“Now I’ll have to tell you,” Louis said. “Mr. Hamilton will like that, but Mrs. Hamilton has got a skunner on it. If I was you I’d leave it under the seat, and when we drive around to the shop, why, then you can get it out. That’s what we always do.”

“Doesn’t she let her husband take a drink?”

“No bigger than a bird,” said Louis. “But she’s got brassbound opinions. Just you leave the bottle under the seat.”

They left the valley road and drove into the worn and rutted hills over a set of wheel tracks gulleyed by the winter rains. The horses strained into their collars and the buckboard rocked and swayed. The year had not been kind to the hills, and already in June they were dry and the stones showed through the short, burned feed. The wild oats had headed out barely six inches above the ground, as though with knowledge that if they didn’t make seed quickly they wouldn’t get to seed at all.

“It’s not likely looking country,” Adam said.

“Likely? Why, Mr. Trask, it’s country that will break a man’s heart and eat him up. Likely! Mr. Hamilton has a sizable piece and he’d of starved to death on it with all those children. The ranch don’t feed them. He does all kinds of jobs, and his boys are starting to bring in something now. It’s a fine family.”

Adam stared at a line of dark mesquite that peeked out of a draw. “Why in the world would he settle on a place like this?”

Louis Lippo, as does every man, loved to interpret, to a stranger particularly, if no native was present to put up an argument. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Take me—my father was Italian. Came here after the trouble but he brought a little money. My place isn’t very big but it’s nice. My father bought it. He picked it out. And take you—I don’t know how you’re fixed and wouldn’t ask, but they say you’re trying to buy the old Sanchez place and Bordoni never gave anything away. You’re pretty well fixed or you couldn’t even ask about it.”

“I’m comfortably off,” said Adam modestly.

“I’m talking the long way around,” said Louis. “When Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton came into the valley they didn’t have a pot to piss in. They had to take what was left—government land that nobody else wanted. Twenty-five acres of it won’t keep a cow alive even in good years, and they say the coyotes move away in bad years. There’s people say they don’t know how the Hamiltons lived. But of course Mr. Hamilton went right to work—that’s how they lived. Worked as a hired hand till he got his threshing machine built.”

“Must have made a go of it. I hear of him all over.”

“He made a go of it all right. Raised nine children. I’ll bet he hasn’t got four bits laid away. How could he?”

One side of the buckboard leaped up, rolled over a big round stone, and dropped down again. The horses were dark with sweat and lathered under the collar and britching.