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that dragged hope with it as it went nowhere.
    Sometime after midnight, Struggles started to doze off. His head nodded and his chin was almost on his chest, but even then a consciousness warned him and he jerked his head up abruptly. He moved it from side to side now, shaking himself awake; and as his face swung to the left he saw the pinpoint of a gleam up on the mountainside.
    He came to his feet, fully awake now, but blinked his eyes to make sure. The light was moving down with crawling slowness from the peak, flickering dully, but growing in intensity as it inched down the rock slide path that Juan Solo had climbed earlier.
    After a few minutes Struggles saw a torch, with the flame dancing against the blackness of theslope, and as it descended to the ledge the shape of a man was illuminated weirdly in the flickering orange light it cast.
    The figure moved to the edge, holding up a baroque cross whose end was the burning torch—the figure of a man wearing the coarse brown robes of a Franciscan friar.
    He held the cross high overhead and spoke one sentence of Castilian, the words cold and shrill in the darkness.
    â€œLeave this Blood of the Saint or thus your souls shall plunge to the hell of the damned!”
    His arm swung back and the torch soared out into the night and down until it hit far below on the slope in a shower of bursting sparks. The figure was gone in the darkness.
    Quiet settled again, but a few minutes later gunfire came from down the slope. And shortly after that, the sound of horses running hard, and dying away in the distance.
    The rest of the night Struggles asked himself questions. He sat unmoving with the dead cigar stub still in his mouth and tried to think it out, applying logic. Finally he came to a conclusion. There was only one way to find out the answers to last night’s mystery.
    At the first sign of morning light he rose and started to climb up the slope toward the ledge.
    This would answer both questions—it was the only way.
    He was almost past caring whether or not the American and his men were still below. Almost. He climbed slowly, feeling the tenseness between his shoulder blades because he wasn’t sure of anything. When he was nearing the rim, a hand reached down to his arm and pulled him up the rest of the way.
    â€œJuan.”
    The Indian steadied him as he got to his feet. “You came with such labor, I thought you sick.”
    And at that moment Struggles did feel sick. Weak with relief, he was, suddenly, for only then did he realize that somehow it was all over.
    He exhaled slowly and his grizzled face relaxed into a smile. He looked past Juan Solo and the smile broadened as his eyes fell on the torn blanket with the pieces of rope coiled on top of it.
    â€œPadre, you ought to take better care of your cassock,” Struggles said, nodding toward the blanket.
    Juan Solo frowned. “Your words pass me,” he said, looking out over the slope; and added quickly, “Let us find what occurred with the American.”
    Struggles was dead certain that Juan knew without even having to go down from the ledge.
    Not far down the grade they found him, lying on his face with stiffened fingers clawed into the loose sand. Near his body were the ashes of the cruciform, still vaguely resembling—even as the wind began to blow it into nothingness—the shape of a cross.
    Struggles said, “I take it he didn’t believe in the friar, and wouldn’t listen to his men who did.”
    Juan Solo nodded as if to say, So you see what naturally happened, then said, “Now there is plenty of time for your silver, Señor Doctor,” and started back up the grade.
    Struggles followed after him, trying to picture Tomas Maria, and thinking what a good friend the friar had in Juan Solo.

3
Three-Ten to Yuma
    H E HAD PICKED up his prisoner at Fort Huachuca shortly after midnight and now, in a silent early morning mist, they approached Contention. The two