“Yeah. And, Ben, your former brother Hilario told me the other day he’d never missed a dance in Santiago. I didn’t see him at the dance when they came for Roberto, but let’s assume Hilario was absentmindedly telling the truth about his perfect attendance. He fingered Roberto and left. He’ll be at the fight, so keep your head down.”

Sophie came out of the dark, taking off the blanket she wore as a shawl. Joe thought she was finally joining the circle at the fire, but she threw the blanket over the flames, smothering them as she stomped on the blanket. “Indian Service,” she said.

“You’re sure I can keep the cigarettes?” Ben asked.

“Yes, get out of here,” Joe said.

“That’s good of you,” Ben said in Tewa. “You’re a good boy.”

By now all the dogs on the east side of the pueblo were barking the alarm. Sophie and Ben led Roberto up the riverbank and around a screen of thimbleberries. Joe and Anna climbed to the jeep and pulled on their shoes. “This is much more interesting than Göttingen, you know,” she said.

“Very few cowboys in Göttingen.”

He started the jeep. Headlights out, they rolled past cottonwoods and water tanks and onto a dirty road between the pueblo and fields of barley and sorghum. Over peach trees was a glimpse of the church’s low brow. The air stirred the smell of roasted chilies. Joe drove along an irrigation ditch toward the wooden planks that bridged a cross ditch. The planks coughed as the jeep passed over.

“There!” Anna said.

Fifty yards ahead the two Service riders were on horseback. Al, the older one, waved both arms for Joe to stop. Billy seemed to have acquired a handgun with a long, bright barrel.

Joe turned behind a windbreak of sunflowers. If he was stopped, he was AWOL and Anna would have broken security. At the same time, he could see what the riders were up to. Sophie, Ben and Roberto had taken to the ditch, and Billy and Al were waiting for them to come up. The fields were a maze of ditches, all fed by the mother ditch at the north end along the highway. If the fugitives reached the cornfields, where the rows of stalks were shoulder-high, the riders would never catch them.

Joe eased through the sorghum, the grass beating against the wheels. The riders paid no attention. The jeep rolled into the corn, mowing a row as it went. The stalks bent and broke: red corn, blue corn, black corn, beaded corn, Indian corn. At the end of the row, he stopped.

To his right, about twenty yards down the dirt road, Al was shouting, “Open her up, Billy.”