“I am looking for my husband,” she said simply.
He sat watching her.
“ No comprendo. It is true that I often have the pleasure of entertaining travelers in the mountains. But, alas, they never stay with me for long. Either their friends are so desolate in their absence that they bribe me to ensure their safe and speedy return — or their friends are so unresponsive that I am forced to conclude that they cannot be very desirable guests. I am incapable of believing that a gentleman who had won the heart of the señora can have belonged to the latter category.”
“It is possible,” she said, without bitterness. “But I knew nothing of it.”
She was silent for a moment.
“It was two years ago,” she said. “He came here to Durango, to La Quinta. He was going into the mountains. No one ever heard of him again. I know that you were here then, and I wondered if you might have — entertained him. Perhaps I was foolish...”
El Rojo dug his knife in the cheese.
“ Por Dios! ” he said. “Is it like that that one lives in Mexico? You have lost your husband for two years, and it is not until today that you want to find him?”
“I don’t want to find him,” she said. “I want to know that he is dead.”
She said it quietly, without any force of feeling, as if it was a thought that she had lived with for so long that it had become a commonplace part of her life. But in the very passionlessness of that matter-of-fact statement there was something that sent an electric ripple up the Saint’s spine.