The leaves of the cottonwoods, dry and fragile and lemon-yellow, stirred briefly, rattled and rustled together, and several drifted to the ground. A tufted bluejay flew darkly from one tree to the next, lit on a slender branch and shook more of the dead leaves free.

Below the trees, near the red-stemmed willows, a picketed horse grazed industriously on the strip of grass, switching its tail now and then at a few idle, indifferent flies.

The cowboy was not far away. He lay in the sun near a boulder on the far side of the arroyo, away from the abandoned house; his head was propped against his saddle, and the floppy black hat covered most of his face, revealing only the bearded chin and the mouth, the latter relaxed, partly open, emitting at regular intervals the deep prolonged sighs of sleep. His property was close at hand—the saddlebags, the rifle in its scabbard, the bedroll, all still attached to the saddle itself; while the guitar and the bridle hung from handy stubs on a nearby juniper.

A raven circled above the arroyo and the spring, descended and landed with a cumbersome flapping of wings in the top of the highest cottonwood, shattering a few leaves and sending a wave of tremors through all the others. It spread its black wings, wobbling somewhat on its perch, and bent its head to search for lice. The bluejay in the adjoining tree squawked, chattered and then flew away. After that, except for the routine murmur of a few insects near the spring, the arroyo was allowed to resume its original and fundamental silence.

Burns slept on, his hands across his belly, his legs apart and fully extended over the ground.

Ten miles away and a thousand feet below, the gleaming river wound through the valley and through the dark ragged crawl of the city and beyond the city into the far haze of the south. The city steamed and glimmered faintly, smoky and alive and obscure, while a few airplanes droned in circles above it like flies over a poisonous dump. West of the river the volcanoes, black as obsidian against the light, cast long tapering shadows over the tawny skin of the plain, and to the southwest, more than sixty miles away, the jagged peaks of Thieves’ Mountain burned into the southern sky with a strange vaporish flaming purple, as if illuminated from within by furnaces of radiant energy.

The raven launched itself awkwardly, like a vivified scarecrow, out of the cottonwood tree and flapped up into the static yawning vacancy of the canyon beyond the arroyo and the ruined house.

The silence flowed back in the wake of whispering echoes.

A lizard scurried down the face of the big rock near Burns, stopped for a moment to watch him, pushing itself up and down on its forelegs like an exercising athlete, and then hurried jerkily on and disappeared under the edge of the rock.

The long evening shadows crept over the sleeping man, darkening his boots, his knees, his lean overalled thighs…