‘She says, if you like, instead of cleaning your house, she will cook for you.’

I looked at the faces of the men then back to Dolores’s own, questioning, anxious, and I felt the warmth and the smoke close round and found myself overcome with a sort of heady acquiescence.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell her, yes, please.’

Duval lays his hat on the table. He looks round the room and gives a low whistle. The cabin looks pretty in candlelight, and despite my protestations Emmy has laid the table with her favourite mismatched booty from the yard sales. Duval picks up the frosted glasses one by one, examining the painted Indian chiefs on each. ‘Sequoyah, Geronimo!’ He looks up. ‘These are wonderful. Where did you find them?’

‘Apparently, they were given out as freebies in the sixties by the oil companies.’

He laughs. ‘So no irony there then.’

‘No, I guess not.’

He puts the glass carefully back on the table. ‘This was Geronimo’s territory, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘He was an Apache. In fact the only interesting thing about Tombstone, a town beneath contempt as far as I’m concerned, is that it hosted a baseball team which was interrupted by one of Geronimo’s raids.’

‘Somehow baseball and Geronimo don’t feel like they belong in the same century.’

‘They don’t, hence the tragedy. When Geronimo was eventually exiled to Florida, a newspaper man asked him if it broke his heart to leave his people and he apparently replied, “I had no heart left by the time I got to Florida.”’ He lifts the lid off the pork and the sweet smell of spices and cilantro fill the room. ‘So how’s Dolores’s cooking?’

Dolores is a wonderful cook. Benjamín told me she comes from his home town, that her husband died in an oil rig accident in the north. The other men wanted her to stay in the schoolroom, a Wendy to their Lost Boys, but Benjamín didn’t want to risk her being alone there, not when the men were up working on the town.