A few sat with hands folded on shirts spread across their laps, covering their loins with leaves, one polished a small fruit against his thigh. A towel, fringed like a Spanish shawl, draped a pair of shoulders, one head was capped with a handkerchief knotted at the corners.
And sullenly from down the line: “Maybe he’d hunt up Luke.”
“What’s that?” She looked for the man who spoke, hurried from one end of the white shot wall to the other, walked more slowly now to choose between three or four. All shook their heads, none moved, men slashed by cable, once felled in the tracks of the donkey engine. “Maybe not. Might call for the old woman.”
And ten men down: “Anyway, you wouldn’t catch him in to Clare.”
“But, lady,” Lou Camper saw, pounced on, the moving of the lips, felt the brass end of his finger rub her slacks, “we don’t dwell on his coming back.” And the firm finger touched her again.
“They’d riot again if he come back.”
“That’s right, after all we mourned.”
And from the drawling boy: “Not every town would make as much of him as us.”
“We’ll leave in the morning then,” said Lou. The men nodded. “Who,” smiling at the boy, “would know him if they saw him?”
“Everybody. But,” raising a half cured cheek and open mouth, “he’d be a sorry sight if he showed up.” The Mexican, neck of the guitar resting against the hollow of his hip, reached into the bucket, drew forth a foot nipped by fish, dyed purple on the brown. He pulled it into the light.