variety of gunslinger, most speaking the Spanish language, some rubbing a Mexican whore’s behind through her brownish muslin dress. The whores did not use underwear.

Bryant sat down with Mexicans, paid a quarter for a pull of mescal, and lucked out, the bottle worm falling down into his swallow. He grinned happily as he chewed it and made himself no friends.