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with yet another surly pest. But when you add both incidents up, you get a coincidence even Jack London would hesitate to use in one of his wild Alaska yarns.”
    She said she didn’t know what “coincidence” meant. So he told her, “Try fortuna ciego. What are the odds on two men who’d never met, but were fated to meet, getting shot at about the same time by pure accident?”
    She nodded gravely. “Perhaps the two happenings were only meant to look like unrelated trouble by someone who did not wish for the two of you to ever meet. Pero, Stuarto, if that was the case for why would they wish for to kill both of you? Would not the death of one of you alone serve as well to prevent you from ever meeting?”
    He said, “They may have sent someone after both of us to make sure one or the other died. I wouldn’t be here talking about it if I hadn’t proven it’s possible to miss. I wish I knew as much about them as they seem to know about me. You see, once a good newshound gets the scent he’s inclined to keep sniffing until he finds something out. They didn’t bother you about any papers old Herb might have left with you until they’d had time to find out I was still alive. I suspect they wanted to make sure I never laid eyes on ’em. So how far out here were you planning to roll before the first trail break? I’d sure like to see what your man might have left in the back of this cart. ”
    She reined in her draft mule immediately. “Our beasts could use a rest. I will show you the papers right now.” So, as Stringer dismounted and tethered his mule to one clump of scrub, Juanita dropped down off her seat to tether the other. Both animals had to be watered before they did anything else, but that only took a moment. Then she led him around to the back of the cart, and they both climbed into the stuffy interior. The heat inside was oppressive, but it took only one sniff to tell that Juanita was a mighty clean housekeeper. The sun beating down all day on the canvas roof had baked the scent of lemon oil and pine soap out of the paneling and spartan furnishings. There was a hint of chili pepper and toilet water in the air as well, but not a whiff of bedbug or chamber pot. He saw two bunk beds folded up against one side, while the other was lined with chests that no doubt served both for seating and as tabletops. One chest was an old army footlocker. Juanita dropped to her knees to open it, lifting out the top tray filled with men’s shaving gear, clean socks, and a brass barometer. Then she handed him a sheaf of papers, neatly bound with a rubber band. “I think these are what that company rider must have been after. Herberto had nothing else of value here. Such money as he had would have been on him when he was killed. I did not ask about it. So perhaps they saw no need to mention it to me.”
    Stringer grimaced and said he knew about small-town undertaking customs. Then he found a seat on another chest and opened what looked like a survey map.
    It was. In fact it appeared to be a printed government survey map of the so-called Imperial Valley and hence mostly blank. He found pencil lines on it as well that nobody but the late Herbert Lockwood had likely felt called to draw in, neatly but lightly, with hard lead. Stringer knew engineers in the interest of accuracy liked to draw lines too skinny for anyone but a spider to notice. Once he got used to the contrast between the printed ink lines and the spiderweb of faint penciling, he was able to read the survey map fairly well. But it failed to explain why anyone would have wanted the man who drew them all that dead.
    The canal lines Lockwood had drawn from a point just below Yuma didn’t seem to be leading water, if they were leading any water at all, more alarmingly than Sam Barca had mentioned back in the pressroom in Frisco. It was easy to see that the neat little dashes across the original