We were relieving ourselves and watering our horses when dawn started outlining things. Bob climbed up into his saddle and scanned the open geography behind us and spied what he first mistook as a twister, then recognized as the dust of flying hooves. He turned in his saddle and saw me picking cockleburs off my pants leg. “Emmett, I think we have a posse contending for us.” He said it not loudly at all, but like a man might say he believed his son had quit school and it was a terrible disappointment.

Newcomb heard him and clambered up onto his horse before he’d even tucked his shirt in. He stood in his stirrups and yelled for McElhanie and Bryant to saddle up and by then we could hear the thunder of running horses.

The gang of us spurred our horses to speed and rode down into a dry gulch that gave itself to a canyon littered with dead timbers that were washed up flat as railroad ties. Then the five of us turned our horses around and yanked our rifles out from scabbards underneath the saddle skirts. We backed up so close to the steep side of a cliff that the horses brushed their tails against it.

The cantina’s posse was seven men, five of them wearing sombreros. They slowed a city block away and their horses nudged and bickered as the Mexicans reined back to argue the situation. They were so distant all I could see in the morning dark were animals and white shirts.

Bob said, “I think they’ve got us in a disadvantageous position. We might do better if we’re shorter.”

So we jumped down into silt as deep as our ankles. Bob stood inside the clumped roots of a tree. I crouched in a green pool of water the size of a tablecloth. The others were dispersed.

“I’m gettin’ kind of sleepy,” said Newcomb, but only McElhanie laughed.

Then there was Spanish shouting and the waving of pistols and they charged straight at us with what the dime novelists call bloodcurdling howls. The Mexicans lowered their pistols and their arms flew up as they fired and chunks of cliff exploded onto the hides of our horses, which skittered and walked, eyes bulging. McElhanie let go the first shot from the gang; then Bob and I and Newcomb and Bryant fired and the Mexicans’ wrists jerked high as they answered and brought their horses up again and turned them this way and that.

Holes were being kicked out of the dirt cliff and one of the Mexican horses collapsed when Bryant’s shot split its hoof apart. I aimed at the throat of a man with crossed bandoliers and pressed the trigger and struck him instead in the thigh. The skin burst out like a rosette and the man reached for it, wheeling his horse.